the purpose of this paper is to estimate the time required to irrigate an acre of land with varying tube well installations in India. This is done by estimating the brake horsepower required by various tube well installation under varying conditions of soil seepage, varying size of pipes and discharge with the help of engineering equations in order to allow an estimate of the time requirement for irrigation. Once the time requirement is available then it becomes possible to estimate the variable costs associated with different tube well installations, for which no data is available. This paper attempts to fill that gap.