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Professor Punit Singh’s efforts started with a field survey to understand the soil and terrain of Taipadar village in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh.
| Photo Credit: V.V. Krishnan
The efforts of a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) have resulted in villages in Chhattisgarh being equipped with a sustainable water pumping system that requires zero electricity.
Punit Singh, associate professor at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies (CST), has been working on a solution to address the irrigation scarcity in Chhattisgarh for the past 10 years. His efforts started with a field survey to understand the soil and terrain of Taipadar village in Bastar district.
According to IISc, due to Mr Singh’s efforts, Taipadar is now equipped with a sustainable water pumping system that requires zero electricity. His project uses low-head check dams and cascades of such dams along rivers, with turbine pumps installed to pump water without any electricity.
The turbine uses about 90% of the river water flow at low head (which is then recycled back to the river) to generate power, specifically torque and speed, which is then used to drive standard submersible multi-stage pumps. The novelty lies in the precise design of the system.
Depending on specific site conditions, where the water head ranges from 2-4 metres, the objective is to lift and transport water to different elevations, usually between 15 and 25 metres, or even up to 30 metres, if required.
Mr Singh started working on developing turbine pumps for electricity generation during his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. When he returned to India in 2009, he started exploring the deployment of ram pumps in Chhattisgarh, starting with Taipadar.
“Two turbine pumps with power generation capabilities were generously sponsored by the KSB Pumps Trust in Germany. I invested about ₹50 lakh in a ram pump sourced from Rife, USA, and in the construction work, which spanned three years,” Mr Singh said.
Apart from Taipadar, similar systems were set up in Girdalpara in Sukma district and Karhani in Gourella-Pendra-Marwahi (GPM) district.
In December 2022, the Foundation for Science Innovation and Development at IISc. joined hands with the Chhattisgarh Water Resources Department to scale up the water resource management and irrigation infrastructure in the State. The areas covered under this collaboration include Karhani, Neelawaram (Sukma district), and Pongro (Jashpur district).
Under the collaboration, IISc. will test the quality of turbines manufactured by various vendors at a designated simulation facility. Over the next few years, the collaboration will focus on installing one or two pumps on each dam, along with piping, storage, and canal networks.
