Science & Tech · Energy & Climate · April 18, 2026
How Varanasi — India's Most Ancient City — Is Leading Its Solar Revolution
A city of temples, ghats, and 3,000-year-old rituals has become one of India's fastest-growing rooftop solar districts. Here is the story of how it happened — and what the rest of India can learn from it.
Every morning, as the sun rises over the Ganga at Varanasi, priests perform the Agni Puja — a fire ritual that has greeted the sun for three thousand years. This April, that same sun is powering close to 10,000 rooftops across the city. Ancient faith and modern energy technology have found, in Varanasi, an unlikely common ground.
Varanasi is not a city you would associate with solar revolution. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — a place of ghats, incense, Sanskrit, and silk. It is also, as of December 2024, the highest-performing rooftop solar district in the entire state of Uttar Pradesh, and one of the fastest-growing in India.
The story of how that happened is not just a feel-good energy story. It is a blueprint — a detailed, replicable model that India's government, its think tanks, and its solar industry are now studying carefully. Because if rooftop solar can take off in Varanasi, it can take off anywhere.
The Numbers That Tell the Story
To understand why these numbers matter, you need to understand what Varanasi is — and what it is not. It is not a wealthy tech hub like Bengaluru. It is not an industrial powerhouse like Surat. It is a city where narrow lanes wind between centuries-old temples, where the economy is built around silk weaving, pilgrimage, and small trade. Per capita incomes are modest. Infrastructure has historically lagged. And yet it outperformed virtually every other district in UP in solar adoption speed.
"Varanasi's achievement is remarkable given that it accounts for under 10% of Uttar Pradesh's population, yet accounts for over 12% of the state's total rooftop solar installations. The Varanasi model demonstrates effective collaboration between state, district, and city administrations — and serves as a blueprint for districts across India." — RMI India, Insight Brief on Scaling Rooftop Solar, December 2024
What Is the PM Surya Ghar Scheme — And Why Did It Work Here?
Before Varanasi's story can be understood, the scheme that drove it needs to be explained. The Pradhan Mantri Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana — launched by Prime Minister Modi on February 13, 2024 — is the world's largest domestic rooftop solar initiative. Its goal is to put rooftop solar on one crore (10 million) Indian homes by March 2027.
The scheme's financial structure is genuinely generous. It offers capital subsidies of over 50% for rooftop systems up to 3 kW — meaning a household installing a standard 2 kW system pays roughly half the cost. In Uttar Pradesh specifically, the state added an additional subsidy of ₹15,000 per kW for systems up to 2 kW. The combined central and state subsidy in UP reaches over 60% — the highest in any Indian state. On top of that, households can access collateral-free loans at around 7% interest from public sector banks, and benefit from up to 300 units of free electricity per month through net metering.
Subsidies alone, however, do not explain Varanasi's outperformance. Every district in UP had access to the same scheme. Varanasi did something different with it.
The Varanasi Model — What They Did Differently
The story of Varanasi's solar surge is, at its core, a story about administration. Specifically, it is about what happens when district-level governance decides to treat a government scheme as a mission rather than a checkbox.
RMI India, which partnered with the UP government to support implementation, documented several initiatives that distinguished Varanasi's approach from other districts.
India's Solar Picture — Where Varanasi Fits
Varanasi's story sits within a much larger national transformation that deserves its own framing. India's solar sector in 2024 and 2025 broke records that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
| Metric | Figure | Context |
|---|---|---|
| India's total solar capacity (Apr 2025) | 107.94 GW | 3rd largest solar capacity in the world |
| Rooftop solar added in 2024 | 3.2 GW | 88% increase over 2023 — largest single-year jump ever |
| Rooftop solar added in 2025 | 4.9 GW | Another record — residential segment now 74% of new additions |
| PM Surya Ghar registrations | 1.45 crore+ | Largest rooftop solar scheme ever launched globally |
| PM Surya Ghar installations (Jul 2025) | 16 lakh homes | 1 crore target by March 2027 — on track in strong states |
| UP total installations (Mar 2026) | 4,57,925 | UP now leading state in India for rooftop solar installations |
| Gujarat rooftop solar capacity | 4,984 MW | Still leads nationally; accounts for 29% of India's total rooftop capacity |
| India's solar generation (FY2024–25) | 144 TWh | Up from 116 TWh the year before — saving 57 million tonnes of coal |
The context matters: India added 23.8 GW of total new solar capacity in FY2025 — a 58.5% jump from the previous year. The country crossed 100 GW of installed solar capacity in 2024, joining an elite group of nations. By April 2025, India had recorded its all-time highest single-day solar generation of 65,804 MW.
The rooftop segment — historically the laggard — is now the story. Residential consumers accounted for 74% of new rooftop installations in 2024, reversing years in which commercial and industrial users dominated. The PM Surya Ghar scheme is the single biggest driver of that shift, and Varanasi is its poster child.
Why a Religious City Embraced Solar — The Cultural Angle
There is a dimension to Varanasi's solar story that data alone cannot capture. This is a city where the sun is not just an energy source — it is sacred. The Surya Puja, worship of the sun god, is a living daily practice on the ghats of the Ganga. Chhath Puja, one of the most intensely observed festivals in UP and Bihar, is dedicated entirely to the sun.
Solar energy communicators working in the district quietly used this cultural resonance. Community outreach in Varanasi did not pitch solar as a technology product. It was presented in the language the city understands — as harnessing the energy of Surya, the sun, for the household's benefit. Whether this framing consciously drove adoption is difficult to quantify. But community workers and local government officials noted that resistance — a common barrier in rural and semi-urban India where solar is sometimes viewed with scepticism — was lower in Varanasi than in comparable districts.
"In Varanasi, the sun is not a stranger. It has been worshipped here for millennia. When we told people that this scheme allows your home to draw power from the sun and sell back what you don't use, many of them found something familiar in the idea." — Community outreach worker, Varanasi district, as reported by Saur Energy International
The practical reality reinforced the cultural appeal. In a city where summer temperatures regularly cross 45°C and power cuts were a summer fixture, reducing electricity bills and gaining some protection from grid failures had immediate, tangible value. Solar was not an environmental abstraction in Varanasi. It was a solution to a problem people felt every July.
The Gaps That Remain — An Honest Accounting
Varanasi's success is real. But it is important to tell the full story, including the parts that do not make for clean headlines.
The state-level picture also has significant gaps. Uttar Pradesh's 4.57 lakh total installations are impressive in absolute terms — but UP is India's most populous state. The penetration rate remains low relative to the opportunity. Assam, with a far smaller base, recorded the highest compounded quarterly growth rate of 35.3% between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025 — suggesting that the next frontier is not the large states but the smaller, faster-moving ones.
And at the national level, while rooftop solar is booming, it still represents only about 15% of India's total solar capacity — far below the proportion seen in leading solar nations like Germany, Australia, or Japan, where rooftop accounts for 30–50% of total installations. India's vast rooftop potential — estimated at 57–76 GW of realisable capacity — remains largely untapped.
The challenge is no longer awareness or even cost. It is execution: simplifying the application and approval process, increasing vendor availability in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, making DISCOM net metering approvals faster, and ensuring that the financing pipeline does not become a bottleneck that turns interest into frustration.
What the Varanasi Model Means for India
RMI India's December 2024 brief on Varanasi was explicit: this is a blueprint, not a one-off. The initiatives that drove Varanasi's acceleration — ward-level registration targets, proactive vendor onboarding, bank branch coordination, community-level peer networks — are all replicable. They do not require exceptional resources. They require exceptional administration.
That is both the encouraging and sobering lesson. Varanasi showed what is possible when district administration treats a government scheme as a genuine mission. The implication is that hundreds of other districts, with the same scheme, the same subsidies, and the same technology, are leaving enormous potential untapped simply because the implementation machinery is not engaged at the same level.
Uttar Pradesh, emboldened by Varanasi's success, has now set a target of solarising 2.5 million households across the state. In March 2026 alone — a single month — UP installed 52,729 rooftop solar systems. On March 31, 2026, UP recorded 3,188 installations in a single day — the highest ever in the state's history.
And at the centre of that momentum sits Varanasi — a city that has been greeting the sun for three millennia, and has recently decided, at scale, to put it to work.
The Ground Reality — What the Success Story Isn't Telling You
Here is the part of the Varanasi solar story that the press releases do not include. And it needs to be told — because ignoring it would be dishonest, and because understanding it is the only way to fix it.
When Ramesh Singh of Janipur village in UP installed a 3 kW rooftop solar plant, he expected his electricity bills to drop. Initially, they did — he received a minimal bill. Then in July 2025, he opened an envelope and found a bill of ₹12,269 for three months. His previous bills were ₹700–800 per month. Nothing about his usage had changed. The solar panels were on his roof, generating power every day. And yet somehow, he owed more than ever.
He is not alone. In Khajani town in Gorakhpur district, Brijesh Modanwal installed a 5 kW system in April 2025 and received a bill of ₹22,295 for three months — for a household that had panels on the roof producing electricity in full Uttar Pradesh summer sun.
"Earlier, I used to get a bill of about ₹700–800 per month. Now, despite the same load, I don't understand how my bill has increased." — Ramesh Singh, solar rooftop consumer, Janipur village, UP — Mongabay India, August 2025
What is happening? The answer lies in net metering — and in the gap between how it is supposed to work and how it works on the ground.
A metering company representative confirmed to Mongabay India that in many cases, net meters had simply not been configured after installation. "His is an existing net meter. It has yet to be configured to generate correct bills," the representative said, requesting anonymity. The smart meter works on a network basis — if there is no network, it only shows fixed charges. This is why some consumers receive very small bills initially, and then a massive bill when the system corrects itself improperly.
In Varanasi itself, a local solar vendor named Ajit Mishra told Mongabay that 192 loan applications submitted through his company were pending across Varanasi and surrounding districts — stuck because of name mismatches between electricity department records and Aadhaar cards. Banks process loans only when names match exactly. The electricity department takes weeks or months to make corrections. Meanwhile consumers wait, vendors lose business, and rural adoption stalls entirely.
The rush to install has also brought quality problems. PVVNL officials noted in multiple cases that plants installed under the scheme appeared to be of poor quality. Vendors competing on price have cut corners on components. Consumers who cannot evaluate panel specifications have no way to know until their system underperforms months later.
None of this cancels Varanasi's achievement. The 15x growth is real. The administration's effort is genuine. The savings for households with correctly configured systems are significant. But a consumer who installs solar and receives a higher bill does not just become personally disillusioned — they tell their neighbours. And the word-of-mouth that drove Varanasi's solar adoption up can just as easily drive it down if these ground-level failures are not corrected urgently.
The fixes are not complicated. Net meters must be configured within days of installation, not months. DISCOM officials need accountability for delays. Loan processing needs a digital fast-track that does not stall on Aadhaar name mismatches. Vendor quality standards need enforcement. These are not engineering problems. They are administration problems — the same category Varanasi's district team solved brilliantly on the way up, and must now solve to sustain the momentum.
Frequently asked questions
Varanasi has been called many things across three millennia — the city of light, the city of Shiva, the eternal city. In 2024 and 2025, it quietly earned a new descriptor: India's rooftop solar capital of the heartland.
That this happened in a city of weavers, priests, and pilgrims — rather than in a technology park or an industrial corridor — is the point. India's solar revolution will not be won on the rooftops of Bengaluru's tech campuses alone. It will be won, or lost, in the lanes of cities like Varanasi.
But the revolution is incomplete. For every household in Varanasi whose electricity bill dropped to near zero, there is another household in UP whose bill went up after installing solar — because a net meter was never configured, a loan was stuck over an Aadhaar name mismatch, or a DISCOM official had no incentive to help. The technology works. The subsidy is real. The administration is the variable — and right now, that variable is dangerously uneven.
Varanasi showed India what is possible when administration rises to the occasion. The challenge now is making that the rule, not the exception — before the households who were promised lower bills, and got higher ones instead, convince their neighbours that solar was never worth it.
