Pavagada Shakti Sthala
A 13,000-acre park built on leased farmland with a pioneering farmer-lease model — a template for land aggregation without acquisition.
Footage · Spread Film · YouTube
approx. 2.05 GW
Total capacity
Aggregated across multiple co-located developers
approx. 13,000 acres
Land aggregated
Leased, not acquired, from local farmers
28 years
Lease tenure
Annual rent with periodic escalation
approx. 5
Villages covered
Pavagada taluk, Tumakuru district
20+
Developers hosted
Independent IPPs sharing common park infrastructure
approx. Rs 16,500 cr
Investment
Cumulative across all blocks and evacuation infra
2015
Karnataka government forms KSPDCL as SPV to aggregate degraded farmland in Pavagada taluk for a solar park.
2016
Farmer-lease model launched: 28-year land leases signed with annual rent and escalation, avoiding outright acquisition.
2016-2017
First blocks commissioned; multiple private developers allotted plots within shared park infrastructure.
2018-2019
Phased capacity addition continues across five villages; common evacuation and transmission infrastructure scaled up.
2019
Park reaches approx. 2,050 MW, becoming one of the world's largest single-location solar parks.
2019-present
Cited globally as a model for community-consent land pooling in utility-scale renewable deployment.
Pavagada demonstrates that gigawatt-scale solar can be built on aggregated private land without acquisition, using long-tenure farmer leases instead of forced sale. For Indian developers and lenders, it is the reference case for de-risking land title, enabling multi-developer co-location within one park, and structuring transmission and financing around a single-window state-SPV model rather than parcel-by-parcel negotiation.
For state solar park tenders under the MNRE/SECI framework, Pavagada's lease-not-acquire template is directly transferable to Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra parks facing land title disputes. It informs PPP structuring where a state SPV bears land-aggregation and evacuation risk while private IPPs bid on generation tariff alone, and it offers lenders a precedent for underwriting projects on leased rather than owned land under Indian security and mortgage law.
Engineering, procurement and finance lessons
01
Lease, don't acquire
Long-tenure land leases with indexed annual rent gave farmers continuing income and ownership while giving developers bankable site control — a replicable structure for arid, low-yield agricultural belts facing acquisition litigation risk.
02
Shared park infrastructure lowers per-project cost
A single-window SPV built common roads, drainage, security and evacuation infrastructure, letting individual IPPs focus capital on generation assets rather than duplicating substations and transmission corridors.
03
Multi-developer co-location needs clear interconnection rules
Hosting 20+ developers in one park requires pre-agreed metering, scheduling and grid-code compliance protocols at the pooling substation to avoid disputes over curtailment and evacuation priority.
04
Community consent is a financing variable
Transparent rent structures and local employment commitments reduced social risk premiums in lender due diligence, showing that community terms materially affect cost of capital for large land-intensive RE parks.
05
Site selection on degraded land protects food security optics
Choosing low-rainfall, low-crop-yield land pre-empted land-use conflict narratives that have stalled solar parks elsewhere in India.
Sources · Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) · Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) · Mercom India · The Economic Times · Karnataka Solar Power Development Corporation Limited (KSPDCL)
- Structuring farmer-lease and land-pooling agreements bankable under Indian lender and RBI security norms.
- Designing shared-infrastructure PPP models for state solar park SPVs to cut per-developer evacuation cost.
- Advising on multi-developer interconnection, metering and grid-code compliance within pooled solar parks.