Insights from Farmer-Managed Decentralized Solar Irrigation Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Choudhury, Arnab Paul, Rathod, Rahul, Yadav, Aryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Choudhury, Arnab Paul
Rathod, Rahul
Yadav, Aryan
author_facet Choudhury, Arnab Paul
Rathod, Rahul
Yadav, Aryan
contents Solar irrigation systems are increasingly deployed in rural regions, yet their distributed and remote deployment makes maintenance challenging for farmers. While formal monitoring processes and applications exist, they often fall short in practice. We present insights from grid-connected solar irrigation schemes that incentivize farmers to feed energy to the grid, focusing on how farmers maintain their systems. We found that farmers face multiple challenges but are also devising strategies, including the appropriation of WhatsApp to share daily generation data with peers and compare performance across installations to identify potential system anomalies. Our findings highlight how messaging platforms function as informal digital infrastructures enabling collective sensemaking around distributed energy systems. We discuss implications for designing agricultural energy technologies that support peer comparison, contextual interpretation, and community-driven maintenance, framing these as a socio-technical platform. Finally, we outline directions for future work integrating such practices with formal monitoring tools and explore their potential to support citizen science initiatives in environmental sensing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_09395
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Insights from Farmer-Managed Decentralized Solar Irrigation Systems
Choudhury, Arnab Paul
Rathod, Rahul
Yadav, Aryan
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Solar irrigation systems are increasingly deployed in rural regions, yet their distributed and remote deployment makes maintenance challenging for farmers. While formal monitoring processes and applications exist, they often fall short in practice. We present insights from grid-connected solar irrigation schemes that incentivize farmers to feed energy to the grid, focusing on how farmers maintain their systems. We found that farmers face multiple challenges but are also devising strategies, including the appropriation of WhatsApp to share daily generation data with peers and compare performance across installations to identify potential system anomalies. Our findings highlight how messaging platforms function as informal digital infrastructures enabling collective sensemaking around distributed energy systems. We discuss implications for designing agricultural energy technologies that support peer comparison, contextual interpretation, and community-driven maintenance, framing these as a socio-technical platform. Finally, we outline directions for future work integrating such practices with formal monitoring tools and explore their potential to support citizen science initiatives in environmental sensing.
title Insights from Farmer-Managed Decentralized Solar Irrigation Systems
topic Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09395