Kanpur: 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. His success caught the imagination of other farmers, who are lining up for the technical know-how. “I am sharing with them how I simply attached the rubber pipe in the nozzle through which the pump sucks in air,” he said.

To start, the tube well requires a litre of diesel and once it is running, it switches to gas. “It cost me merely Rs 17.60 for an hour of operation that is far cheaper than running it on diesel. That cost Rs 75 per hour,” he said. In a week, he used up the cylinder carrying 14.2 kg of gas and cost Rs 690 to irrigate his field. In this duration, the tube well ran for 35 hours in two cycles. “I am both happy and worried as some people have told me that using LPG like this is a crime,” he said, adding that he was compelled by the circumstances.

Tiwari has lost his father and the three bighas of land was the only way to help the family – his mother and three younger siblings – survive. “I have taken loans from a few people and I was worried about not being able to repay them,” he said. He tried to find work on the fields and factories in Chaubeypur but did not succeed. “There was no work available anywhere because of Corona and the lockdown,” he said. “That is why I had to use this system; I promise I will not do it again. My field is irrigated and if need be, I will borrow from the sunaar (goldsmith) again. I do not want to go to jail,” he said.

Piyush Mishra, a progressive farmer and head of a neighbouring village, said what Sonu did was path-breaking and the most talked about thing in the region. “We will help him if he needs it,” he said.

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