In Short : The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) may achieve only 50% of its FY25 target under the PM Surya Ghar Yojana, aimed at boosting rooftop solar installations. Challenges like low awareness, financing hurdles, and implementation delays have slowed progress. Despite efforts to streamline processes and increase subsidies, meeting the target remains difficult, impacting India’s residential solar energy goals.
In Detail : The Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) expects to install rooftop solar (RTS) plants on around 12 lakh households under the PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojna in the current fiscal year, ending this month, against the target of covering 25 lakh households.
“It was estimated that during the initial year i.e. FY25, of the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, a total of 12 lakh households are likely to be benefited through the installation of solar rooftop plants under the scheme,” Minister of State for New & Renewable Energy Shripad Yesso Naik said in a written response in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.
On the same day, Minister for New & Renewable Energy Pralhad Joshi announced on X (formerly Twitter) that the Ministry has achieved 10 lakh installations under PM Surya Ghar scheme.
Pace of installations
Under the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, the Ministry aims at solarising 1 crore households by providing free electricity up to 300 units every month through RTS installations. The government has allocated around ₹ 75,000 crore and it has to be implemented by FY27.
These 1 crore installations will generate about 1 lakh crore units of electricity and lead to a reduction of 72 crore tonnes of CO2 emission.
However, 12 lakh installations by March 31, 2025 is almost half of the target set for FY25.
In its second report on the MNRE’s demand for grants for FY25, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Energy stated that the budget allocation (BE) for PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojna is ₹6,250 crore with a target to install 25 lakh RTS systems.
The committee took oral evidence from the representatives of MNRE on October 15, 2024 and it was adopted on December 3, 2024.
Appearing before the committee on October 15, 2024, MNRE Secretary said “Around 1.4 crore registrations have been done in it, 20 lakh people have applied for it, who want to actually do it. The current figure of establishment is 4.8 lakh. Subsidy release has been done for around 2.8 lakh.”
“In between, there was a rainy season, when the momentum became a little less. But the average capacity is still around three to three and a half thousand, which we can do on a daily basis. We hope that we will easily be able to cross the target of about 12 lakh households this year.”
However, the Secretary explained to the panel that as the numbers under this scheme increases, its growth will also increase at the same pace. Four-five months ago (from October 2024), there were about three and a half thousand connections per day, which have also increased to around nine thousand.
Fast tracking installations
Besides, the MNRE is also coming out with innovative ideas to boost solarisation under the scheme.
For instance, the MNRE Secretary informed the committee that the Ministry has introduced the concept of Model Solar Villages. Under this one village would be selected in every district, in which the local administration will run a challenge and the village which gets the maximum solarisation in that six-month period will get central financial assistance (CFA) of about ₹1 crore.
Also, the Budget for FY26 has given a healthy boost to spending on distributed renewable energy (RE) segment with budget estimates totalling ₹22,600 crore, a massive over two-fold surge from budget estimates (BE) for FY25, and a 66 per cent jump from the revised estimates (RE).
The budget allocation for PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojna in FY26 has grown by 80 per cent to ₹20,000 crore from FY25 (RE) of ₹11,100 crore. Compared to the BE for FY25, the allocation rose by more than three times.
In fact, PM Surya Ghar accounts for more than three-fourth of the total budgeted spending on MNRE’s central sector schemes and projects (₹26,399.37 crore), which includes solar power, wind power, renewable energy sources (RES) and green hydrogen mission.
