Kocha village in the Khunti district of Jharkhand has been wired into a 40 kW solar micro-grid with IoT-enabled smart management, marking the third Climate Smart Village established under Schneider Electric India Foundation in partnership with PRADAN. The grid now supports irrigation pumps, agro-processing units, households, street lighting, a primary health centre and an e-vehicle.

The pilot builds on earlier deployments in the Gumla district's Sehal and Chatti villages, where solar arrays of 40 kW and 45 kW were integrated with load-balancing systems to power productive use in agriculture and local enterprises. That model delivered doubling of household incomes and emission reductions of around 60,000 kg of CO2 annually for those communities.

Officials at the inauguration in Kocha included Jharkhand's Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Minister Dipika Pandey Singh, Khunti MP Kali Charan Munda, Torpa MLA Sudeep Gudhiya, and Damini Chaudhari, Vice President for Strategy, M&A & CSR at Schneider Electric. Deepak Sharma, MD & CEO of Schneider Electric India, emphasised the initiative's aim to fuse renewable energy with local entrepreneurship and digital systems to empower self-sufficient rural economies.

Before the grid installation, farmers in Kocha were restricted to a single rain-fed cropping cycle each year, lacking the electricity required to operate processing machinery or irrigation pumps. Many households lacked reliable power, and migration was common owing to the scarcity of local jobs. Under the new scheme, farmers are experimenting with multi-crop production and in-village processing. A women-led Farmer Producer Organisation, Torpa Mahila Krishi Bhagwani Saykari Swalambhi Samiti, is central to aggregating, processing and marketing produce locally.

The mini-grid design employs smart energy management software that monitors demand and allocates energy dynamically, aiming for close to full utilisation of the solar capacity throughout the day. The system aggregates essential loads-agricultural, domestic and community-so that surplus power is diverted to where demand is highest at any given time.

In the Gumla villages, the success of this load-diversion strategy allowed continuous operation of irrigation pumps, oil expellers, rice hullers and small mills, effectively removing dependence on diesel backups. The result was a consistent power supply, reduced fuel costs and increased productivity. That template is now being scaled to Kocha.

SEIF intends to use the Kocha rollout as a replicable blueprint for scaling further in Jharkhand and across other states with energy-poor rural communities. The target is to reach 100,000 farmer families by 2025 through distributed, decentralised energy systems that combine renewable generation, digital control and demand flexibility.

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