The Maharashtra cabinet, chaired by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, cleared eight decisions at its meeting on August 11, the two biggest aimed at renewable energy developers and landowners awaiting acquisition compensation. Internal land transfers between group companies or special-purpose vehicles set up for solar, wind and storage projects will now be fully exempt from stamp duty, and land purchases for such projects get a 25% cut in transfer fees, according to ThePrint and Deshdoot.
Why the stamp duty waiver matters
Renewable energy developers typically route land purchases through subsidiary special-purpose vehicles, one per project, for financing and liability reasons. Every time land moved between the parent company and these SPVs, or between SPVs within the same group, it attracted stamp duty as if it were a fresh sale, even though ownership stayed within the same corporate family. The cabinet’s decision removes that repeat cost: the parent company still pays stamp duty on its original purchase, but subsequent internal transfers are exempt. Both concessions will be written into the state’s Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Policy 2025-36.
Maharashtra has been courting large-scale solar, wind and battery-storage investment as it works toward its clean-energy capacity targets, and land assembly costs are a recurring complaint from developers, since utility-scale projects need hundreds of acres pieced together from multiple parcels. Cutting the transaction cost of restructuring land within a project’s corporate structure is a direct response to that friction, though it does not address the more difficult and slower process of assembling the land in the first place.
A separate fix for delayed compensation
The cabinet also amended Section 72 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act, 2013, changing how interest is calculated when the government delays paying compensation for acquired land. The new rate is pegged at one percentage point above whatever the Reserve Bank of India charges commercial banks for loans, rather than a fixed rate that can fall out of step with actual borrowing costs over time. For farmers and other landowners whose land the state acquires for roads, irrigation or industrial corridors, this is meant to stop the value of overdue compensation from eroding while the government sits on the payment.
What else was approved
The same meeting cleared a Rs 18.09 crore loan for the Killari sugar factory, brought private skill universities under a single law instead of separate legislation for each institution, allowed social work as an independent faculty at senior colleges, and approved a new district and sessions court at Hadgaon in Nanded district. The cabinet separately swapped Mumbai’s September 5 Gopalkala holiday for a Raksha Bandhan holiday for state government employees.
What to watch
The renewable energy concessions still need to be formally notified as part of the 2025-36 policy before developers can act on them. Residents of areas where land is being acquired for public projects should watch for how quickly authorities apply the revised interest formula to their own pending compensation cases.
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.