Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with French president Emmanuel Macron who is on a four-day visit to India, inaugurated the 75 MW solar power plant in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, on Monday.

The largest solar power plant in Uttar Pradesh has been built in collaboration with French solar power giant Engie Solar under the International Solar Alliance (ISA) programme.

India’s stress on solar power as a source of clean and renewable energy, got a major boost in 2010 when the National Solar Mission was launched.

The Mission had set a target of deploying 20,000 MW of grid connected solar power by 2022. However, the Modi government revised the target of Grid Connected Solar Power Projects from 20,000 MW by 2021-22 to 100,000 MW by 2021-22 under the National Solar Mission and it was approved by cabinet on June 17, 2015.

India is making steady strides in achieving its initial target as according to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). As on February 28, 2018, a grid connected solar capacity of 19.58 GW has been installed and the government is very close to achieving 20GW in 2017-18 itself of the the target set initially.

According to the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) there has been increase in percentage of renewable energy in the total energy mix from 5.56% in 2014-15 to 7.83% in 2017-18 (upto January 2018).

In the presence of the French president, Modi on March 11 announced one of the world’s largest investment plans in solar energy. Speaking at the at the founding conference of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), the PM highlighted India’s target to achieve 175 GW of renewable energy, out of which 100 GW would be solar energy. He noted that 20 GW of solar energy had already been achieved.

Modi laid out about ten action points including developing low cost solar energy, increasing scope of solar in energy mix, promoting solar energy based innovations and concessional financing for solar projects and announced the  $1.4 billion line of credit will cover 27 projects in 15 countries and will ne give a major push in the production of solar energy.