By: Mayank Garg, CEO at Aroma Solar
In May 2026, three Indian-made solar modules did not just pass a global reliability test. They tied for the highest score in the world. The Kiwa PVEL 2026 Reliability Scorecard, one of the industry’s toughest independent benchmarks, put modules from Indian manufacturers at the very top. That result answers a question the Indian solar industry has been circling for a while: can this country make modules good enough to compete anywhere in the world? The answer, clearly, is yes.
India has also answered a second question, about scale, just as decisively. Domestic module manufacturing capacity now stands at close to 194 GW under the government’s approved list, up from a fraction of that only a few years ago. That kind of growth, in that short a time, does not happen by accident. It reflects real capital, real policy support, and real industrial ambition.
The harder question is whether the excellence behind those three Kiwa scorecard results is spreading as fast as the capacity is. Manufacturing quality does not scale automatically alongside gigawatts. It has to be engineered in, factory by factory, line by line. The United States is living through the same friction: recently commissioned facilities there have shown lower yields than comparable Indian plants in their own early ramp-up phases. Every manufacturing nation goes through a version of this on the way to consistency.
What makes this particular technology transition harder is the shift happening inside the cell itself. Most Indian manufacturers have moved straight to n-type TOPCon architecture, skipping the long PERC phase that other countries went through first. That is, on balance, good news. It means Indian factories are building on the more advanced platform from day one. But TOPCon also demands tighter tolerances. Interconnections are more delicate, busbar counts are higher, and the margin for error in soldering and lamination is smaller than it was on older cell designs. Getting this right the first time, at scale, is a genuinely difficult manufacturing problem, and it rewards factories that have invested in the discipline to solve it early rather than later.
In practice, the difference between a good factory and a truly excellent one comes down to a handful of specific choices. The best facilities run electroluminescence testing on every module, not a sample, both before and after lamination, catching microcracks and soldering defects while there is still time to fix them. They have moved away from standard EVA encapsulant toward materials like POE and EPE, which resist moisture and corrosion far better over a 25-year lifespan, particularly important for TOPCon cells that are more sensitive to it. None of this is exotic. It is discipline, applied consistently, at every stage of the line.
Policy has moved to support this shift. In May 2026, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy mandated a ten-year product warranty and a twenty-five-year performance warranty on modules used in government schemes, settling any degradation dispute through electroluminescence and I-V testing at an NABL-accredited lab, not negotiation. Combined with the baseline efficiency standards already enforced through BIS certification, this gives manufacturers a clear floor to build above, not a vague expectation. That is exactly what a maturing industry needs.
The market is already rewarding manufacturers who take this seriously. International lenders financing large Indian solar and battery projects are increasingly requiring third-party performance warranty reinsurance from global institutions, and export credit agencies are backing loans specifically tied to the quality track record of the modules involved. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is capital recognising that a module’s real value is proven over 25 years in the field, not on a specification sheet at the point of sale, and choosing to back the manufacturers who can demonstrate that with evidence.
Capacity got India a seat at the table. But a seat at the table is not the same as leading from it. The Kiwa PVEL results this year prove that Indian manufacturing can already lead on quality, not just scale. The real ambition for this industry now is making that the standard across every factory, not the achievement of a handful of them. That is a harder goal than adding gigawatts. It is also the one that decides whether India’s solar story ends up being remembered for scale alone, or for an industry the rest of the world trusts on quality too.