PM Surya Ghar: what the ₹78,000 solar subsidy gets you

"Solar energy" is trending across India again this week, and the reason is a number: ₹78,000. That is the maximum central subsidy available under the Pradhan Mantri Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, the rooftop solar scheme that also promises up to 300 units of free electricity a month. Both figures are real. Both are also more conditional than the headlines suggest.

Here is what the scheme actually does, how the money is calculated, and the parts that trip people up.

What the scheme is

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the scheme on 13 February 2024, and it was formally launched on 29 February 2024 with a total outlay of ₹75,021 crore. The target is ambitious: rooftop solar on one crore — ten million — Indian homes.

The pitch is simple. The government pays a chunk of the cost of putting solar panels on your roof. You generate your own electricity. What you don't use goes back to the grid. If your system is sized correctly against your consumption, your monthly bill can fall to zero, which is where the "300 free units" line comes from.

That last part is worth being precise about, because it is the most commonly misread element of the scheme. The 300 units are not a government handout credited to your account. They are what a correctly sized rooftop system is expected to generate for a typical household. You are not being given free electricity; you are being helped to stop buying it.

How the subsidy is actually calculated

The subsidy is tiered by system size, which in turn is meant to be matched to how much power you currently use:

• 1 kW system — around ₹30,000
• 2 kW system — around ₹60,000
• 3 kW and above — ₹78,000, and this is the ceiling

The important detail: ₹78,000 is a cap, not a default. A household consuming 100 units a month does not need — and will not be approved for — a 3 kW system. The scheme guidance ties system size to consumption bands, roughly 0–150 units, 150–300 units, and above 300 units. If your bill is modest, your subsidy is modest, because your system is small.

This is where a lot of the disappointment comes from. The ₹78,000 figure travels much faster on social media than the sizing rules attached to it.

What it costs you

The subsidy is a subsidy, not full funding. A 3 kW rooftop system in India typically runs well above the ₹78,000 ceiling, so the household is covering the balance — either in cash or through a loan. Several banks offer collateral-free loans for residential rooftop solar precisely because of this gap.

The economics still tend to work over time, because the panels keep producing for two decades or more while the bill you were paying does not go away. But the payback is measured in years, not months, and anyone told otherwise is being sold something.

Where it has actually got to

The numbers here need care, because different official statements count different things.

Government figures put central financial assistance disbursed at ₹14,771 crore up to December 2025. On installations, reported figures for early 2026 include more than 63 lakh applications received on the scheme portal and roughly 25 lakh rooftop systems installed, with some statements citing around 32 lakh households benefited — a wider count that appears to include applicants at later stages of the process.

Take the most conservative of those. Around 25 lakh installations against a target of one crore is roughly a quarter of the way there, two years in. That is substantial by the standards of Indian rooftop solar, which had struggled for a decade before this scheme, and well short of the target.

Where it gets stuck

Three friction points come up repeatedly in reporting and in applicant accounts.

The discom step. After installation, the local distribution company has to inspect the system and install a net meter — the meter that measures what you export back to the grid. Until that happens, you are generating power you cannot be credited for. This step sits outside the applicant's control and is the most common source of delay.

Vendor quality. Installation has to be done by a vendor registered on the national portal. The registered-vendor list expanded quickly to meet demand, and quality is uneven. The subsidy is paid against a registered installation, so choosing the vendor carelessly can cost more than the subsidy is worth.

Who can actually apply. You need to own the property, have adequate and structurally sound roof space, hold a valid electricity connection, and not have taken a previous government solar subsidy. That set of conditions effectively excludes most renters and a large share of apartment residents, which is a meaningful chunk of urban India. Housing societies can install common systems, but that requires a collective decision that many societies never reach.

What to check before applying

If you are considering it, three things are worth establishing first, in this order: your average monthly consumption over a full year, including summer peaks; whether your roof is legally yours to build on, which for flats usually means it isn't; and what your state discom's current net-metering turnaround actually looks like, which varies enormously between states.

Those three answers determine your system size, your eligibility and your timeline — in that order, and before any vendor quotes you a price.

What happens next

The scheme runs alongside a broader push to raise India's non-fossil generation capacity, and rooftop solar is the part of that push which depends on millions of individual household decisions rather than a few large projects. That makes it slower and messier than utility-scale solar, and it also makes it more politically visible, because the beneficiary is a person with an electricity bill rather than a company with a power purchase agreement.

The trajectory to one crore homes depends less on the subsidy amount, which is already substantial, and more on the parts of the process the applicant cannot control: how fast discoms inspect and meter, and whether the vendor network holds up as volume grows.