India, Jan. 31 -- The annual Union Budget presents a critical opportunity to realign India's energy transition by redirecting existing energy subsidies toward a coherent clean energy roadmap. Previous budgets have enabled large-scale renewable energy (RE) deployment through incentives for domestic manufacturing and financial support across clean energy value chains. However, clean energy adoption in rural India has remained uneven, with deployment concentrated in high-resource regions and urban rooftop solar markets, while rural energy systems continue to lag in technology diffusion.

The 2026 Budget offers scope to explicitly prioritise a rural clean energy transition. As India's electricity systems evolve, they are increasingly capable ...