Odisha Announced an Agri-PV Policy on 22 October 2026 That Aims for 1 GW of Solar Above Working Fields by 2030, With 90 Per Cent of Every Site Kept Under Crops

On 22 October 2026 Odisha announced its Agri-PV Policy 2026, a framework for growing crops and generating solar power on the same field, with a target of 1 gigawatt (GW) of agrivoltaic capacity by 2030. The state’s Deputy Chief Minister, who holds the energy and agriculture portfolios, set it out at the 7th Agrivoltaics World Conference at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Odisha describes it as the first dedicated agrivoltaics policy of any Indian state.

The reports of the announcement, all dated 22 and 23 October, call the policy one the state is finalising, and none cites a notification. This article therefore says “announced”, not “in force”. The terms below are the ones the Deputy Chief Minister laid out.

The rule that keeps the field a field

The central condition is that at least 90 per cent of every project site must stay under active cultivation. The land keeps its agricultural classification and, according to the reports, its eligibility for crop insurance. The state’s name for the idea is “One Field, Two Harvests”, and the Deputy Chief Minister put the order of priority as the farmer first and the solar panel second, according to Sambad English.

Ordinary solar farms take land out of farming. Scientists of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) at Jodhpur note in a March 2025 paper that a megawatt of conventional solar needs around 2 hectares, which sets solar and farming against each other for scarce arable land in dry regions.

Two ways in for a farmer, and what investors are offered

Farmers can own an agrivoltaic system and earn from both crops and electricity, or lease land to a solar developer for long-term rent. The state offers 25-year power purchase agreements through GRIDCO (the Grid Corporation of Odisha), along with guaranteed offtake, grid connectivity and open-access rights. Agri-PV incentives are to be paired with support for drip irrigation, cold storage, solar pumps and agro-processing, and Sambad English adds that farmer onboarding is to be simplified.

The same report gives the land base the state has in view: 40.7 lakh acres of suitable cropland and 47.7 lakh acres of fallow land. The policy builds on the Odisha Renewable Energy Policy 2022 and on a February 2026 investor conclave that, the reports say, drew Rs 67,000 crore of clean energy commitments across 6.8 GW.

Work has already started on the ground. A 1 MW Agri-PV project is under way, and a pilot with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is testing advanced agrivoltaic designs. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, so the 2030 target is a thousand times the capacity of that first project.

From a June workshop to an October announcement

The announcement had a lead-up. In early June 2026 the Deputy Chief Minister spoke at a state workshop on scaling agrivoltaics, where the State Energy Action Plan was also unveiled, and a report of 8 June quoted the state as aiming to introduce an agrivoltaics policy by 2027. By 22 October the same policy carried a 2026 name and a 1 GW figure.

What Indian field trials have shown

Indian evidence comes mainly from the ICAR-Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI) at Jodhpur. Its 105 kilowatt-peak system on one acre began going up in March 2017 under an ICAR grant, with a 25 kilowatt-peak sister site at Bhuj, according to pv magazine India. By 2019 the design had been copied at agricultural universities in Gujarat, at Amity University in Noida and at other institutions.

The CAZRI scientists’ March 2025 paper in Indian Farming reports that panel rows leave 25 to 30 per cent of a plant’s area under the panels and 65 to 70 per cent as open space between rows for crops. They cite land productivity up to 60 per cent higher than farming or solar alone, with land equivalent ratios of 1.42 (counting only the open space) and 1.62 (counting the shaded strip too). A ratio of 1.62 means separate crop and solar plots would need 1.62 times the land to match the output. The paper also reports ground temperatures 2 to 4 degrees Celsius lower under panels and irrigation savings of up to 20 per cent. For western Rajasthan it lists rainfed mung bean, moth bean and cluster bean, and irrigated chickpea, bottle gourd, spinach, carrot and onion, as suitable crops.

A controlled trial in Arizona gives figures for three crops. A University of Arizona team grew three crops at the Biosphere 2 research site under panels and in open sun, with equal irrigation, and published the results in Nature Sustainability in 2019. Chiltepin pepper produced three times as much fruit under the panels and cherry tomato twice as much. Jalapeno fruit output was nearly equal, reached with 65 per cent less water lost through the leaves. Panels over crops ran about 8.9 degrees Celsius cooler in daylight than panels in a conventional array, which the authors modelled as roughly a 1 per cent gain in annual power output.

The national programme the Centre says is coming

At the 9 September 2026 curtain-raiser for the conference, the Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy said the next phase of the PM-KUSUM farm solar scheme will carry a dedicated agrivoltaics component, aimed at small and marginal farmers, farmer producer organisations, cooperatives and panchayats, with land ownership staying with the farmer. On 21 October he said the government would soon launch what he called the world’s most ambitious agrivoltaics programme under that next phase, and he cited a study by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) putting 47.5 million hectares of Indian farmland as technically suitable. He also said the technology had been found to raise crop yields by 10 to 20 per cent, without naming a study.

The PIB release gives India’s farmland as 116 million hectares and also calls 47.5 million hectares about 30 per cent of it; those two figures do not match, and PTI’s account of the same speech uses 160 million hectares, which fits 30 per cent.

PTI reported that the MNRE Secretary said a draft agrivoltaics policy is being prepared and will be published for comment by states and other stakeholders. “We are targeting a capacity of 5 GW over the next few years to begin with,” he said. PTI also reported that such plants cost 25 to 30 per cent more than ordinary ground-mounted solar because of the raised structures, and that a 10 GW agri-PV component is expected in the proposed PM-KUSUM 2.0.

The Union Agriculture Minister told the conference the policy must work for the 85 per cent of farmers who are small or marginal, whose average holding is 0.96 hectares. He asked for panel heights and spacing that allow ploughing, safe drainage of rain from the panels, timely payment for power, and safeguards so farmers carry no burden if a company abandons a project.

Farm-based solar sits inside a larger build-out, covered in India’s solar capacity in numbers and, for household roofs, in the PM Surya Ghar article.

What is still open

The “first in India” label is the state’s own. Uttar Pradesh had a demonstration project approved by the Department of Economic Affairs in March 2025, which the state said could lead to a full policy if the pilot worked, but that was a pilot and not a policy. Argus News, in a special report, also points to earlier pilots in Gujarat and Maharashtra. No policy text was available in the reports opened for this article.

The Argus report lists the practical questions: raised mounting costs well above ordinary solar, scattered small plots that are hard to combine, weak rural power lines, and crops that lose yield in shade. It also notes that standard crop insurance is not designed for dual-use land, which sits beside the policy’s promise that insurance eligibility is kept. The CAZRI authors list high upfront cost, dust that can cut panel output by up to 25 per cent in arid regions, and the need for shade-tolerant crops among their own challenges.

As of 29 October 2026, Odisha’s existing agrivoltaic capacity is the 1 MW project and the Singapore pilot, against a 2030 target of 1,000 MW.