India's electricity grid just received its biggest single policy push in years. Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced on Wednesday, 30 September 2026 that the Union Cabinet has approved the PM-DHARA scheme with an outlay of ₹1,86,405 crore, a transmission infrastructure programme designed to evacuate 135 gigawatts of renewable energy across states and Union Territories.

What PM-DHARA is built to fix

India's renewable energy build-out has outpaced its grid's ability to carry that power to consumers. Solar and wind farms routinely face curtailment — forced shutdowns because transmission lines are full — and peak-hour congestion wastes clean electricity that is already being generated. PM-DHARA targets both problems directly, creating dedicated evacuation corridors so that power produced in sun-rich Rajasthan or wind-swept Tamil Nadu can flow without bottleneck to demand centres in other states.

Shah described the scheme as 'a giant stride towards Modi Ji's vision of a greener future,' noting it will 'strengthen our grids, create more opportunities, and address issues such as congestion and peak-hour curtailment.' The framing places the scheme squarely within Prime Minister Narendra Modi's long-stated target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 — a commitment India made at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.

A decade of grid-building, now scaled up

This is not India's first attempt at solving the transmission puzzle. The Green Energy Corridor initiative, launched in 2015, built the first generation of dedicated renewable transmission lines — but the scale of ambition has since grown dramatically. India now targets roughly three times the renewable capacity it envisioned a decade ago, and the grid infrastructure has struggled to keep pace. PM-DHARA, at nearly ₹1.86 lakh crore, represents a step-change in the size of the public investment being committed to close that gap.

Renewable energy developers and state power utilities — the two groups most directly squeezed by curtailment losses — stand to benefit immediately if the scheme delivers on its evacuation targets. For developers, curtailment is lost revenue on assets already built. For state utilities, congestion means expensive peak-hour procurement from conventional sources even when cheaper green power sits stranded upstream.

135 GW target and what comes next

The headline number — 135 GW of evacuation capacity — is significant because it implies a transmission network built not just for today's installed base but for the renewable pipeline still under construction. Whether that capacity materialises on schedule will depend on state-level implementation timelines, land acquisition for transmission corridors, and the pace of fund disbursement under the scheme. Measurable reductions in curtailment rates over the next two to three years will be the clearest early indicator of whether PM-DHARA is delivering.

India's net-zero commitment for 2070 rests on a foundation of reliable, congestion-free renewable transmission. A grid that cannot carry clean power is a ceiling on every climate target the country has set. PM-DHARA is the government's bet that removing that ceiling is worth nearly two lakh crore rupees of public money.