Assignment 02

The Panels Are Fine

Suryanika Energy, Nashik  ·  board meeting Friday 11:00  ·  roughly 90 minutes

The room

It is 6:40 on a Tuesday evening in Nashik. The office of Suryanika Energy is one long room above a tyre showroom — eleven desks, two of them empty, a whiteboard with last quarter's install target still on it, and a wall of framed photographs of rooftops.

Rohit Bhalerao started the company four years ago after quitting a job at a panel manufacturer in Pune. Suryanika sells and installs rooftop solar for houses and small housing societies. Six hundred and fourteen systems so far. Rohit signs off on every one of them personally, or used to.

You are sitting at the end of the table because Rohit's sister Anuja put you there. Anuja put ₹85 lakh into this company in 2023 and has been on the board since. She found you through a professor. The brief she gave you on the phone was one line: "Something is going wrong and my brother has decided what it is. I want a second opinion before Friday."

Rohit is standing at the whiteboard. He has been talking for eleven minutes.

"It's the panels," he says. "I told you two years ago we should not have moved to Nexvolt. They were 18% cheaper and I let the numbers win. Now customers are angry and they are right to be angry. We replace the panels at every site that has complained. Premium module, Tier-1 brand, we eat the cost, we send a letter to every customer explaining what we did. That is the only thing that saves this company's name."

Anuja asks what it costs.

"About 1.2 crore. 180 sites, roughly ₹68,000 a site."

"And what is in the bank?"

Rohit does not answer that. Priya, who does the accounts, says quietly: "Forty-one lakh. There's a warranty reserve of nine lakh inside that."

Nobody says anything for a while.

Then Kiran, who runs the installation crews and is also Rohit's cousin, says: "Sir, my boys have not done anything different in four years. Same mounting, same clamps, same torque. If something has changed it is not on the roof."

---

What set this off

Eleven days ago, a resident of Rachana Heights — a 42-flat society in Indiranagar where Suryanika did 19 individual rooftop systems between March and June 2024 — started a WhatsApp group called "Suryanika Solar Victims." It has 31 members. Someone forwarded a screenshot to Rohit. Someone else has drafted a legal notice and posted a photo of it. Google rating went from 4.6 to 3.1 in nine days.

Rohit has not slept properly since.

The board meets Friday at 11:00. Anuja wants your view before Rohit's plan goes to a vote. Rohit knows you have been asked to look and is not thrilled about it, but he has told everyone to give you whatever you ask for.

The papers on the table

These are the things that exist. Nobody has organised them for you. Some of it is probably wrong.

1.Excerpt from the "Suryanika Solar Victims" WhatsApp group

2.The brochure

The Suryanika residential brochure, printed December 2024. Front page:

SAVE UP TO ₹4,200 EVERY MONTH.

Zero electricity bills. 25-year panel performance warranty. 5-year workmanship warranty. Government-approved vendor.

Back page, 6pt type:

Savings estimate based on 3 kW system, average irradiance, 100% self-consumption or net export at prevailing DISCOM tariff, annual settlement. Actual generation and savings vary by roof orientation, shading, weather, consumption pattern, tariff category and DISCOM policy. Estimate is indicative and not a guarantee.

3.Service tickets, free-text extract (Jan–Aug 2025)

Copied out of the ticket sheet exactly as the office typed them. The Category column is chosen by whoever picked up the phone.

4.Generation, six sample sites

Units per month, from the customer's own meter reading shared with the office.

5.Volume

6.A note Kiran left on your chair

7.Two things that came up in passing

Priya mentions, while looking for something else, that MSEDCL moved residential net-metering from annual settlement to monthly settlement with effect from April 2025. Under the old rule, units you exported in winter sat as credit and could be used in monsoon. Under the new rule they do not carry forward.

The annual maintenance contract — panel cleaning twice a year plus one inspection — is free for the first year and ₹2,400/year after that. Priya says the renewal rate is "around 18%, maybe less."

8.What does not exist

You will ask. The answers are no.

What you have to do

Anuja needs your view before the board votes on Friday morning. Rohit's proposal is on the table and will pass unless someone gives her a better reason.

That is the whole assignment.

What you cannot do

• You cannot spend ₹1.2 crore. You cannot spend money the company does not have.
• Rachana Heights is drafting a legal notice. Whatever you recommend has to survive the next thirty days, not only the next two years.
• Kiran is Rohit's cousin. Rohit hired the sales team himself and defended them once already. You are allowed to say anything you can support; you are not allowed to pretend the politics is not there.
• You cannot invent facts. If a number is not in these papers, it is not known — say so, and say what you would do about not knowing it.
• Nothing here is a real company. Do not contact any real installer, customer, or society. Do not use anyone's actual bills, meter readings, names or photographs.

What we expect back

One artefact Anuja can carry into the board meeting. Deck, memo, single page — whatever you think does the job. If it needs a covering explanation from you to make sense, it has not done the job.

A recording of you, two to four minutes, saying it out loud. Not reading it out. Saying it.

Your working. Whatever you actually produced on the way — the messy version, the numbers you ran, the thing you tried and threw away. Attach it as it is.

Use AI as much as you want, for anything you want. Two conditions: every number and every claim in what you hand over is yours to defend, and you should be able to tell us afterwards which parts of the thinking were yours.

You have about 90 minutes. That is not enough time. It was not going to be enough time for a real consultant either.

How this gets judged

Four questions, in this order:

1. Did you work on the right problem?
2. Can you defend every number you put on the page?
3. Could Rohit act on this on Monday morning?
4. Do you know what you don't know — and does your recommendation survive being wrong about it?

There is no expected answer. Two people can reach opposite recommendations here and both be right, and the difference will be entirely in the reasoning.