Contribution short abstract

Solar pumps that are promoted as solutions to irrigation challenges in Ladakh create unequal access to water resulting in inequalities between and within villages. There is also fragmented implementation and governance, revealing gaps between technological promises and lived realities.

Contribution long abstract

In high-altitude cold deserts like Ladakh, glacier meltwater-fed irrigation networks are now increasingly prone to water stress due to environmental shifts produced by climate change. Technical solutions like solar energy-powered motors that pump up water from the Indus River, commonly known as ‘solar pumps’, are presented as solutions for irrigation challenges. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork done in 2025 in Phey and Takmachik, villages in Ladakh, and using a political ecology perspective, this research explores how solar pumps reshape access to and control over water. Preliminary findings show that socio-ecological inequalities and governance challenges are manifested in two ways. First, within villages, pumped water is distributed and accessed unevenly, leading to unequal outcomes regarding agricultural production. Between villages, benefits are limited to those villages that lie on the banks of the river, creating inequalities in agricultural productivity between villages lying upstream and downstream. Second, the installation of solar pumps is done through private donors, NGOs, and occasionally through government schemes, leaving the implementation fragmented with limited integration into existing policies. There are new systems of governance for the management of pumped water, separting it from the purview of traditional water governance. This study argues that there are significant gaps between the promises of renewable energy-powered technologies, meant to be cheaper, efficient, and help with irrigation, and the reality of inequalities that emerge from these technologies. With growing debates on large-scale solar projects and energy autonomy in Ladakh, small-scale renewable energy projects for irrigation form an important part of these debates.