This paper presents the design and implementation of Modular Multilevel Inverter (MMI) to control the Induction Motor (IM) drive using intelligent techniques towards marine water pumping applications. The proposed inverter is of eleven levels and has the ability to control the speed of an IM drive which is fed from solar photovoltaics. It is estimated that the energy consumed by pumping schemes in an onboard ship is nearly 50% of the total energy. Considering this fact, this paper investigates and validates the proposed control design with reduced complexity intended for marine water pumping system employing an induction motor (IM) drive and MMI. The analysis of inverter is carried out with Proportional-Integral (PI) and Fuzzy Logic (FL) based controllers for improving the performance. A comparative analysis has been made with respect to better robustness in terms of peak overshoot, settling time of the controller and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the inverter. Simulations are undertaken in MATLAB/Simulink and the detailed experimental implementation is conducted with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The results thus obtained are utilized to analyze the controller performance, improved inverter output voltage, reliable induction motor speed control and power quality improvement by reduction of harmonics. The novelty of the proposed control scheme is the design and integration of MMI, IM drive and intelligent controller exclusively for marine water pumping applications.