More than 4.32 lakh households are estimated to be freed from the cycle of paying monthly electricity bills due to installation of roof top solar projects as part of the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana.
“In the last ten years, 7.9 lakh rooftops have been installed in the country and in the last one year, 9 lakh residential rooftops have been installed. In this, the bills of 48 percent households have become zero,” said the report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Energy on the demand for grants of the Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) for FY25.
MNRE representatives had informed the panel about the households during their oral submissions on February 25, 2025.
Senior officials said that the number of households with zero electricity bills will grow further as the number of households under the PM Surya Ghar Yojna have increased to 10 lakh, which was announced earlier this week.
As of February 25, around 1.72 crore registrations have been done, of which 45.84 lakh applications have been submitted. Installations have been done in 9.05 lakh households.
The Ministry has released subsidies to the bank accounts of about 6 lakh households. Apart from this, there is also a provision to give incentives to Discoms. Incentives worth Rs 2,000 crore have been released.
The government has registered 12,257 vendors. Besides, Discoms have waived the technical feasibility. Feasibility approval is not required up to ten kilowatts.
For FY26, the scheme has been allocated a budget of ₹20,000 crore to complete 35 lakh installations equalling around 10.5 GW capacity.
In FY25, which ends this month, the Ministry had set a target of installing solar power projects on rooftops of 25 lakh households. However, it expects to install 12 lakh projects till March 31, 2025.
Under the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, the Ministry aims at solarizing one crore households by providing free electricity up to 300 units every month through rooftop solar installations. The government has allocated around ₹75,000 crore and it has to be implemented by FY27.
These 1 crore installations will generate about one lakh crore units of electricity and lead to a reduction of 72 crore tonnes of CO2 emission.
