Pump stocks rally on budgetary sops; Shakti, Roto Pumps zoom 20%

Shares of pumps maker rallied by up to 20 per cent on the BSE in an otherwise weak market on Saturday after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced expansion of Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha Utthan Mahabhiyan (PM KUSUM) Scheme under which 2 million farmers would be provided funds to set up standalone solar pumps.

Shakti Pumps (India) was locked in the upper circuit band of 20 per cent at Rs 293 on the BSE. The trading volumes on the counter jumped over 13-fold with a combined 3.12 million shares changing hands on the NSE and BSE. There were pending buy orders for 227,432 shares on both the exchanges at 02:59 pm.

Roto Pumps, too, rallied 20 per cent to Rs 183, while WPIL soared 10 per cent to Rs 688 in the intra-day trade today. In comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex tumbled 2.2 per cent or 887 points at 39,837.

While presenting the Budget for 2020-21, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that 2 million farmers would be provided funds to set up grid-connected 1.5 million solar pumps.

In the Budget speech of July 2019, I had stated that “annadata” can be “urjadata” too. The PM-KUSUM scheme removed farmers’ dependence on diesel and kerosene and linked pump sets to solar energy, she said.

Now, I propose to expand the scheme to provide 2 million farmers for setting up stand-alone solar pumps; further we shall also help another 1.5 million farmers solarise their grid-connected pump sets. In addition, a scheme to enable farmers to set up solar power generation capacity on their fallow/barren lands and to sell it to the grid would be operationalized, she added.