Why a Solar Company Became a Farming-as-a-Service Company – #SankalpChangemakers features Amit Saraogi, Co-founder, Oorja Development Solutions

 

 

The distance was actually useful, in a backhanded way. We couldn’t assume anything, so the very first thing we did after the programme was spend a month in the field doing a site selection survey and needs assessment before writing a single line of a business plan. Climate-KIC gave us frameworks and access to a network, and the discipline of having to defend the idea to people who had zero context on rural Uttar Pradesh, which is a good stress test. 

 

But the model itself was built, unbuilt, and rebuilt entirely on Indian ground. We actually started with residential mini-grids, which is what the European programme had us pitch. Once we were in the field and the state grid kept expanding into the villages we were targeting, that model simply didn’t have a future. We pivoted to irrigation because that’s where the unmet need clearly was. If we’d designed in a vacuum in Europe and just executed that plan in India, we would have built the wrong company. The European framework acted as a useful toolkit to kick start a venture that was truly grounded in the reality of rural Uttar Pradesh. 

 

 

One of the real challenges in the early years was the mismatch between capital-intensive infrastructure (we own and finance every pump) and revenue that comes in tiny increments, tied to monsoon patterns, crop cycles, and a farmer’s day-to-day cash position. There were stretches where we had assets in the ground already generating real value for farmers, but the receivables cycle and our own balance sheet were still under strain working through it. Trust was the other piece: you cannot rush a smallholder into changing how he irrigates his field; that decision touches his entire season’s income, so the payoff on that trust-building takes time to show up in the numbers. Agriculture as a sector overall requires a huge amount of patience, and the timelines are fundamentally different. The business model and long term projections need to reflect that. 

 

What held it together was refusing to ask farmers to change their behaviour more than necessary. We matched the payment frequency to what they already paid for diesel, and provided a huge discount on the cost per unit (our solution is 30-50% cheaper than the diesel alternative) so switching didn’t feel like a leap of faith for individuals who are inherently cash constrained. We also hired local farmers as pump operators rather than outside technicians, which did double duty: it solved last-mile servicing and it meant the person collecting payment and fixing problems was someone the community already trusted. Early grant and prize capital (things like the Keeling Curve Prize or the Echoing Green Climate Fellowship among others) enabled validation at moments when the volume of pumps and customers wasn’t there yet. 

 

 

It evolved, and I’d be overselling our foresight if I said we planned the whole stack from day one. We started as an energy company solving an energy problem: water lifted by solar instead of diesel. But once you’re standing in a farmer’s field for years, you can’t pretend irrigation is the only constraint on his income. Soil health, crop choice, input use, water-use efficiency: all of it is interconnected, and farmers were asking us about it because we were already the trusted, recurring presence on their land. 

 

So the advisory layer, soil testing, and now things like vermicompost adoption got bundled in because farmers needed them, not because we set out to build an agri-tech company. The honest version is: we became a Farming-as-a-Service company because the energy problem, solved properly, kept pulling us deeper into agriculture. That’s also why we ended up being recognised by a food-systems body rather than purely an energy one; in other words, a social enterprise solving real agricultural problems and using energy access as an enabler. 

 

 

A few levers, used together. First, we retain ownership of the asset and serve a cluster of farmers from a single solar pump rather than selling one pump per household: that single shift in asset utilisation is what makes the economics workable because you spread a capital-intensive asset across enough volume that per-farmer servicing costs come down. Second, our tariffs are deliberately benchmarked below what farmers were already paying for diesel, which keeps adoption easy without requiring us to operate at a loss; farmers save on their irrigation bill and we still recover cost plus margin over the life of the asset.

 

Third, we’re disciplined about blended finance rather than pure subsidy: grant and concessional capital have been funding the early de-risking of the model: deploying the first decentralised assets, testing new geographies, piloting interventions to encourage and incentivise behaviour change, building the digital monitoring layer, etc. Effectively, all the elements which brought together create the foundation for a financially sustainable, innovative business model that can be replicated at scale. On the other hand, the day-to-day revenue from usage must carry operating costs and asset financing over time. We’re not fully off blended capital yet at the growth-equity stage, but at the unit level (per pump, per cluster of farmers) the model is built to be self-sustaining rather than perpetually subsidised. 

 

Third, we’re disciplined about blended finance rather than pure subsidy: grant and concessional capital have been funding the early de-risking of the model: deploying the first decentralised assets, testing new geographies, piloting interventions to encourage and incentivise behaviour change, building the digital monitoring layer, etc. Effectively, all the elements which brought together create the foundation for a financially sustainable, innovative business model that can be replicated at scale. On the other hand, the day-to-day revenue from usage must carry operating costs and asset financing over time. We’re not fully off blended capital yet at the growth-equity stage, but at the unit level (per pump, per cluster of farmers) the model is built to be self-sustaining rather than perpetually subsidised. 

 

 

 

 

Most clean-energy and agri-livelihood ventures in our space don’t publish anything close to this. They report installed capacity or beneficiary counts, which is a far lower bar and tells you almost nothing about whether someone’s life actually improved. That’s exactly what the sector still measures badly: too much focus on kilowatts installed or tonnes of CO2 avoided, too little rigour on income durability, gender outcomes, and whether the model would survive without subsidy. Commissioning an independent SROI study was our way of forcing a more honest answer to that question for ourselves. 

 

 

I think what set us apart is that we weren’t pitching a single clever piece of technology but rather a proven, bundled service model with years of field data and independent verification behind it. Judges weren’t being asked to take a bet on a lab result; they were looking at a company that had already de-risked the “does this actually work for the farmer” question, and was asking a more interesting question: how do you bundle pay-per-use irrigation with advisory services in a way that compounds impact. 

 

In terms of what it does for us: global recognition like this changes the nature of conversations with investors and partners. It doesn’t replace the hard work of proving unit economics, but it does shorten the distance to that conversation. When a global, independently judged process has already validated your model against nearly 1,200 peers, domestic investors and government partners take the diligence load more seriously, and conversations move faster from “convince me this is real” to “let’s talk about scale.” 

 

 

It starts with recognising that land titles in rural India are overwhelmingly held by men, even though women do an enormous share of the actual agricultural labour. In the geographical zones we work in, if you design a service that only signs up landholders, you’ve structurally excluded women by default: not through any explicit bias, just through inherited convention. So we deliberately redesigned onboarding to let women become direct, independent subscribers to our irrigation service regardless of land ownership. That’s a small operational change with a large downstream effect, because the person who subscribes is the person whose name is on the usage record, whose income is recognised, and who has a direct relationship with the operator. 

 

We’ve also pushed this into our own team composition and into the field: training operators to engage women as decision-makers, not just as household members standing nearby while a man transacts. We track this with real targets rather than good intentions: women currently make up roughly a fifth of our direct irrigation customers, and we’re working to get that closer to a third by the end of the decade. None of it is dramatic, it’s a series of deliberate, unglamorous design choices that, added up, change who actually holds power and income within the household. 

 

 

 

 

I’d say the “doesn’t pay or scale” line is usually a comment on a particular kind of impact work (i.e. grant-dependent, project-based, donor-cycle work) rather than on the sector as a whole. If you build something that genuinely removes a cost barrier for the people you’re serving, and you’re disciplined about unit economics from day one rather than treating them as an afterthought, you can build something that scales and that investors (not just donors) want to back. It took us years to get there, and we’re still working on it, but the proof points exist now: blended capital, gender-smart certifications, global recognition, real investor interest.

 

The other thing I’d say is: go and spend real time in the field before you design anything. Most bad “impact” ideas come from people who diagnosed a problem from a conference room. The model only became real for us once we’d spent weeks in Uttar Pradesh villages, not weeks in a workshop in Europe. Be patient with trust-building, be ruthless about the economics, and don’t let anyone tell you those two things are in conflict.