The rooftop solar market in India is much larger than the targeted 40 GW, but we have not realised even one per cent of this potential,” remarks GaganVermani, founder and chief executive officer, MYSUN, a start-up dedicated to “solarising India”. He incorporated MYSUN about three years ago, with the aim to make an impact in the distributed solar segment. Vermani explains, “The country has made significant progress in the deployment of large-scale solar but rooftop solar lags behind even with hundreds of companies operating in the segment. The idea behind MYSUN was to develop a platform that simplifies rooftop solar installation for end-consumers – be it industries or individual homes.” Prior to this, Vermani was the managing director and CEO at Sunborne Energy, a solar-based IPP and EPC company. He founded the solar downstream business of Moser Baer in 2007. He has also worked in Delphi Corporation and Hero Honda and has over two decades of experience in areas including operations, supply chain, cost management, business development, capital markets, and mergers and acquisitions.
Vermani expects the impact of Covid-19 on the rooftop solar segment to last a couple of quarters. He says, “If we ignore the current period, rooftop solar has been constantly growing but lack of technology use and suitable business models for the Indian market are obstacles in realising the segment’s true potential.” He feels that the current business models do not cater to the medium and small enterprise segment, which constitutes 95 per cent of the Indian industry.
Talking about his favourite assignments, Vermani recalls how he and his team spent about eight to nine months researching about the market before formally launching MYSUN. “We were working to develop a business plan and trying to gauge the financial returns from solarisation in just one city. During the process, we got so excited that we ended up doing that exercise for each and every pin code in India for every customer category.”
Vermani follows a collaborative management style and believes that each employee is important in building the organisation. He values new ideas and technologies.
An alumnus of the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, Vermani is a fitness enthusiast. He maintains a regular schedule of exercise and is an active long-distance runner and cyclist. He loves playing lawn tennis and the guitar.