Installers belong in the product organisation

Ask most Indian rooftop solar companies where their installers sit in the organisation and the answer will be sales, or a regional operations team that reports to sales. The logic is understandable. Installers are usually small local contractors, they are recruited by state teams, and their output is counted in installations completed. They look like a channel.

I held that view until 2023, when our own data made it untenable. My argument now is that in residential and small-commercial rooftop solar, installation is the last stage of manufacturing, and the people who set its standards, certify its workers and decide how it is paid should be accountable for the product rather than for the month's sales.

The product is assembled on the roof

A Dhruvanta inverter leaves Haridwar tested. Panels arrive from module makers with their own certification. What the customer receives, however, is neither the inverter nor the panels. It is a system assembled on a particular roof by a particular crew: a structure anchored into concrete or bolted to a sheet roof, cables run across a parapet and down a wall, an earthing pit dug in whatever soil the house stands on, and an inverter commissioned against whatever voltage the local feeder delivers that afternoon. Every one of those steps can be done well or badly, and almost none of them can be inspected once the crew has left.

By mid-2023 we had 410 installer partners across eleven states. They had been recruited quickly, mostly on retailers' recommendations, and were paid when a system was commissioned. Systems installed in 2022–23 generated 38 service tickets per 100 in their first year. The monsoon brought 2,900 complaints of water leaking through roof anchors. Our analysis found that most faults traced to installation rather than equipment: anchors drilled without sealing, earthing that would not pass a simple resistance test, DC cable chosen for price rather than current, and inverters set up without regard to the high evening voltages at the ends of rural feeders.

None of this was a moral failure on the installers' part. They did what the arrangement rewarded: finish installations quickly, collect payment and move to the next roof. The sales organisation that managed them was measured on the same thing. Nobody in the chain owned the question of whether the roof would still be dry in three years.

Residential solar in India sharpens the problem. A household system is small, often under four kilowatts, so the installation fee is modest and the pressure to finish quickly is intense. Crews move between towns in the same week, roofs range from new concrete to forty-year-old slabs carrying improvised water tanks, and the monsoon tests every penetration within months. A contractor paid on commissioning has been paid in full before the first real test of his work has even begun.

Pay for the ninetieth day, not the first

In the second half of 2023 we moved installation standards, partner certification and partner management into the product organisation, alongside the people who design the inverter and the app. We kept 160 partners who could pass a new certification, built training academies in Lucknow and Coimbatore, and introduced a standard kit with pre-crimped cables and, where a flat roof allows it, ballasted mounts that do not penetrate the slab. Every installation is now photographed at eleven checkpoints in our app before commissioning.

The most important change was in pay. Partners now receive most of their fee at commissioning and a fixed share only after ninety days without a quality fault. Those ninety days are watched through inverter data: a system producing well below what its location and orientation should deliver is flagged to our service team, usually before the customer notices. The retained share is small enough not to strain a contractor's cash and large enough that a crew foreman thinks about the ninetieth day while drilling the first anchor.

The objection from our sales leadership was fair. Taking installers out of their control separated the people who sell a system from the people who build it, and for the first few months coordination suffered. Order backlogs stretched from three weeks to seven. We installed 19,500 systems in 2023–24 instead of the 26,000 we had planned, and about ₹95 crore of orders slipped or were cancelled. I would make the same choice again, but I do not pretend it was free.

What moved when we moved the team

The first-year ticket rate fell to 11 per 100 systems for installations made in 2025–26. Leakage complaints in the 2025 monsoon numbered 310, on an installed base roughly three times larger than in 2023. Certified partners earn more per installation than they did, because rework has nearly disappeared and their crews spend fewer days returning to old roofs.

Less obviously, the product itself changed. Once the people who design our systems were also responsible for how they were installed, they began designing for the roof. Our latest mounting structure was redesigned after academy instructors showed that the old one needed a specialist tool most crews did not carry. Our inverter's commissioning screen now asks the installer to confirm the measured grid voltage, because the service team had shown how many evening trips began with a wrong setting on installation day. Neither change would have come from a sales organisation, and neither would have come from engineers who had never watched a crew at work.

After-sales service followed the same logic. Our 520 service points and 2,600 technicians used to be measured on tickets closed. They are now measured on repeat visits avoided, which forces the question of why a fault happened as well as whether it was fixed.

For directors, I would suggest one test. Ask who in the company is accountable for the rate of first-year service tickets on newly installed systems, and whether that person also sets installation standards and partner pay. If the answer is a sales leader, the company is measuring its installers on the first day. If the answer is nobody, it is not measuring them at all. In a product expected to last twenty-five years on a customer's roof, the people who put it there are part of what the customer bought.