No money for diesel, school dropout in Kanpur irrigates field with tube well running on LPG

Twenty-four-year-old Sonu Tiwari, a class 10 dropout, didn’t have water to irrigate his fields in Nadiha Buzurg, a small village in Shivrajpur, in Kanpur rural. He also knew he could not afford diesel to run the tube well.

However, he did have a cooking gas cylinder (LPG) they got under the Ujjwala scheme. That’s when Tiwari reasoned that if LPG could run vehicles, it would run a tube well too. He took the LPG cylinder to the field and after trial and error, he managed to run the tube well on LPG last week.

“The tube well ran for 10 hours on four kilos of cooking gas. The same amount of work would have required 11 litres of diesel,” he said, beaming broadly.