PM Surya Ghar: Free Electricity Through Rooftop Solar

Imagine an ordinary Indian household's biggest recurring utility cost, its electricity bill, being eliminated almost entirely through a government-subsidised rooftop solar installation, generating enough power to cover the household's own consumption and, through net metering covered elsewhere on this site, feed any surplus back into the grid, exactly the proposition behind PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, launched in February 2024 with the explicit goal of reaching one crore Indian households by March 2027, making it the world's largest domestic rooftop solar programme by household target.

The scheme's progress has been genuinely substantial though still well short of its enormous target, over 39.7 lakh rooftop solar systems installed benefiting more than 48 lakh households by FY26, adding roughly 6.7 GW of cumulative installed capacity, with installation pace itself accelerating, 18.71 lakh systems installed during 2025-26 alone, roughly matching the entire prior period's cumulative total, suggesting genuine momentum building even though the one crore household target remains considerably distant.

Gujarat's clear leadership, over 5.15 lakh systems installed and 7.41 lakh households benefited, well ahead of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh in second and third place, illustrates how state-level implementation capacity and existing solar infrastructure, covered under Solar Park elsewhere on this site, genuinely shapes how quickly individual states can convert national scheme ambition into actual household installations, meaning the scheme's national success ultimately depends on replicating Gujarat's implementation model more broadly across other states.

This scheme connects directly to the broader net metering and feed-in tariff mechanisms covered elsewhere on this site, and represents a genuinely different growth channel from the utility-scale solar parks and open access solar covered throughout this page, PM Surya Ghar specifically targets distributed, household-level generation, meaning its success would meaningfully diversify India's solar capacity growth beyond the large centralised solar farms that have dominated the country's renewable energy story until now, pushing genuine energy generation capability directly onto millions of individual rooftops instead.