Kojadmal Jat’s solar farm is different from those surrounding it. In Kundanpura, a village in Bassi block, nearly an hour’s drive east of Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital, the sight of fields dotted with rows of ground-mounted solar panels is now common. On 60-year-old Jat’s land, though, tender maize unfurls under the dark glass of the panels reflecting the afternoon light. The maize, in shades of pale yellow and green, fills a space that conventional solar farms leave barren.

Jat has been working with researchers of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) on an agrophotovoltaics (APV) project.

Also known as agrivoltaics or agriPV, this is a practice in which the same land is used for agriculture and solar power generation.

His farm is part of a pilot, spread across nearly 3 acres, roughly twice the size of a cricket ground. This is Rajasthan’s first farmer-owned APV, which generates 600 kW. The installation feeds enough electricity into a local grid to provide daytime irrigation power for around 250 farms.

In 2023, inspired by the growing solar-panel-covered fields of his neighbours, Jat exchanged the uncertainties of each harvest for the predictability of monthly income. His decision exposes a dilemma at the heart of the energy transition: should productive farmland generate food or electricity? Jat was anguished by this trade-off. “My farm was generating solar power, but at the end of the day, I am a farmer. I could not come to terms with the fact that I was no longer able to cultivate my land because of the solar panels.”

India ranks 102nd out of 123 countries, on the 2025 Global Hunger Index. Converting productive farmlands to solar power plants risks intensifying food insecurity.

APV works on the principle that partial shading from solar panels can reduce heat stress and evaporation while creating a more stable microclimate, potentially valuable for farming in dry and arid regions. Laxmi Sharma, a research associate with the ICRIER team, was assigned the job of helping Jat explore the APV model. “When we showed him that he could combine farming with solar energy generation, he was delighted by the prospect of being able to do both,” she recalls.

By diversifying farm income, the model reduces dependence on a single source of livelihood and strengthens resilience to both climatic and market risks. But the economics that make APV attractive also constrain its wider adoption. APV can increase farmers’ annual returns of roughly ₹3 lakh to ₹4 lakh per acre, but elevated mounting structures add nearly ₹35 lakh over a conventional installation. For many smallholder farmers, this is simply out of reach

Farmers as solar entrepreneurs

Jat had spent a lifetime farming before turning to solar energy. Through farming he was able to earn close to ₹40,000 a year, but with these panels, his annual income has increased nearly eightfold, to about ₹3 lakh.

In mid-2024, a young team of researchers in New Delhi set out to study the viability of a farmer-owned agrivoltaics model. “When we started, there were only around two dozen agrivoltaics pilots in India,” says Sharma, who joined ICRIER in 2024 for this project. “Most were led by academic institutions or private developers and very few were actually owned by farmers.”

In Madhya Pradesh, Anand Jain, an MTech graduate from IIT Roorkee and a farmer since the 1990s, had arrived at the same question from a different direction. He started studying agrivoltaic projects in Germany and other parts of Europe, collecting data on panel height, spacing, and the microclimate created beneath them.

“Because I am a farmer, I wanted to save every inch of my land,” he says. The panels, he reasoned, should adapt to the farm, not force the farm out.

His own experiment became an early example of the kind of farmer-led model that ICRIER would later seek to study more systematically.

The ICRIER team distilled its findings in an April 2025 report titled ‘Solar as a Third Crop to Augment Farmers’ Income’. They then set out to test this idea in the field.

Rajasthan was their natural choice because the State has India’s highest solar irradiation. It was among the leading implementers of the PM-KUSUM, a Central government scheme, which offers incentives to farmers using solar energy. The ICRIER team partnered with a grassroots organisation to find a farmer willing to test the model. Their search led them to Jat.

Taking the risk

Jat and his family were intrigued but cautious. “My first question was about trust,” he says. “We are often shown ambitious schemes and glossy promises, but when things go south, we are left to navigate the uncertainty and financial risk on our own,” recalls Shiv, 36, Jat’s son, who was closely involved with his father in the APV project.

The researchers, meanwhile, had their own doubts. They wanted to know whether Jat was serious enough about farming to continue cultivating the land for the next 25 years. “For us, Kojadmal was a stranger. For Kojadmal, we were just another group of experts. Trust had to be built through multiple conversations,” recalls Laxmi.

Jat and his son say that their experience with ICRIER’s earlier work made the difference. The team had already been working with farmers on a net-house project, and they had seen their efforts first-hand. “They didn’t just come and tell us about a plan, they were there, working with us and showing us what they were doing. I had seen their team’s hard work on the ground. That is what earned our trust,” says Shiv.

They worked through the technical and financial details together, but Jat knew that the final risk would still be his. “This wasn’t free money,” says Subhodeep Basu, a researcher at ICRIER, who worked on the ‘Solar as a Third Crop…’ study. If agrivoltaics were to create farmer-entrepreneurs rather than grant recipients, Jat had to invest in the project himself and share its risks.

Trusting the process

The next challenge lay in retrofitting an operational solar plant. “A lot of individual farmers told us, ‘We already have a steady source of income. If construction means losing energy revenue during that period, we’re not interested,’” recalls Subhodeep. Hence, instead of shutting down the entire plant, they retrofitted it, one inverter at a time, allowing the remaining sections to continue generating electricity. “That way we could minimise this energy loss,” says Subhodeep.

The ICRIER team decided to advise farmers on which crops were most likely to thrive beneath the panels, while leaving the final choice to them. They would shoulder the risk and reap the returns. Jat chose maize, hoping to grow it during the off season under the cooler microclimate created by the panels, when supplies were thin and prices higher. “In May, the heat made planting impossible but this year, we harvested an abundant maize crop with much less water. The panels have made it possible to farm where it was once impossible,” says Shiv.

With the engineering finalised and the crop chosen, the last question was whether the economics could make the model viable. Like the conventional solar project, 70% of the upfront cost would come from a commercial bank loan carrying an interest rate of 10.25%. For this pilot, the additional cost of retrofitting, i.e., ₹35.3 lakh, was provided by Kotak Mahindra through their CSR programme Kotak Karma.

The electricity generated by the plant would continue to flow into the grid, where Rajasthan’s distribution utility, Jaipur Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd. (JVVNL), would purchase it at ₹3.14 per unit for 25 years. The plant would generate electricity every day of the year. “To understand the financial feasibility of the pilot, we modelled two scenarios, one with viability gap funding (VGF, a government scheme) and another without it,” adds Subhodeep. Without VGF, Jat would have had to wait nearly 12 years to recover his investment. With VGF covering part of the upfront cost, that wait was cut almost in half, to just over six years. The project also became substantially more rewarding as annual profits increased from ₹3.76 lakh to ₹4.48 lakh per acre, while the expected return on investment rose from 12% to 18%.

Between promise and scale

GIZ India, a German development agency that funded the project, found that 54% of the 1,700 farmers it engaged through workshops expressed interest in adopting agriPV systems.

Another farmer who had watched Jat’s project evolve from its earliest days admitted he had often imagined replicating it on his own land. “Kojadmal could take the risk,” he says. “I’d like to as well. I already have a ground-mounted solar plant. But I don’t have the appetite to take such a big loan or put in that kind of money.”

High capital costs continue to deter participation, says Ashok Gulati, an agricultural economist and professor at ICRIER. With lending rates hovering around 10.5%, the economics remain challenging for most farmers, he adds.

“Many state distribution companies remain reluctant to sign long-term power-purchase agreements because of financial stress or surplus power. Land approvals, bureaucratic delays and shifting policy guidelines have slowed implementation,” explains Gulati.

He also suggests that a credit guarantee backed by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) could make smaller agriPV projects easier to finance. But for now, no such financing window exists, a NABARD official confirmed. What does exist is a carefully structured repayment system that gives banks confidence to lend.

Jain sees the implementation gap from the ground. PM-KUSUM is a Central scheme, but execution is entirely at the State level. “There should be a single-window system under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), so farmers are not left navigating this maze on their own.”

He took more than nine months to get the power-purchase agreement done. Meters added another hidden cost: at around ₹5 lakh each, four meters meant ₹20 lakh before the plant could even begin generating returns. “How is this feasible for an ordinary farmer?” he asks.

Further, the paperwork carries a steep price: stamp duty on registered mortgage agreements for solar projects can run into lakhs of rupees, adding another upfront cost to an already capital-intensive investment.

Rajasthan’s energy department, however, says the process has been streamlined, with nodal officers, standardised procedures, simpler land acquisition processes and the shifting of implementation from the Rajasthan Renewable Energy Corporation to power distribution companies. The State now has over 3,000 MW of installed solar capacity and daytime power reaching farmers across at least 22 districts. But that ease is not uniform across States. In Madhya Pradesh, Jain had to deal with three separate energy departments.

Even in Rajasthan, agriPV has no dedicated procurement pathway and must compete with conventional ground-mounted solar in tenders designed around lower-cost PV, despite its higher capital costs and added agricultural benefits.

The price of possibility

Financing is only one constraint. A senior NABARD official, speaking anonymously, says weak rural-grid capacity and concerns about absorbing decentralised solar power have made NABARD cautious about dedicated agriPV financing.

Rajasthan sanctions PM-KUSUM plants only where substations have capacity and is planning large-scale battery energy storage systems to absorb surplus daytime generation, though storage adds capital costs.

While PM-KUSUM has been in operation since 2019, there is no centralised monitoring or grievance redressal cell.

Gulati argues that the next phase of PM-KUSUM must strengthen the ecosystem that supports farmers by identifying crop varieties and establishing a centralised agriPV monitoring portal under MNRE to track project commissioning, power exports, and payment timelines. It must also create a single platform for grievance redressal and coordination among DISCOMs, state nodal agencies and implementation partners.

Shirish Garud, now a consultant with The Energy and Resources Institute and a former senior fellow and director, argues that India needs a dedicated Renewable Purchase Obligation for agrivoltaics.

While the Electricity Act, 2003, already requires distribution companies to procure a fixed share of their electricity from renewable sources, the mandate makes no distinction between conventional solar and agriPV.

Subrahmanyam Pulipaka, CEO, National Solar Energy Federation of India, says that for agriPV to move beyond pilots, India must first establish a clear definition of what constitutes an agriPV project. Unlike countries such as Germany, France and Japan, which have clear standards governing agrivoltaics, India does not yet have formal standards, technical benchmarks, or eligibility criteria.

The next priority is to build a robust evidence base. “We should now scale it across all agro-climatic regions and generate reliable data on agricultural productivity, solar generation, and project economics,” Pulipaka says.

Krishi Vigyan Kendras and agricultural universities, he says, should lead these demonstrations by training farmers in identifying locally suitable cropping patterns and building confidence in the technology.

Pulipaka says farmer-producer organisations and cooperatives are fundamental to this capital-intensive, knowledge-intensive model. “FPOs can aggregate farmers, build awareness, provide technical support, and make project implementation more efficient,” he adds.

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