What has India done to promote rooftop solar?
By contrast, India’s solar expansion is driven by government plans and incentives, like a programme launched in February 2024 offering a total of 75 billion rupees (US$9 billion) in subsidies to install 30 GW of capacity on about 10 million homes.
The country has already disbursed US$1.05 billion in subsidies to 1.6 million households, according to the IEEFA.
India’s overall rooftop solar potential could be as high as 960 GW, nearly double the country’s current entire power generation of 500 GW, said the New Delhi-based think tank The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in a June 2025 report.
Why has Bangladesh not developed rooftop solar?
Densely populated Bangladesh should be ideally suited to rooftop solar power, but the country’s homes and business have lacked affordable and accessible finance to do so, while high import duties on rooftop solar components also throttled quick adoption, said an IEEFA analysis in August.
In July, the government set a goal of adding 3GW capacity to be installed on government buildings, schools and hospitals across the country.
However, Bangladesh would need to train bank officials about financing solar projects, offer low-cost finance to solar energy businesses and waive import duties on solar components, said the IEEFA study.
Does everyone have access to rooftop solar?
No. The growth of rooftop solar power has often been uneven across regions and income groups.
In India, states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, or Kerala had rooftop solar capacity of about 6 GW, 4.1 GW and 1.6 GW respectively, while others like the northeastern states Manipur and Meghalaya had only 10.6 MW and 0.21 MW as of September 2025, said the country’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.
In Pakistan, the national grid has a total installed generation capacity of 46 GW from all energy sources, though peak demand hovers between only 20 to 30 GW, said a report by Renewables First, an Islamabad-based think tank.
The government has to pay the power plants a capacity payment – a set fee based on the amount of power that plants can generate – even when they remain idle due to surplus capacity.
With a large number of wealthy consumers switching to solar and leaving the main grid, the demand for grid power has fallen.
The government, faced with capacity payment obligations nearly tripling to 2.1 trillion Pakistani rupees (US$7.46 billion) in 2024 from 721 billion Pakistani rupees in 2022, has slapped a 10 per cent tax on imported solar panels in this year’s budget.
Meanwhile, utilities have put up prices. Grid-dependent poorer consumers, unable to switch to solar, were hardest hit.
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