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The government’s road map to a green future till 2070 will cover a dozen sectors including energy, power, highways, and industries such as steel, cement, iron, and aluminium, two people familiar with the matter said. And charting five-year plans for the transition is Niti Aayog, the very entity that replaced the erstwhile Planning Commission.
Once the roadmap is ready, sector-specific ministries will decide on policies after securing necessary cabinet approval, the people cited above said on the condition of anonymity.
“Niti Aayog is helping to define how the country needs to transition, how the power sector should look like, how much solar and wind capacity is required, how the industry needs to transition and which technologies are required, among others,” said one of the two people, who is part of climate finance group of the finance ministry. “But economics does not work beyond the headlines,” the person said, explaining why the think tank has been tasked with the study.
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The person described the Niti Aayog effort as a “scoping study” to set out various capacities that need to be built up and necessary investments for the green transition, financing and government support. “This will be in blocks of five years each until 2070.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced during COP26 held at Glasgow in 2021 that India would become net zero by 2070. His pledge was part of worldwide commitments to bring greenhouse emissions down to prevent the global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels by 2100.
For India, power generation is the biggest emitter, contributing about 50% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector. Around 27-28% comes from manufacturing—contributed by direct energy consumption and processes like heating limestone that release greenhouse gases. About 11-12% of the emissions come from the transport sector.
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“The study was scheduled to come out last month. It’s an iterative process and Niti Aayog is still in the process of taking feedback from various stakeholders like policy advocacy forums, industry players, and ministries,” the second of the two people quoted earlier said. “Hopefully, it will be out this month,” the person said, without offering timelines.
“Once the study is out and the sector-specific ministries start implementing it, there might be some policy tweaks or new policies that may require cabinet approval,” the person said.
India has updated its nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to achieve 50% of installed generation capacity from non-fossil sources and a 40-45% reduction in emission intensity by 2030.
The Niti Aayog study follows finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s announcement in her full budget speech in July that the government would bring out a policy document on appropriate energy transition pathways, while balancing the imperatives of employment, economic growth and environmental sustainability.
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Sectoral experts say the sooner India translates this plan into action, the higher the chances of achieving its net zero target.
“The sooner we do it, the better it is for us in the long run because what happens is that many investments are very capital-intensive lumpy, and the cost of coming to net and the trajectory to net should be factored in at the earliest,” said Ajay Shankar, a distinguished fellow at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). “Taking decisions is not easy, it’s complex as many factors are involved.”
Queries sent to secretaries and spokespeople of the ministries of highways; environment, forest and climate change; power; new and renewable energy; heavy industries; steel and financial services; and vice-chairman of Niti Aayog remained unanswered at press time.
Vaibhav Chaturvedi, senior fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), said that apart from identifying the big emitting sectors, it would be important to find out the available mitigation alternatives and their costs.
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“In power, for example, renewable energy is going great right now because our share in electricity generation of solar and wind is still less than 15%. The moment it starts crossing 20-25%, it will become a challenge. One has to introduce storage in a very big way. If not storage, nuclear power or carbon capture must come in a big way,” Chaturvedi said. “It’s an ongoing journey, and at any given point in any sector, there will be new challenges that will continue to emerge which have to be addressed.”
According to him, the new challenges “will always be more costly unless some breakthrough happens”. “In the case of carbon capture and storage or smaller module reactors or storage solutions, it will be more expensive. It depends on where we are and at what level we are talking about,” Chaturvedi said.
Delaying carbon mitigation measures would also come with economic costs. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which levies on imports based on carbon emitted during production, will kick in from 2026.
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“The other dimension that is also important is that EU’s CBAM. If we are quick to move to low carbon or zero carbon, our manufactured goods can enter the market with zero taxes, and that is a great opportunity for us in India to become a major manufacturer of goods services and we are still waiting to succeed in a big way,” TERI’s Shankar said. “If we decarbonize rapidly, our firms will be able to enter into the European market competitively and gain market share.”
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