India, May 30 -- I grew up in a farming village in Madhya Pradesh. My earliest memories of the agricultural economy are not abstract--they are visceral. Families scanning the sky for monsoon clouds. My father calculating whether we could afford another season of diesel for the pump sets. The quiet, resigned despair that followed a bad harvest. Energy, in our household, was not a utility. It was a weight--one of the heaviest a farming family carried from one season to the next.

Three career chapters later--an engineering degree, a satellite-based agri-tech startup, and years building climate risk platforms for electric utilities in America--I find myself back in rural MP, running a solar company that deploys systems across the state. What...