This paper proposes a standalone PV fed PMSM drive for water pumping. The proposed system aims at reducing the switching losses and overall cost by using reduced switch inverter. The proposed system comprises of a PMSM drive, fed by PV source through an inverter employing reduced number of switches. The inverter uses only four switches whereas the conventional VSI utilizes six switches. Field oriented control scheme is employed to control the PMSM drive. Perturb and Observe (PO) MPPT technique is used to generate a speed reference to PMSM drive. Simulation studies for the proposed PV fed 400 W PMSM driven water pumping system are performed using MATLAB platform and respective results are presented to show the efficacy of the system. © 2018 IEEE.