Sowing the seeds of a solar power intervention
Explore India's agrivoltaics model, blending solar energy with farming to boost farmer income and address food security challenges.
India’s emerging agrivoltaics model enables farmers to grow crops beneath solar panels, offering a way to generate electricity while diversifying income. Vanita Bhatnagar speaks to farmers and agri-researchers to find out how high upfront costs, financing constraints, and uneven policy support are preventing more farmers from taking up projects beyond the pilots
Updated - August 23, 2026 05:46 am IST
Kojadmal Jat and his family members (second from left) and his family members at the 600 kW Agri-PV pilot in Kundanpura village, Bassi, Rajasthan. Photo: Special Arrangement.
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.
Maize grows beneath elevated solar panels at Kojadmal Jat’s Agri-PV farm, where panels allow crops to be cultivated while the 600 kW plant continues to generate electricity. Photo: Special Arrangement
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.
Retrofitting the completed plant in phases enables cultivation to begin beneath the solar array while energy generation continues uninterrupted. Photo: Special Arrangement
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.
