The Cabinet approved an additional ₹19,500 crore funding on Wednesday for the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for manufacture of high-efficiency solar modules. The government expects this cash support to catalyse investment worth ₹94,000 crore in a sector that’s highly dependent on imports, creating domestic capacity of about 65 GW of fully and partially integrated solar photovoltaic modules.
The Cabinet also cleared the National Logistics Policy and approved changes to enhance the incentive structure for manufacture of semiconductors, display fabs and compound semiconductors.
The PLI encourages all the stages – allocating Rs 12,000 crore for fully integrated polysilicon to wafers to cells to modules capacity, Rs 4,500 crore for three-stage integration of wafers to cells to modules, and Rs 3,000 crore for integration across cells and modules.
The combined module manufacturing capacity under both PLI tranches is expected to be 74 GW, in addition to 6 GW outside PLI schemes.
Tata Power managing director Praveer Sinha welcomed the move, saying this will help in import substitution and indigenisation of solar equipment.
Effective April 2, the government imposed a 25% customs duty on solar cells to promote domestic manufacturing under the Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative.
