India’s Energy Transition Needs To Rethink The Ground It Is Built On

According to the latest Land Gap Report, nearly half of all national climate commitments worldwide depend on land use. India is no exception. This makes land a critical part of the climate change puzzle. 

Earlier this year, a Parliamentary reply estimated that meeting the 500 GW target would need around 0.3 million hectares of land. It may sound like hectares upon hectares of land, yet it’s a small fraction of India’s total area of 329 million hectares. 

The problem, then, isn’t the quantum of land required, it’s whose land is being used, how it is acquired, and what happens to those who depend on it. 

The Complexity

“India is possibly among the few countries which does not have a mandated environmental and social impact assessment for all renewable energy projects,” Simran Grover, Founder and CEO of the Centre for Environment and Energy Policy (CEEP) told The Secretariat. “It reduces costs in the short term, but increases risk in the long term,” he said.

That risk comes from bypassing existing safeguards such as the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013, which was designed to address the social and environmental consequences of land development. 

One of the biggest distortions lies in how renewable projects are incentivised. “Policy design favours capitalisation,” Grover explained. For instance, waivers on transmission charges make it more attractive to set up large solar parks in Rajasthan, even though the cost of building long transmission lines and the resulting power losses are effectively absorbed by the government. 

This, he said, creates a geographic skew. “If land is cheaper in Rajasthan, it just makes sense to put everything there. But the policy doesn’t factor in the cost of transmission or the social cost of displacing communities.”

An expert in the field told The Secretariat on condition of anonymity that this imbalance also plays out across different types of land ownership. “Private land acquisition isn’t easy,” she said. “Records are often outdated, inheritance claims complicate ownership, and there are social costs attached.”

Public or common lands — often categorised as government-owned — bring another layer of complexity. “These are lands that communities have depended on for centuries,” she explained. 

“When renewable projects are built on them, the rates offered for leasing can be very low and there’s rarely a fair hearing for affected people.” 

In states such as Rajasthan, locals have protested what they see as opaque and exclusionary land allocation for solar and wind projects. 

Grover said that in the push to simplify clearances, India risks hollowing out local participation. “Panchayati Raj is an example of an institution that decentralises governance and gives people some participatory agency,” he said. “But in the name of easing business, the idea seems to be doing away with all consolidation, all participation, all regulatory checks.” 

Acknowledging People's Rights

If India’s energy transition is to be actually sustainable and just, it needs to do a better job at safeguarding the people it is ultimately aiming to protect from climate change. 

“You centre people by acknowledging their rights,” said Grover. The first step is ensuring access to information. “Information asymmetry significantly disadvantages communities, both the owners of the land and those indirectly dependent on it,” he noted. 

He pointed out that active dissemination of information about the sale or lease of the land for renewable projects rarely happens. “In the absence of that, it becomes an unfair transition, because a local landowner does not know the future value of the land or the long-term implications of the lease.” 

Grover believes that every renewable energy project should undergo an independent pre-bid environmental and social impact assessment (EIA and SIA). “It helps investors come in more informed about risks and allows risk mitigation through mechanisms that are actually conducive to communities,” he said. “Otherwise, risk management happens through political collusion.”

For him, understanding land goes beyond legal ownership. “As an urban settler, I will not understand what land means for a person in a remote arid desert of Rajasthan, or a coastal region of Andhra Pradesh,” he said. “I will not understand its economic value, its social value, or its emotional value.”

Solutions And Policy

Despite the gaps, there are pathways to make the energy transition more inclusive. Solar and wind are modular technologies. “You don’t necessarily need continuous parcels of land. Projects can be designed with better cognisance of community needs to create co-benefits rather than conflicts,” he said. 

Decentralisation is key. Not just in governance, but in energy planning. Smaller, community-scale solar systems and rooftop installations can reduce land conflicts while improving local access to power. Experts also highlight alternatives such as offshore wind farms and solar panels on artificial water bodies, where there aren’t as many environmental and social trade-offs. 

Building resilient livelihoods around renewable projects is needed to make sure that clean energy strengthens, rather than severs people’s ties to the land and that the transition benefits, rather than bypasses, those closest to it. 

An example is agrovoltaics which is the dual use of land for both agriculture and solar power. Under the PM-KUSUM scheme, farmers are encouraged to install elevated solar panels on their own land to generate power while continuing to farm beneath them. However, the government is reportedly considering extending the deadline for the totality of the scheme with major components falling behind targets. 

The focus of future frameworks shouldn’t be on the kilometer square of land needed, but on who lives on it, what it means to them, and how they can be part of the transition.

India’s renewable ambitions are large and so is its land. But, unless communities are placed at the heart of policy and planning, the pursuit of clean energy could deepen old inequities even as it helps meet new climate goals.