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Karthik VaradachariChief Product Officer · Essays & perspective
Portrait of Karthik Varadachari
Karthik Varadachari
Chief Product Officer · India

A selected perspective

Subsidy and discom journeys6 min read

A solar product reaches beyond the installation

Indian rooftop solar companies count a sale when the panels are commissioned. For a household on the central subsidy, the product is not complete until the distribution company has inspected it, fitted a net meter and the subsidy has arrived, and companies should design and measure for that day.

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The portfolio

From idea to consequence.

I

Retiring 66 inverter models to make the hybrid the default

When I joined Dhruvanta in April 2021 we sold 112 inverter and UPS models.

View the case study ↗
II

Quoting the full rooftop price before the subsidy

When the central government launched its residential rooftop programme in February 2024, demand changed within weeks.

View the case study ↗
III

Cutting installer partners from 410 to 160 to fix the roof

Our rooftop business grew faster than our ability to install it well.

View the case study ↗

A household judges our product on the evening the grid fails and the month the bill arrives, never on the day we install it.

The journal

Further reading.

  1. 02

    Customer discovery5 min read

    Small-town households buy the evening, not the kilowatt

    Indian rooftop solar is usually sold on annual savings per kilowatt. In the tier-2 and tier-3 towns where we sell most of our systems, households decide on something narrower: whether the lights, the fans and the children's study lamp will stay on between six and eleven at night.

  2. 03

    Installation and service5 min read

    Installers belong in the product organisation

    Rooftop solar companies treat installers as a channel and after-sales service as a cost. Both decide whether a system performs for twenty-five years, so installation standards, technician certification and partner pay should sit with the people accountable for the product.

Solar revenue, year to March 2026
₹1,020 Cr
Up from ₹110 Cr in FY2020-21; 32 per cent of company revenue
Residential rooftop systems installed since 2021
1.12 lakh
Plus 1,400 small-factory systems in FY2025-26
First-year service tickets per 100 rooftop systems
11
For 2025-26 installations, down from 38 for 2022-23

In small-town India a solar product is finished only when the net meter is in, the subsidy has arrived and the roof stays dry through the monsoon, so I design all three as the product.

I am the chief product officer of Dhruvanta Power Systems Limited, a fictional Gurugram-based company listed on the NSE and BSE that has sold home inverters and batteries since 1993. In the year to March 2026 we earned ₹3,180 crore of revenue. Backup products still provide ₹1,890 crore of it, but solar has grown from ₹110 crore in 2020–21 to ₹1,020 crore, and most of that growth comes from rooftop systems we design, sell through local retailers and install on houses and small factories in towns such as Gorakhpur, Bareilly, Sagar, Muzaffarpur and Erode.

My job is to decide what we build and how a customer experiences it, from the first conversation at a retailer's counter to the fifth monsoon on the roof. I came to it from the field: repairing UPS units across Tamil Nadu and Kerala from 1998, nine years of pumps for farmers and households in Coimbatore, prepaid and installation journeys for a satellite television operator, and loan products for buyers at shop counters. Each taught me something a household needs before a rooftop system pays for itself: a sound installation, a bill it can read, a loan it can repay and a service visit that arrives.

The decision that best describes how I work came in 2023. Our rooftop business was growing fast, but systems installed the year before were generating 38 service tickets for every 100 in their first year, many for roofs that leaked in the monsoon. I cut our installer partners from 410 to 160, slowed the order book for two quarters and moved installation standards into the product organisation. Sales disagreed, rightly noting what it cost in growth. First-year tickets have since fallen to 11 per 100 systems, and I now treat the installer's ladder as part of the product.

Inverter owners who became solar customers

We cut our inverter range from 112 models to 46 in 2022 and made a solar-ready hybrid the default, giving up about ₹140 crore of annual entry-level sales. Hybrids are now 41 per cent of inverter units, and 34 per cent of rooftop leads come from existing Dhruvanta owners.

Subsidy files that reach the household

We quote the full price and track nine steps from portal registration to subsidy credit in our app. By March 2026, 51,800 households had received the central subsidy, and the median wait from installation to credit had fallen from 97 days to 38.

Fewer installers, drier roofs

Cutting installer partners from 410 to 160 delayed or lost about ₹95 crore of orders in 2023–24. First-year service tickets fell from 38 to 11 per 100 systems, and monsoon leakage complaints from 2,900 in 2023 to 310 in 2025.

Small factories financed on their own savings

Our small-factory product holds each loan instalment within 80 per cent of the expected monthly bill saving. We installed 1,400 factory systems worth ₹154 crore in 2025–26, with 2.1 per cent of the loans more than thirty days overdue.

Current focus

I am preparing the board's decision on a home battery range built on lithium iron phosphate cells, a ₹210 crore question about how quickly we move households away from tubular lead-acid batteries and what that means for the Bawal plant that makes them. Alongside it, I am redesigning our app for the smart prepaid meters that distribution companies are installing, which will show many of our customers their consumption hour by hour for the first time.

Conversations I welcome

I am staying at Dhruvanta and am not seeking an executive move. Board work is the one addition I am planning: a single independent directorship at a listed or soon-to-list consumer-facing company outside power products, sitting on its Risk Management Committee and its Stakeholders Relationship Committee. I can give about twenty-five days a year, subject to my board's consent and a conflicts review, and I accept a few speaking invitations from product and retail-finance audiences.

Beyond the page

The record behind the perspective.

In the boardroom

  • Dhruvanta Solar Services Private LimitedDirector of the wholly owned installation and service subsidiary, in an executive capacity · 2023–present

Formation

  • Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical and Electronics EngineeringKovaimalai College of Engineering · 1998
  • Postgraduate Diploma in Management, part-time weekend programmeVelvizhi Institute of Management · 2006
Karthik is the only executive who has ever asked me, in writing, to slow the business down. When our roofs were leaking he brought the board a plan, a cost and a monthly report, and he kept sending the report long after the problem had eased.
Ambar SethiaFictional managing director and CEO, Dhruvanta Power Systems Limited
The full record ↗

Contact

I am staying at Dhruvanta and am not seeking an executive move. Board work is the one addition I am planning: a single independent directorship at a listed or soon-to-list consumer-facing company outside power products, sitting on its Risk Management Committee and its Stakeholders Relationship Committee. I can give about twenty-five days a year, subject to my board's consent and a conflicts review, and I accept a few speaking invitations from product and retail-finance audiences.

  • Board appointments
  • Speaking invitations
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