PM Surya Ghar has put 12 GW on Indian roofs in about two years, and the subsidy is generous and precisely defined. What no household scheme pays for is the battery — which is exactly what a rooftop system needs once net metering stops being free money.
Rooftop Solar Is Working. Household Batteries Are Not Part of the Deal — and That Is the Next Problem.
India's rooftop solar programme has stopped being a pilot. Since PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana launched in February 2024, 9,566.89 MW of rooftop capacity had been added as of 20 March 2026, and by May 2026 the figure was above 12 GW across roughly 33 lakh installations, with over one crore households registered on the national portal. The pace is the striking part: the time taken to add one lakh households has fallen from 118 days to under eight, and May 2026 was the strongest month on record at 3.16 lakh installations.
For context, India's total solar fleet is 150.26 GW (FY2025-26), rising to 162.15 GW in FY2026-27. Rooftop under this one scheme is therefore roughly 8% of all solar capacity in the country, built in two years.
What the subsidy actually pays, exactly
The central financial assistance is not a vague percentage. It is a fixed slab, and it is worth knowing precisely because a lot of vendor quotes misstate it:
| System size | Central subsidy, ₹ | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| 1 kW | 30,000 | 60% of benchmark cost |
| 2 kW | 60,000 | 60% of benchmark cost |
| 3 kW and above | 78,000 | 60% up to 2 kW, plus 40% of the additional cost from 2–3 kW |
Note the shape of it. The subsidy is capped at 3 kW — a 5 kW or 10 kW system receives the same ₹78,000 as a 3 kW one. The marginal rate also steps down from 60% to 40% in the third kilowatt. Both features push households toward small systems, which is deliberate: the scheme is designed to cover a typical domestic load, not to subsidise a household becoming a generator.
The gap: nobody subsidises the battery
A rooftop system without storage exports its midday surplus to the grid and draws power back in the evening. That arrangement only works while net metering credits the export at a useful rate. As rooftop penetration rises, DISCOMs have every incentive to move from net metering to gross or net-billing at avoided cost — which is when the household's own consumption pattern starts to matter, and when a battery stops being a luxury.
Here is the asymmetry. India is spending seriously on storage — but all of it at grid scale:
| Storage support | Scale | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Viability Gap Funding scheme for BESS | 30 GWh approved, plus 13.2 GWh already underway | Grid-scale developers |
| VGF outlay | ₹5,400 crore, intended to attract ~₹33,000 crore of investment | Grid-scale developers |
| CEA assessed requirement | 208 GWh by 2030; 411.4 GWh by 2032 | System-level RE integration |
| Largest commissioned project | SECI, Rajnandgaon (Chhattisgarh) — 40 MW / 120 MWh with co-located solar | Utility |
| Household battery incentive | None under PM Surya Ghar | — |
So the state will co-fund a 120 MWh battery attached to a solar farm, and it will pay ₹78,000 toward a 3 kW rooftop array — but it will not put a rupee toward the 5–10 kWh battery that would let that rooftop array serve its own household in the evening. A domestic battery of that size is roughly ₹1.5–3 lakh installed at current prices (an indicative market price, not an official figure), which is comfortably more than the entire subsidy on the panels it would serve.
What would actually change household economics
Three levers exist, and none of them is a bigger panel subsidy:
- Extend the slab past 3 kW for households that add storage. The current cap makes a large array pointless; pairing a higher cap with a storage requirement would buy evening-peak relief rather than more midday export.
- Bring domestic batteries under the VGF logic. The grid-scale scheme works by de-risking a capital cost that has a system benefit the owner cannot capture. A household battery has exactly that property — it shaves the same evening peak — and receives none of the same support.
- Settle the net-metering question before it settles itself. Households are signing 25-year assets against a tariff arrangement that DISCOMs are actively trying to change, and the DISCOMs doing so are the ones under the most financial stress. That is a real risk sitting on 33 lakh rooftops.
The rooftop programme deserves the credit it gets: the subsidy is well-specified, the delivery has accelerated tenfold, and 12 GW in two years is not a rounding error. But it has built a fleet of generation assets with no storage layer, into a distribution system whose commercial incentive is to stop paying for their output. The battery is the missing half of the policy.
Sources: subsidy slabs and scheme design — MNRE guidelines for PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana and Press Information Bureau releases; installation and capacity figures — PIB (9,566.89 MW as on 20.03.2026; ~33 lakh systems and >12 GW as of May 2026; 3.16 lakh installations in May 2026; the pace of enrolment falling from 118 days to under eight days per lakh households; 40 lakh beneficiary households; 75 lakh target by December 2026; 1,000 billion units and 720 Mt CO₂e lifetime estimates). Total solar installed capacity — NITI Aayog India Climate & Energy Dashboard (150.26 GW FY2025-26; 162.15 GW FY2026-27). Storage — Ministry of Power VGF scheme (30 GWh plus 13.2 GWh underway, ₹5,400 crore outlay), CEA requirement assessments (208 GWh by 2030; 411.4 GWh by 2032), and SECI's Rajnandgaon 40 MW / 120 MWh project. Household battery costs are indicative market prices, not an official figure, and are labelled as such.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
