India’s commitment to climate change mitigation and energy transition has placed solar photovoltaic (PV) at the forefront of its clean energy strategy. With over 110 GW of installed solar capacity, rooftop solar (RTS) offers a unique opportunity to generate electricity at the point of consumption, reducing transmission losses, land use, and costs for consumers.

The Government of India’s flagship PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana has significantly accelerated the adoption of RTS. The scheme aims to install RTS systems in 40 lakh households by March 2026 and 1 crore households by March 2027. As of March 2025, 10 lakh installations have been completed. To meet these ambitious targets, the entire RTS ecosystem must scale rapidly. The government has significantly increased budgetary support for the scheme with an outlay of INR 20,000 Crore in FY 2-25-26 and an outlay of INR 75,000 crore through FY 2026–27.

While the scheme currently focuses on residential rooftops, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has also issued guidelines for RTS on government buildings. There is growing potential to extend RTS to other sectors, such as MSMEs, which can benefit from decentralised, clean energy solutions.

WRI India has been actively engaged in identifying barriers and opportunities in the RTS sector since 2018. Our work spans residential, healthcare, MSMEs, and commercial segments, including pilot studies and temporal analyses. Key challenges identified include:

  • Limited access to affordable financing for upfront capital costs, including fragmented convergence of funding across schemes
  • Revenue costs and lack of clarity for operation, maintenance and disposal of assets at end of life
  • Stakeholder misalignment with RTS adoption goals
  • Low awareness of RTS benefits and government incentives

While some of these recommendations have been integrated into the revamped RTS scheme, several bottlenecks remain. To address these, we are organizing a multi-stakeholder consultation in Assam to gather insights from diverse actors across sectors. This dialogue will help deepen our collective understanding of the barriers and co-develop actionable strategies to accelerate RTS adoption.

Progress and potential of rooftop solar PV in Assam:

Assam is endowed with diverse renewable energy resources - solar, wind, water, biomass, and hydro - that offer strong potential for clean energy expansion. According to Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Assam has a solar potential of around 13.76 GW. In alignment with this resource richness, Assam’s Integrated Clean Energy Policy (ICEP) 2025 has set a bold target of 1,900 MW of rooftop solar (RTS) capacity by 2030, a substantial increase from the 300 MW goal under the earlier Assam Renewable Energy Policy (AREP) 2022. This state-level ambition is closely aligned with the PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, a national mission to solarise one crore households with robust financial and institutional support mechanisms.

However, Assam’s current RTS installation stands at just ~60 MW (about 20,000 systems) as of mid-2025, underscoring the gap between potential and progress. Encouragingly, recent uptake has been driven by enabling policies, including net metering, group net metering, and virtual net metering under AERC, as well as targeted subsidies such as the ₹15,000/kW state support (up to ₹45,000) layered on top of central incentives. The RTS vendor base has also expanded rapidly, from 21 firms in 2023 to over 440 by mid-2025. As Assam embarks on scaling rooftop solar across its geographies, this event provides a timely platform to unpack emerging challenges, explore scalable models, and co-develop solutions that accelerate the deployment of equitable and sustainable rooftop solar in the state.

Objective:

  • Our aim is to help realise and maximise the potential of adopting RTS by households, institutions, and other relevant entities. To enable this, we aim to:
  • Understand the current issues that are plaguing the adoption of RTS for various categories of consumers:
    • Residential
    • Other commercial sectors, which are mostly MSMEs
    • Government buildings
  • Identify possible avenues that will enable the required scale to be achieved by the targeted timeline.
  • Identify specific interventions for the stakeholders, like the developers, decision-makers, and consumers, in this regard.

With these findings, we will engage with Ministry of New and Renewable Energy as well as specific states to identify areas of intervention and strategy for scaling RTS adoption.