India Was Elected President of the International Solar Alliance for a Third Straight Term, Announced on 3 November 2026, With France Returned as Co-President at the Ninth Assembly in Delhi

Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy Pralhad Joshi announced on 3 November 2026 that India had been elected President of the International Solar Alliance for the third consecutive term, and that France had been re-elected Co-President. He spoke at a press conference during the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit and Expo in Delhi, where the ninth session of the alliance’s Assembly was meeting from 2 to 5 November. The alliance has 130 signatory and member countries, according to the minister and to the count on its own website.

Joshi thanked the member countries for “reposing their trust” in India, in the words of the Press Information Bureau’s release, and said the focus of the new term would be mobilising investment and accelerating deployment. The Deccan Herald quoted him: “progress becomes truly meaningful when its benefits are shared.”

What the sources say about the vote

The PIB release gives the result and no tally. It also gives no length for the new term. The only detail on the vote comes from France: ANI, quoting a press release from the French Embassy in India, reported on 4 November that France was re-elected Co-President “for a two-year term from 2027 to 2029”, beating Burkina Faso in a contested election. The sources opened for this article do not say whether India faced another candidate, and the alliance’s own page for the session, checked on 6 November 2026, lists the agenda but no outcome document.

The earlier elections follow the same pattern. At the seventh session in November 2024, India was the only candidate for President and France beat Grenada for Co-President, for 2024 to 2026 (ANI, ThePrint, pv magazine). At the third Assembly, held virtually in October 2020, India and France were re-elected for two years (Press Trust of India, in Business Standard). The “third consecutive term” count is the ministry’s. The Assembly chooses its President and Co-President with attention to equitable geographic representation among the four regional groups of members: Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Others, and Latin America and the Caribbean, according to pv magazine’s 2024 report.

What the Assembly is

The Assembly is the alliance’s top decision-making body. Its page on the alliance’s website says it sets the alliance’s objectives, approves the operating budget and reviews how programmes are being carried out, with member countries voting each year. The eighth session met in New Delhi from 27 to 30 October 2025 with more than 120 countries, according to the same page.

The ninth session was held together with the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit and Expo and the fourth International Conference on Green Hydrogen. The alliance’s agenda shows an inaugural session on the afternoon of Monday 2 November, the day the Prime Minister inaugurated the summit, according to the PIB release. The PIB release names ministers of France, Denmark, Suriname, Seychelles and Sri Lanka among those present at the press conference, with France represented by Minister Delegate Mathieu Lefèvre.

From a Paris announcement to a treaty body

The alliance was launched jointly by India’s Prime Minister and the then President of France on 30 November 2015, on the first day of the COP21 climate conference in Paris, according to the alliance’s 2017 press release. Its Framework Agreement entered into force on 6 December 2017, thirty days after Guinea became the fifteenth country to deposit its instrument of ratification with India as depositary. The same release states the alliance’s aim of mobilising more than USD 1,000 billion of investment into solar energy by 2030 and calls it the first treaty-based intergovernmental organisation headquartered in India.

Membership was first framed around the 121 countries lying fully or partly between the Tropics, according to the 2017 release. The first Assembly, on 3 October 2018, adopted an amendment opening it to every UN member state, and the Ministry of External Affairs said in July 2020 that the amendment had entered into force (PTI, in the Deccan Herald). The alliance’s home page now shows 114 member countries that have signed and ratified the Framework Agreement and 16 signatories, which adds up to the minister’s 130. Its secretariat is at Surya Bhawan on the NISE campus in Gurugram, Haryana.

The Bahamas’ foreign ministry said that its High Commissioner delivered the country’s signed instrument of ratification on 3 November on the margins of the Assembly. Several Indian news digests call the Bahamas the 116th member, a count the alliance’s own page did not show when checked on 6 November.

The programmes the minister listed

The release names four areas of work. India’s own build-out, which the alliance’s farm and rooftop programmes draw on, is covered in India’s solar capacity: the numbers, in the piece on the 300 GW renewable milestone and in the explainer on rooftop solar under PM Surya Ghar.

The first is finance for Africa. The minister described a USD 200 million Africa Solar Facility to which India has committed about Rs 225 crore (USD 25 million). The alliance’s page describes it as the first regional platform under its Global Solar Facility. The ISA Director General, Ashish Khanna, told reporters that the World Bank, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority and Africa50 are partners, according to PSU Watch. Joshi also cited a USD 300 million Nigeria Distributed Renewable Energy Fund as a model. The partners who announced that fund in Barbados on 12 March 2025, Sustainable Energy for All among them, gave its target as USD 500 million, so the two figures differ and the release does not explain how. Khanna added the facility and the fund together and called the total USD 500 million.

The second is farmers. The release says the minister highlighted empowering 3 million farmers through solar energy and agri-PV, with the PM-KUSUM scheme as the model the alliance is adapting for member countries, Africa in particular. At the press conference, Joshi said the first phase of PM-KUSUM covered nearly 3 million farmers, about 30 lakh pumps, and that a second phase was expected soon (PSU Watch).

The third is small island states. The release lists alliance-backed work in Fiji, Madagascar, Comoros and Seychelles on health clinics, schools, drinking water and cold storage for farm produce, and says the alliance is aggregating solar-plus-storage demand, starting with Mauritius. Mauritius published a tender for 220 MW of solar and storage on a new e-marketplace the alliance built with the World Bank, according to pv magazine’s report of 4 June 2026. The tender, launched in April, was set to close in mid-July 2026.

The fourth is skills. The release lists 17 Solar Technology Application Resource Centres, known as STAR-C, the SHINE global capability centre (Strategic Hub for Innovation and Execution) and an AI-enabled ISA Academy. The alliance’s own Global Capability Centre page shows 11 STAR-C centres active and six more in development, which makes 17 only if both are counted. The Academy’s page reports 4,350 professionals trained from 78 countries, with no date on the figure.

France’s share

France and India launched the alliance together in Paris, and Lefèvre said France has been a committed member since its inception (PSU Watch). He announced a voluntary contribution of 50,000 euros to the alliance for 2026, and said France had given 1.25 million euros to the STAR-C programme since 2021 and 150,000 euros to the Africa Solar Facility in 2025 (ANI, PSU Watch). He listed France’s priorities as building skills in developing countries, access to finance, widening the alliance’s reach and diversifying the supply chains of the energy transition. The French Embassy release adds that the two governments renewed a renewable-energy memorandum in 2025; the wider relationship is covered in India and France: the strategic partnership.

As of 6 November 2026, the PIB release and the alliance’s session page, the two official texts opened, give neither the vote nor the length of India’s new term. The French Embassy release, as reported by ANI, puts France’s term at 2027 to 2029 and places the next climate conference, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, from 9 to 20 November 2026.