A green giant’s pollution woes: How Waaree Energies dumped toxic effluents in a Gujarat village

Retired army man Satish Patel, 50, laments that water from the rivulet running behind his home is no longer fit for consumption, even for cattle. When he was a child, his family directly used water from the barely 10-foot-wide stream that has no official name but is locally called Chanandevi.

Today, the water has changed colour. “During the monsoon, when fish reach here from upstream, they die,” he says.

Patel blames pollution from the massive solar cell and module manufacturing plant across the stream from his house. Operated by Waaree Energies Ltd, the poster child of India’s clean energy push, the factory has been releasing untreated industrial water right into Chanandevi, Patel alleges.

The stream cuts through Sunthwad village in Chikhli taluka of Navsari, in the agricultural belt of South Gujarat. Just outside the village, it merges into the Vanganiya river, a tributary of the Ambika river.

When Mint visited Patel’s home on a warm Sunday morning earlier this month, a foul smell permeated the air in the mango orchard behind his house. Deeper in the orchard, away from the house and towards the stream, the odour grew stronger. Two concrete pipes, each about two feet wide, were releasing a steady trickle of water into the Chanandevi. A white substance coats the algae where this runoff meets the rivulet.

“It’s a trickle right now, but at night, they dump a lot of water,” Patel says.

Mint could not verify if the discharge increases under the cover of darkness. However, an investigation by this publication found that the Chikhli factory of Waaree Energies was repeatedly pulled up by a government watchdog for violating pollution norms, including for releasing highly acidic wastewater straight into the stream.

The Chikhli factory is Waaree Energies’ only operational integrated solar cell and module factory, as well as one of India’s largest integrated solar module manufacturing units, with 5.4 gigawatts of annual capacity. It started assembling solar panels from imported cells in 2022.

Three years later, the factory started the much more complex job of producing the cells, a process that requires a number of toxic chemicals and generates effluents. Waaree Energies has a second solar cell plant with 10-gigawatt capacity coming up in neighbouring Unn, just about 20 kilometers away.

The Chikhli factory effluent issue has repercussions far beyond the village of Sunthwad or the boardroom of Waaree Energies. It raises questions on how ready the country is to responsibly manage the ongoing policy-driven surge in solar cell manufacturing and, eventually, chip making. Could energy sustainability come at the cost of water pollution?

Six warnings

Between April 2025 and August 2026, the Waaree factory received six notices from the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), a regulator, for repeated environmental infractions, according to documents accessed by Mint under the Right to Information Act, 2005. The violations ranged from mishandling of chemicals and ponding of acidic wastewater within the factory premises to outright release of effluents into the rivulet.

In its first notice of directions sent to the company on 21 April 2025, the GPCB noted that the company was releasing wastewater from the storm water drainage—the two concrete pipes mentioned above—into the stream behind the factory. A notice of direction is a binding order. It landed less than a month after the factory’s solar cell manufacturing unit was inaugurated by the state’s chief minister Bhupendra Patel and the union minister of new and renewable energy Pralhad Joshi.

The second notice followed three months later, in July 2025. This time, the factory’s effluent treatment plant, mechanical vapour recompression evaporator, and agitated thin film dryer were non-operational, the regulator found during an inspection. These systems are meant to treat the effluents from the solar cell manufacturing process so that there is zero liquid discharge.

The factory was also sourcing water tankers, which it was not permitted to do—it is only permitted to use water from borewells and a canal.

When the regulators inspected the factory a month later, it hadn’t yet complied with the directions of the July 2025 notice, leading to a third notice of directions in August 2025.

The notices directed the factory to comply with all the necessary regulations, failing which the regulator warned that it will order a shutdown. And that is what happened five months later, when during an inspection in January 2026, Waaree Energies was again found to be releasing wastewater into the Chanandevi. The wastewater had a pH reading of 2-4, according to GPCB’s closure direction to Waaree. That is a strongly acidic level, comparable to the stomach acid of humans.

Moreover, the GPCB inspectors found that a pond of similar acidic wastewater, as expansive as six tennis courts, had accumulated within the factory premises. The mechanical vapour recompression evaporator and the agitated thin film dryer were still non-operational.

A fourth notice to the company on 28 January ordered it to shut the Chikhli factory within 15 days. The regulator directed the local power distribution company to cut its power supply, documents show.

Corrective action

Waaree Energies took prompt corrective action. During a follow-up inspection on 4 February, GPCB noted that the storm water drainage pipes dumping water into the stream were closed, the effluent treatment systems became operational, the pond of acidic water was drained and all the other directions of the regulator were complied with.

On 11 February, the company was granted permission to run its unit for three months on a trial basis. The factory was again inspected in May after the company applied for permanent revocation of the closure notice. This time, too, the GPCB inspectors found no effluent discharge; all the water treatment systems were operational.

Mint could not verify the current status of the environmental regulator’s permission to the unit. However, its run-ins with the state pollution watchdog did not end here.

The tanker question

Waaree received two more show-cause notices in August 2026. The company was again found using water from tankers, in violation of its environmental permits.

During an inspection in July this year, the regulator found a register at the factory gate that noted that upwards of 100 tankers had entered the premises on four separate occasions. The register disappeared during a following visit in August, but GPCB inspectors photographed a dozen tankers pumping water into the factory’s raw water tank.

Why are water tankers a problem? The environmental permits for the factory stipulate that it be run as a ‘zero-liquid-discharge’ unit. This means that it must process all its wastewater, extract pollutants from it, and reuse the water within the factory. The solid impurities extracted from the water are required to be sustainably disposed of. This reduces the need for fresh water, raising questions over why the company relies on so many tankers.

Waaree Energies did not respond to a detailed questionnaire emailed by Mint on 23 October.

Many more

Waaree Energies is not the first company to come into the crosshairs of India’s pollution watchdogs. In 2018, Vedanta Group-owned Sterlite Copper plant at Thoothukodi in Tamil Nadu was pulled up by the state’s pollution control board for similar mishandling of hazardous waste. Protests from locals, who complained of air, groundwater, and soil contamination soon turned violent, leading to 13 demonstrators losing their lives in police firing. The plant remains shuttered to this day.

More recently, the pollution watchdog in neighbouring Rajasthan ordered the shutdown of beer maker Carlsberg’s brewery at Alwar this month after it found particulate emissions eight times over the prescribed limit during an inspection in July, according to media reports.

In Gujarat, GPCB has issued 512 notices of direction and 403 closure notices in 2025-26, according to its annual report.

Despite the interventions, the enforcement of environmental laws in India lags that in many other countries, experts say. Factors such as jobs, the economic impact, and political influence weigh in on the decisions made by local regulators.

A weak link

India rapidly scaled its renewable energy infrastructure over the past decade. A series of policy measures like subsidies and import restrictions promoted the installation of solar power plants and the local assembly of solar modules.

Today, out of the 555 gigawatts of power generation capacity in India, 168 gigawatts, or nearly a third, is solar. It is second only to coal, which accounts for over two-fifths of India’s power generation capacity. Domestic module assembly capacity jumped from just 2.3 gigawatts in 2014 to 172 gigawatts by March 2026, according to government data.

An entire ecosystem therefore flourished in just over a decade—renewable energy producers, equipment manufacturers, lenders, investors, and the energy users.

Nonetheless, India’s policy push didn’t end at developing a module assembly industry in the country. Policymakers have charted a path for companies to scale local cell manufacturing, and, eventually, get further upstream into making silicon wafers and ingots, and ultimately, into making polysilicon. Cell manufacturing capacity has reached almost 30 gigawatts a year in India and is rapidly scaling.

Despite the policy push, the knowhow struggled to keep pace. The complexity and industrial skill required in manufacturing cells was an order of magnitude higher than in assembling the cells into modules, say experts.

India doesn’t make the equipment that manufactures these cells, relying mostly on imports from China, New Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a think tank, noted in a report published in May 2026. Domestic companies also rely on technicians from China to operationalize the equipment. In fact, the report cited the example of Waaree’s Chikhli plant, which it said requires around 30 Chinese technicians to optimize the manufacturing process.

People familiar with Waaree’s operations blame the effluent situation on this weak link. Visa delays for Chinese citizens last year played spoilsport. They could only offer advice on video calls, leaving the equipment running at suboptimal capacity. Couple that with a rush to operationalize the cell manufacturing lines costing thousands of crores of rupees sitting on its balance sheet, and the company found itself with more untreated effluents than it could manage.

Solar cell manufacturing uses chemicals like hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride, nitric acid, potassium hydroxide, and gases such as Diborane and Silane, according to CEEW. If water containing these chemicals is released untreated into a natural water body, it can cause an immediate rise in the water’s acidity, kill fish en masse, and collapse the hydrological ecosystem.

Experts warn that waste management requirements will compound rapidly as India sets its sights on semiconductor chip manufacturing, which generates similar effluents but in much higher concentration.

Blinded investors

Waaree Energies emerged as one of the biggest winners of the renewable energy boom. The company rapidly scaled its module manufacturing capacity from just about 2 gigawatts in 2021 to over 25 gigawatts today. The company is also diversifying into solar cell manufacturing, battery storage systems, power transmission infrastructure, transformers, inverters and smart meters. Eventually, it plans to get into ingots, wafers and polysilicon—the precursors to solar cells.

This makes Waaree one of the most diversified renewable energy players in the country, a story that investors wanted a piece of. The company listed on the bourses in November 2024 at a 66% premium to its issue price, overnight making the promoter family billionaires. The company’s valuations soared in subsequent months to reach a peak of ₹1.04 trillion by September 2025.

Today, the company’s valuation has sobered to just under ₹64,000 crore amid an emerging markets selloff, but the shares continue to trade at nearly a 50% premium to the issue price ( ₹1,503).

Founder Hitesh Doshi and his three brothers are worth $5.2 billion, according to Forbes.

While public markets fuelled this meteoric rise, regulatory scrutiny could complicate it. Waaree could now attract the market regulator’s ire for withholding key operational setbacks from those very investors.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) requires listed companies to publicly disclose within 24 hours material events like a closure notice issued by an environment regulator.

When Waaree Energies received the closure notice by GPCB in January, it was bound by regulation to inform its shareholders within this timeframe. However, the company did not.

“Under Sebi’s disclosure framework, the trigger is receipt of a closure direction, not whether it is final,” says Sumit Agrawal, managing partner of Regstreet Law Advisors and a former Sebi officer. “A company is entitled to say it will contest the order or is already remediating, and it should, but that intention is not a reason to stay silent. Relief that comes later, such as permission to run on a trial basis, is itself an update the market should receive. It does not, however, cure a delay in the original disclosure, because investors were entitled to price that risk in the interim,” he adds.

Cell production at the Chikhli factory had hit a rate of 350-megawatts a month by December 2025, the company’s management said during an investor call on 22 January 2026. However, the factory’s production slowed to about 230 megawatts of cells a month during the January-March period, coinciding with GPCB’s closure notice.

When analysts questioned the decline in production during an investor call on 30 April 2026, Abhishek Pareek, the company’s chief financial officer, blamed it on a technology upgrade while withholding any information about the factory’s run-ins with the GPCB.

To be sure, the factory was not shut despite the GPCB notice, so it cannot be concluded if it had affected production. But sources familiar with the development say that the episode did throttle manufacturing during the quarter.

Troubled locals

Meanwhile, back in Sunthwad, locals are getting restless. A complaint by two residents about worsening quality of water from borewells prompted another GPCB inspection of Waaree’s plant in August 2026. Lab reports of samples collected by the regulator did not find evidence of effluents from Waaree’s factory finding their way into the groundwater.

GPCB’s inspection report had no mention of any discharge from the storm water drainage outlet. Mint could not verify if the inspectors checked the north side of the factory during this visit, where the concrete pipes are located. However, when Mint visited the site on 18 October, the pipes were discharging a slow trickle of hazy water. A “closed” sign installed earlier in February had been cast aside.

The water being released, the smell, or the white deposit on the algae aren’t conclusive evidence that Waaree was still releasing harmful effluents into the stream, says Nivit Yadav, programme director at Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a think tank. The smell and the white deposit could also be due to bio-accumulation of effluents dumped in the past. The run-off from the pipes seen today could be domestic waste and not toxic effluents, he explains. While that would also be a violation of environmental rules, it’s not as grave as dumping untreated chemical waste.

“But since the locals are complaining, a proper water test should be conducted and the results should be put out in the public domain,” Yadav says.

On their part, the residents have written multiple letters to Waaree to stop the discharge into their local stream, according to Rupesh Patel, a member of the gram panchayat and a truck driver by profession. There are no copies of these letters—Mint, therefore, hasn’t been able to review them.

The residents say they are also urging government authorities to intervene.

“If nothing works, we will go and sit in protest before the factory gate,” Rupesh Patel says.

• pH 2–4 | The acidity level of the wastewater dumped into the Chanandevi rivulet by Waaree Energies’ Chikhli plant in south Gujarat.
• Six | The number of regulatory notices slapped on the Chikhli plant between April 2025 and August 2026 for repeated infractions.
• 34% | The drop in monthly cell output at the Chikhli factory in Q4 Y26 that coincided directly with the environmental shutdown notice.