How Su-Kam Replaced Diesel at Eighteen Assam Rifles Outposts — Including the 100 kW Plant at Moreh

1. Hero Archive Anchor

• Founder essay: How Su-Kam Replaced Diesel at Eighteen Assam Rifles Outposts — KunwerSachdev.com
• Primary contemporaneous source: Facebook Archive — July & September 2014
• Archive Entry 1 (26 July 2014): “Our Solar 100kw Plant at Moreh in 26th Sector H.Q. Assam Rifles.” One of the 100 kWp sites in the 18-site programme.
• Archive Entry 2 (3 September 2014): “Training imparted to Assam Rifles technical team on general operation and maintenance of Solar Power Plant installed in Battalion and Headquarters of Assam Rifles.”
• Press record: VARIndia and Electronics Maker (June 2014) — 18 sites, 1.3 MW, REIL, JNNSM. pv magazine India (March 2018) confirms the 1.3 MW Assam Rifles work.

2. The Founder’s Story: The Unfiltered Reality of Border Engineering

By Kunwer Sachdev (Founder & Managing Director, 1988–2018)

The Assam Rifles is India’s oldest paramilitary force, raised in 1835. It guards the 1,643-kilometre Indo-Myanmar border. For decades, when a remote battalion needed electricity, the answer was a diesel generator, drums of fuel, and a road the monsoon could close for weeks.

Through Rajasthan Electronics & Instruments Limited (REIL) — a Government of India enterprise that consolidated renewable procurement for central forces — Su-Kam put off-grid solar with battery storage on eighteen sites in five states: Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, and Assam. Total capacity: 1.3 MW. Ten sites at 50 kWp. Eight sites at 100 kWp. Moreh, 26th Sector H.Q., is the 100 kW plant we posted on Facebook in July 2014. The diesel did not disappear. It stopped being the only answer.

This was not a cold tender. REIL came to us because earlier solar work for state nodal agencies had already survived the field. Defence procurement is conservative for a reason. They do not buy a pitch. They buy whether your last plant still runs. Funding sat under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission subsidy administered by MNRE. We were responsible for design, supply, installation, commissioning, and maintenance — including a 48-hour service SLA on sites that, in some cases, could only be reached by helicopter.

Why off-grid was the only architecture

The North-East border is not terrain for a grid extension. Mountains, heavy rain, seasonal roads — and in many battalion postings the conventional grid is not a meaningful presence. What exists is a genset, a fuel drum, and a supply chain that fails when the road fails. Off-grid solar on roofs and ground frames charges tubular 2V battery banks through the day. Diesel stays on standby for long overcast spells. Runtime — and therefore fuel demand — drops. The logistics chain that used to deliver diesel weekly now delivers it monthly or less.

I visited several deployments, mostly the more accessible Assam-region sites. Before solar, some posts rationed electricity when drums ran low: lights off unless strictly needed, radio room first, computers metered. The day I walked a freshly commissioned site, the jawans were dealing with something they had not had to manage before — reliable 24-hour power. There was disbelief. For some of them it was the first posting where you could switch on a fan in the afternoon without a sergeant calculating the diesel cost in his head.

Topographical Nightmares: Shadows and Fragmented Terrain

Every site presented unique physical challenges:

• The Shadow Problem: At one base, towering mountain ridges and dense forest cover created severe shadow pockets. A standard rooftop layout would have caused continuous string mismatch. Our engineers had to meticulously model sun angles to position arrays where generation would not collapse during morning and evening hours.
• Fragmented Arrays: At another post, contiguous flat land did not exist. Building a single 100 kW ground-mounted solar field was physically impossible. We had to break the solar plant into smaller modular sub-arrays across multiple staggered slopes and rooftops, trenching and clubbing the DC cabling together into a central power conditioning unit (PCU).

Logistical Chaos: The Battery Shipping Blunder

Material logistics became our biggest operational headache. Shipments were split: inverters, structures, and control panels shipped directly from our factories in Gurugram and Baddi, while the heavy battery banks were routed through REIL’s logistics channel.

REIL’s handling was completely mismanaged:

1. Unmarked Shipments: Heavy crates of industrial 2-Volt battery cells (starting at 500 Ah minimum) were shipped without proper labeling or destination markings.
2. Cross-State Mix-Ups: Batteries meant for an outpost in Manipur were dumped at a site in Nagaland or Mizoram.
3. Manual Rectification: Our field engineers had to physically track unmarked consignments across rugged border roads, re-sort hundreds of heavy 2V cells, and transport them to the correct hilltop installations.

Building Manpower & Training Soldiers

In these border outposts, local solar technical manpower simply did not exist. We trained our own internal task force in Gurugram on high-voltage DC bus wiring and 2V cell string balancing before sending them to the hills.

Once installed, we took a crucial step that separated an equipment vendor from an engineering partner: we trained the Assam Rifles soldiers themselves. The banks used 2-volt tubular cells — the serious off-grid chemistry of the mid-2010s, before lithium at this scale was economic. Water topping, electrolyte level, specific gravity, equalisation. None of it is rocket science. All of it is real work. Skip it and a ten-year bank dies in three. The Su-Kam engineer on a service flight was the backstop. The front line was the jawan on rotation who knew, week by week, whether the cells were right.

Across all eighteen sites we put an internet remote-monitoring screen — generation, state of charge, load, alarms — close to real time. For 2014–2016 that was ahead of most Indian off-grid work. It was also the only way to honour a 48-hour SLA on that geography. The jawans picked up the duty quickly and, in many cases, kept the plants better than commercial technicians at our civilian sites. Off-grid solar in remote India fails when site discipline fails. These plants did not fail for that reason.

The Working Capital Struggle: Late-Paying PSUs

Beyond the terrain and logistics, managing cash flow with a public-sector intermediary was an enormous uphill battle. REIL was a notoriously late paymaster. Payments were delayed for months, forcing us to carry massive working-capital burdens while keeping high-stakes defense timelines on track.

3. Ground Reality & Technical Specifications

4. Verified Contemporaneous Media & Historical Records

• Full founder essay: How Su-Kam Replaced Diesel at Eighteen Assam Rifles Outposts — KunwerSachdev.com
• VARIndia: Assam Rifles uses Solar power to light up remote locations — 18 sites, 10×50 kWp + 8×100 kWp, REIL, JNNSM, remote monitoring, 48-hour SLA.
• Electronics Maker (12 June 2014): Assam Rifles switches to solar — same 1.3 MW programme; diesel cost cited as falling by about half.
• pv magazine India (5 March 2018): Interview with Kunwer Sachdev — “1.3 MW at various sites for Indian Army’s division, Assam Rifles.”
• Facebook Archive (July & Sept 2014): Moreh 100 kW plant and Assam Rifles technical training
• Field map: Solar Installation Projects — KunwerSachdev.com

5. Series Connections & Next Steps

• Series hub: More solar field posts live on the solar blog.
• Companion Landmark Project (Episode 1): Read how direct-DC systems electrified 40,000 Rural Homes in Uttar Pradesh.
• Companion Landmark Project (Episode 4–6): AP 2013 solar petrol pumps, Jalgaon 10 kVA, Panipat / Sanoli 2015.
• Companion Innovation (Series 2): Read about heavy-duty industrial PCUs and Patented Multi-Battery Protection Systems.
• Companion Grassroots Story (Series 3): Read how Su-Kam expanded its North East Dealer Channel across Shillong and Kokrajhar.

Historical Documentation Notice:
This article documents historical innovations and installations executed under the leadership of Kunwer Sachdev during his tenure as Founder & Managing Director of Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. (1988–2018). Kunwer Sachdev exited the company in 2019 under the IBC process and holds no association, affiliation, or liability with Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. or its subsequent management.