Rooftop solar crosses 50 lakh homes as PM Surya Ghar triples its pace

India's rooftop solar programme has crossed a mark it spent the previous decade nowhere near. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy said on 4 August 2026 that PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana has taken rooftop solar to more than 50.06 lakh households, a milestone reached in a little over two years.

The ten years before the scheme produced 7.94 lakh installations in total. The scheme is the Government of India's flagship rooftop solar programme, running with an outlay of Rs 75,021 crore and described by the ministry as the largest of its kind anywhere.

It aims to reach 1 crore homes, with central subsidy paid directly into beneficiary bank accounts. Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy Pralhad Joshi said on 4 August 2026 that the sun now powers 50 lakh Indian homes.

What is driving the jump in rooftop solar installations

Speed is the story here. Daily installations have risen 3.2 times over nine months, from 5,038 a day in October 2025 to nearly 16,328 a day in July 2026. July was the strongest month the scheme has recorded, with 5.06 lakh households connected. At the current run rate, 1 lakh households are being added every six days.

Money has moved at a similar pace. Rs 28,024 crore has been released to beneficiaries through Direct Benefit Transfer, and 14.8 GW of rooftop capacity has been commissioned so far. Financing has been the other lever. Concessional loans at 5.75%, benchmarked to the repo rate plus 50 basis points, have been sanctioned for 21.87 lakh applicants.

Of these, 17.5 lakh installations have already been completed on loan financing, with Jan Samarth integration enabling paperless processing. The process itself is fully online, from application to subsidy release. PFMS integration allows subsidy to be cleared within 15 days, application programming interfaces link the national portal with more than 80 DISCOMs, and net metering agreements are signed digitally.

Consumers can also see star ratings for vendors before choosing one, a response to long-running complaints about installation quality. That vendor base has grown to 34,219 registered firms, of whom 29,469 are active, while over 2.32 lakh people have been trained under capacity-building programmes. Around 23,000 third-party quality inspections have been carried out.

Access has widened as well. Under the Utility-Led Aggregation model, 1.6 lakh installations have been completed for PMAY, BPL and SC/ST households across four states, with the model cleared for rollout in 12. Rooftop systems up to 10 kW now get deemed approval and a feasibility waiver, and 32 states and union territories have scrapped application and net metering charges.

How does a household earn from power it does not use

A rooftop system often generates more electricity during the day than the home consumes. Net metering allows that surplus to flow back into the grid, with the meter recording both what the household draws and what it sends out.

The household is billed only on the difference. When exports exceed imports over a billing cycle, the DISCOM pays for the balance. Nearly 19 lakh households are now receiving zero electricity bills.

For some, the panels have become a small source of income. More than 12 lakh households together earned Rs 421 crore from surplus power in FY 2024-25, working out to roughly Rs 3,500 a year for each home exporting to the grid.

The next stretch will test whether this pace holds. Reaching 1 crore homes means roughly doubling the count achieved so far, and the ministry is widening the programme beyond households. About 1.06 lakh government buildings have been solarised, a City Accelerator Programme is running across 46 cities, and a payment security mechanism has been introduced to draw RESCO bidders into state solarisation projects by lowering the risk of delayed payments. For the vendors, financiers and installers built up around the scheme, the demand signal for the year ahead is clear.