Identify the correct statements regarding the Chief Minister Solar Agricultural Channel Scheme.
(a) This Scheme was started in June 2017, when Devendra Fadanvis was Chief Minister.
(b) The main purpos

Question

Identify the correct statements regarding the Chief Minister Solar Agricultural Channel Scheme.
(a) This Scheme was started in June 2017, when Devendra Fadanvis was Chief Minister.
(b) The main purpose of this Scheme is to provide supply of electricity to farmers through the agricultural feeder.
(c) The government has decided to pay ₹ 50,000 per acre as rent to the farmers under this Scheme.
(d) Solar panels are set up on government land up to ten kilometres from the 33 kV substation.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), '(a), (b) are correct'. The scheme printed here as the Chief Minister Solar Agricultural Channel Scheme is the Mukhyamantri Saur Krushi Vahini Yojana, and the two statements that survive are the two about its origin and its object. Statement (a) is correct: the scheme was introduced in June 2017, when Devendra Fadnavis — whose name the paper prints as 'Devendra Fadanvis' — was Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Statement (b) is correct and states the whole idea of the scheme: agricultural consumers are separated onto their own feeders, and those agricultural feeders are then supplied from decentralised solar plants set up near the distribution sub-stations that serve them, so that farmers receive reliable daytime power for their pumps instead of the night-time supply they were often given, while the distribution utility's subsidy burden on agricultural tariffs falls. Statement (c) does not reproduce the scheme's own figure. The lease rent the scheme publishes is denominated per HECTARE, not per acre: under the reframed version of the scheme announced in 2023 the rent for private land is Rs 1,25,000 per hectare per year with a three per cent annual escalation, the earlier norm having been lower, and land is taken on a long lease with the title remaining with the landowner. Statement (d) misdescribes the land. The scheme is not confined to government land — private farmers' land and gram panchayat land are leased for these projects as well, which is precisely why a rent has to be fixed at all, and the siting norm is expressed as a radius around an agriculture-load-dominated distribution sub-station rather than as a rule about government land alone. Only (a) and (b) therefore stand, which is option (3).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Statement (a) is right about the scheme's origin, but statement (d) describes the projects as being set up on government land, when the scheme's central mechanism is the leasing of land — including private farmers' land and gram panchayat land — near an agriculture-dominated distribution sub-station. That is the reason the scheme has a published lease rent at all. This option also drops statement (b), the object of the scheme, which is the single most secure thing about it. A candidate lands here by remembering that land near a sub-station is required and not remembering whose land it is.  (b) This is the near miss and the most attractive wrong option. It takes both of the true statements and adds the rent claim, which does not reproduce the scheme's own figure: the rent is fixed per hectare, at Rs 1,25,000 per hectare per year with three per cent annual escalation under the 2023 revision, and the land is taken on lease rather than acquired. A rate quoted per acre when the scheme states it per hectare is the kind of alteration that reads naturally to anyone who thinks in acres, and it is a reminder that in scheme questions the UNIT is part of the fact, not decoration around it.  (d) This option keeps the one true statement about the scheme's origin and then adds both of the statements that fail, on the rent and on the land, while discarding statement (b), which states the scheme's purpose correctly. It is the choice of a candidate who has read about the land-leasing aspect in the news — which was the most reported feature of the scheme's 2023 relaunch — without pinning down the numbers, and who then assumes that the statement describing the purpose must be too simple to be the one intended.

Concept: The problem the Mukhyamantri Saur Krushi Vahini Yojana addresses is specific to Indian power distribution. Agricultural pump sets are supplied at heavily subsidised tariffs, and utilities have long managed both the cost and the load by giving farmers electricity at night, when demand elsewhere is low. That is bad for the farmer, who has to irrigate in the dark, and bad for the utility, which carries a cross-subsidy it cannot recover. Feeder solarisation solves both at once: agricultural consumers are put on separate feeders, and a decentralised solar plant is built near the distribution sub-station that serves those feeders, so the power is generated in daylight, consumed close to where it is produced, and costs the utility far less than conventional supply. Maharashtra launched the scheme in June 2017 and reframed it in 2023 as Mukhyamantri Saur Krushi Vahini Yojana 2.0, with a target of solarising thirty per cent of agricultural feeders by 2025 through roughly 7,000 MW of decentralised solar capacity. Land is taken on long lease near the sub-station, with the owner keeping title and receiving an annual rent of Rs 1,25,000 per hectare with a three per cent escalation. The national counterpart is PM-KUSUM, launched by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy in 2019, whose Component C covers exactly this feeder-level solarisation alongside components for standalone solar pumps and the solarisation of existing grid-connected pumps.

State PCS 2024 Q97 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q97 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer