Santosh Harish

The success of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission depends on certain critical features – the subsidy structure, the role of standardised systems and institutional models of delivery As the actual costs of small systems are considerably higher, on a per watt basis, than the benchmark costs assumed for the subsidy, smaller systems that are within the reach of the rural poor receive lower subsidies than larger systems.

The overall goal of the off-grid guidelines of the JNNSM is to achieve wider dissemination of solar
technology, and a generous capital subsidy of up to 90% is offered for rural applications Even so,
there are several bottlenecks to large-scale dissemination Primarily, the techno-economics,
financing and institutional mechanisms of several solar applications are not well understood
Therefore, these form a focus of this study In addition, this study looks at the Government of India’s