Publication Type: Reports

How Can India Align Its Clean Energy Innovations with Its Ambitions? An Assessment of Public RD&D Investments and Activities

Overview

India’s clean energy ambitions now extend well beyond installing renewable generation capacity towards increasingly making clean energy technologies in India, competitively and at scale. Public research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) builds a country’s knowledge of production processes, materials, systems integration and scale-up, and it is where industrial ambition can translate into domestic capability. This study sets out to answer whether India’s public RD&D is building the knowledge and capabilities its clean energy and industrial ambitions require.

Until now, this system has been hard to see as a whole. Funding is spread across multiple ministries and agencies, with no central register that consolidates them into a view of the public research base. Our report brings together 1,359 publicly funded projects at 90+ institutions, active between 2019 and 2024, representing about INR 1,443 crore (USD 151 million) in declared funding. It covers six areas: renewables, power and storage, hydrogen and fuel cells, transport and e-mobility, energy efficiency, and carbon capture, utilisation and storage.

Concurrently, our new India Clean Energy RD&D Tracker provides a breakdown of publicly available clean energy investments and activities across technologies, institutions, and types of innovation.

We examine how research effort is distributed across technologies, what kinds of innovation the portfolio supports, whether the focus is on products or production processes, and whether all this aligns with India’s broader clean energy, industrial, and climate objectives. The dataset is assembled from publicly available disclosures and should be understood as an evolving resource rather than a complete census of India’s public clean energy RD&D.


What India’s clean energy RD&D portfolio contains

Effort is concentrated, more so by funding than by project count. Among the mapped projects, renewables account for 421 projects and INR 580 crore (USD 61 million), followed by power and storage at 333 projects and INR 492 crore (USD 52 million). Together they absorb about three-quarters of declared spending. Within renewables, solar photovoltaics alone take 234 projects and INR 401 crore (USD 42 million), more than the hydrogen, energy efficiency, transport, and CCUS categories combined.

The research is overwhelmingly incremental and product-focused. Across the mapped projects, 81% improve, adapt, or optimise technologies already in commercial use, while 67% focus on products. This pattern is consistent across renewables, storage, and hydrogen.

Funding is fragmented, while projects are small and uniform in scale across technology categories. Across the portfolio, 68% of projects with declared budgets receive less than INR 50 lakh (USD 52,000) and median project size varies only between INR 33 lakh and INR 39 lakh (USD 35,000–41,000) across technology categories, suggesting that different types of research are often supported through similar funding instruments.


Why this matters

India’s transition is occurring under conditions that imported technologies do not automatically accommodate. Research focused on adapting technologies to local conditions can generate real near-term returns. Viewed through that lens, the portfolio is well aligned with India’s deployment needs.

Deployment, however, is no longer India’s only objective. Manufacturing capability has become an explicit national priority. Product innovation determines what is made; process innovation determines how it is produced efficiently, consistently, and at competitive cost. Yet the mapped public RD&D portfolio remains weighted heavily towards product innovation. 

The funding architecture reinforces this pattern. Uniform grant sizes may be appropriate for investigator-led research but are less well suited to pilot manufacturing, production engineering, demonstration, and scale-up, where manufacturing capabilities are often developed. Different capability objectives therefore appear to require different funding instruments.

Where public RD&D effort sits: projects and budget by strategic objective
Source: Authors classification and analysis

The central finding is that the balance between deployment, manufacturing capability, and technology leadership appears to have emerged from many independent funding decisions, without an explicit portfolio-level strategy visible in the public record.


What follows

State the intended balance. RD&D strategies should articulate capability objectives alongside technology priorities, making explicit what public investment is expected to contribute to deployment, manufacturing competitiveness, and technology leadership.

Monitor the portfolio, not only the individual project. Portfolio-level monitoring should complement project-level evaluation, allowing policymakers and funders to assess whether aggregate investment remains aligned with evolving national objectives.

Differentiate funding instruments. Different stages of innovation require different scales, time horizons, and institutional arrangements. Broadening the mix of funding instruments is likely to address important gaps more directly than increasing the overall budget alone.

Treat process innovation as a strategic objective in its own right. Work on production methods, manufacturing equipment, quality control, and pilot-scale validation sits closer to industrial production than conventional laboratory research. Supporting these capabilities is likely to require stronger collaboration between public research institutions and industry.

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Living with Heat in India: Heat-Health Risks, Vulnerability and Emerging Responses

Overview

This report examines India’s evolving heat risk and its implications for population health, with a focus on changing heat exposure, the populations and places most at risk, and the institutional and policy responses emerging across the country. It assesses India’s progress in responding to extreme heat, identifies gaps in implementation, coordination, data and financing, and consolidates priorities for strengthening long-term heat resilience. The report also highlights practical approaches being tested on the ground and considers how emerging evidence can inform scalable, context-specific responses to the health, livelihood and socioeconomic impacts of extreme heat.

The report draws on historical and projected temperature data, alongside evidence on heat-related health impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. It examines India’s heat governance landscape, including Heat Action Plans (HAPs), health-system preparedness, heat-health surveillance, early warning systems, and interventions led by non-governmental and community-based organisations. It then identifies priorities for institutionalising long-term heat resilience, including mainstreaming heat action across sectors and levels of governance, strengthening institutional and health-system capacities and coordination, unlocking finance for adaptation, and embedding health outcomes in the planning, implementation and evaluation of heat action.

Key Highlights

– India’s temperatures are rising; the average temperature during 2015-2024 was about 0.890C higher than the 1901-30 baseline, with 2024 recorded as the warmest year since 1901.

– The warming is uneven across seasons and regions. Northwestern and central India are experiencing frequent heatwaves, with a predicted expansion to the southern peninsula and a rise in humid heat.

– Extreme heat is increasing health risks, with increasing evidence on heat-related mortalities and illnesses, including links to cardiovascular, kidney, and pregnancy risks.

– Outdoor workers face significant productivity and earning losses due to heat stress, highlighting the need for a calibrated work-rest schedule and basic water, shade, rest and cooling provisions.

– Urban heat islands, built environments, income levels, occupation, migration, gender and other social inequalities can contribute to higher impacts of heat exposure.

– Heat Action Plans (HAPs) have been prepared by 23 states, 195 districts and 64 cities based on NDMA guidelines. Heatwaves were declared a notified natural disaster in August 2026.

– Heat-related illness and death surveillance has been expanded, health facility preparedness and heatstroke management units have been operationalised, and IMD has strengthened early warning capabilities through high-resolution GIS-based forecasting, colour-coded messages and heat-index forecasting.

– While heat adaptation solutions are expanding, the research has focused on documenting interventions and occasionally their potential for exposure reduction. Evaluating their health impacts will be the next frontier

– The report calls for heat action to be integrated across sectors with health outcomes as a guiding principle, sustained financing and strengthening of institutional capacities for long-term resilience.

The report is from the Global Heat Health Information Network – South Asia Hub. The South Asia Heat and Health Hub will serve as the region’s central platform for collaboration, knowledge exchange, and policy innovation on heat-related health risks. You can also read other reports in the series from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan.

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The Energy Transition in Irrigation: A Case Study on Community Solar Irrigation in Chhattisgarh

Highlights

– Solarisation as a catalyst for the energy transition: With irrigation accounting for one-fifth of India’s total energy demand, solarisation has become a critical policy instrument for decarbonising the agricultural sector. Chhattisgarh is supporting this transition by implementing India’s first large-scale, state-supported Community Solar Irrigation Scheme (CSIS).

– Enhancing energy access and productivity: Transitioning to solar-powered community models enhances energy access, ensuring that the benefits of reliable power reach those beyond the centralised grid. Chhattisgarh’s CSIS has brought irrigation to 2,851 hectares of land in remote forest and hilly regions, directly benefiting 2,740 marginal and small farmers.

– Resource efficiency and financial sustainability: A successful energy transition in agriculture requires moving away from recurring consumption subsidies to durable infrastructure investments. Chhattisgarh achieves this through a distinctive financial convergence model, bundling funds from local and line department budgets.

– Potential to drive cross-sectoral livelihood gains: Projects such as community solar irrigation can serve as a gateway for broader rural transformation, including an increase in the crop cycle, diversification to high-value crops, and potentially non-farm income generation if surplus power can be tapped and used for local productive activities other than irrigation. For example, women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are growing vegetables in the rabi season and can explore the productive use of surplus solar power for non-agricultural activities during off-seasons.

– Social infrastructure and institutional innovation for scalability: The global shift towards renewable energy requires robust local institutions to manage shared resources. Chhattisgarh’s model proves the efficacy of the state–society–market alliance, where the state provides sustained institutional hand-holding and technical support to the community infrastructure through a network of ‘system integrators’ to ensure the long-term functionality and scalability of decentralised energy assets.

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The Cross-Cutting Themes: A Study on Transition Preparedness in Ten Indian States (2023-24)

Highlights

– In the period of this study (2023–24), most of the studied states have updated their State Action Plans for Climate Change (SAPCCs) in accordance with the central government’s mandates. Bihar released an additional Low-carbon Development (LCD) planning document to complement its SAPCC, indicating a progressive shift in state-level thinking.


– There is an improved focus on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks and financing mechanisms within the revised state plans, which is a significant shift from financial year (FY) 2020–21.


– This study cycle (2023–24) found significant progress in the preparation of city/district-level LCD or climate action plans. Of the 10 studied states, 5 have prepared such plans have prepared such plans for at least 1 city or district, which is a notable advance over the previous study cycle (2020–21).


– There has been incremental progress in articulating a just transition within state climate planning, a concept that was largely absent in the previous study cycle.

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Governing India’s Just Energy Transition: The Case of Jharkhand’s Task Force on Sustainable Just Transition

Highlights


– At present, the governance of the energy transition is nested within broader climate governance frameworks and lacks a dedicated national policy or institutional architecture. As a result, state-level preparations remain limited, and just transition objectives are not systematically integrated into policies, planning processes, or intergovernmental coordination mechanisms.

– India’s energy transition is bound to be shaped by developments at the subnational level, particularly in the coal-dependent eastern states, where the economic, social, and fiscal impacts of the transition are most acute. Subnational institutional governance is therefore essential to ensure a just energy transition.

– This study takes the example of Jharkhand’s Task Force on Sustainable Just Transition, a first-of-its-kind institution established to address social and economic issues while guiding the state towards a low-carbon economy aligned with national climate goals.

– Using the Task Force as an example of an enabling institution, the study identifies key institutional challenges and draws lessons for other states to strengthen subnational preparedness, policy alignment, capacity, coordination, participation, and data systems for a just energy transition.

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Energy Transitions Preparedness Initiative: Transport Sector FY 23-24

Executive Summary


– As India advances towards an energy transition, actions taken in the transport sector – the fastest-growing sector in terms of energy consumption – will be crucial. Because road transport is a State List subject under India’s Constitution, state-level decisions will be critical for realising an energy transition.

– The Energy Transition Preparedness Initiative (ETPI) provides a framework to assess state-level progress towards an energy transition across India’s electricity, buildings, and transport sectors. It covers ten states that account for more than 50% of India’s transport sector emissions.

– By analysing publicly available data and reports, this study highlights the progress made by states in the base year, 2020–21.

– The study reveals that progress has been made in policy formulation around major aspects of the transport energy transition: prioritising non-motorised transport (NMT) and public transport, encouraging electric vehicle (EV) adoption, scrapping old vehicles, and promoting densification around transit hubs. However, a defined articulation of targets can guide a more focused transition.

– In converting policy to action, intent varies across states. This study highlights that the structures that can guide the focused implementation of energy transition projects are still nascent. Dedicated and consistent funding, integrated governance, and data-driven decision making can play a critical role in accelerating implementation.

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Energy Transitions Preparedness Initiative: Buildings Sector FY 23-24

Executive Summary


– The Energy Transition Preparedness Initiative (ETPI) is an effort to study states’ progress towards achieving the energy transition by analysing their plans, actions, and governance processes through a set of indicators. One of the focus sectors under ETPI is buildings, which falls under state jurisdiction and is guided by state-level policies.

– The ETPI indicator framework for buildings was used in 10 states for the study period FY 2020–21 (the report was published in 2024). These states are Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh. This report builds on the FY 2020–21 baseline and includes updates through FY 2023–24. The five-building sector indicators cover aspects such as Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) compliance and Eco Niwas Samhita (ENS) preparedness; promotion of rooftop solar photovoltaic (RT-SPV) systems, energy-efficient appliances, and energy efficiency and clean energy in public buildings; and energy efficiency and clean energy in affordable housing.

– We have used publicly available information. The goal is to highlight examples of good practice, facilitate cross-learning, and encourage the adoption of approaches suitable for state-specific contexts.

– We find that the studied states are progressing in adopting and notifying building codes. However, for successful implementation, it is important to remove local-level barriers by simplifying compliance procedures, creating a pool of experts to assist with compliance, and enhancing the awareness and capacity of institutions.

– Power distribution companies and State Designated Agencies in some of the studied states, such as Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, and Maharashtra, are promoting energy-efficient appliances, offering an opportunity for other states to learn from these examples and adopt similar initiatives. Also, stronger market surveillance efforts are needed for the Standards & Labelling programme to drive greater market transformation.

– In state-specific affordable housing schemes and policies, little attention is paid to thermal comfort in the design and construction of projects. However, recently there have been efforts to integrate climate resilience measures into rural affordable housing projects under the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) programme.

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Is India Ready for a Warming World? How Heat Resilience Measures Are Being Implemented for 11% of India’s Urban Population in Some of Its Most At-Risk Cities

Executive Summary

In this report, we study the implementation of policies and actions aimed at reducing extreme heat risks in nine Indian cities in nine states, covering a little over 11 percent of India’s urban population. We picked these cities based on how vulnerable they were to increases in extreme heat events as the planet warms. Using CMIP6 climate model output, we established which Indian cities with a population over 1 million (according to Census 2011) would experience some of the greatest increases in days with dangerous heat index values (a measure of the combined effect of temperature and humidity) compared to the historical average. Rapid shifts in the extreme heat index distribution induced by climate change may overwhelm communities’ adaptive capacity and lead to substantial increases in heat-attributable mortality and morbidity. This study is particularly urgent given recent indications that the climate may be warming faster than previously anticipated. 

We conducted 88 interviews with city, district, and state government officials charged with implementing heat actions in these nine cities. Because heat adaptation requires a coordinated, cross-sectoral response, we conducted interviews with representatives of disaster management, health, city planning, and labour departments, as well as city and district administrators.

To assess how prepared these cities are for extreme heat in the coming decades, we catalogued short-term measures meant to save lives while paying special attention to heat solutions that are thought to bring long-term benefits. The latter include changes to urban form and the built environment – expanding urban tree cover, reducing density by increasing open space with building setbacks and parks, and changing design norms for heat-trapping buildings – and improvements in institutions that manage heat risk, from capacity-building efforts for government officials to the mandatory reporting of heat deaths to higher levels of government. Many of these actions take years to mature through refinement before they improve lives on the ground.

This is the first study to assess the implementation of extreme heat policies and actions across multiple cities in India.

This study is novel in its focus on long-term policies and their implementation challenges. We believe the issues and patterns highlighted in this report will be useful to cities, in India and elsewhere, that are attempting to complement their short-term responses with long-term heat risk mitigation through structural and institutional responses.

Key Findings

1. All cities report short-term emergency measures: These include actions like access to drinking water, changing work schedules, and boosting hospital capacity before or during a heat wave. If these measures are being implemented correctly, verification of which is beyond the scope of this study, this could be read as a positive story in achieving a minimum baseline of life-saving actions across cities in just over a decade since India’s first heat action plan (HAP) was published in 2013.

2. Guidelines and directives from higher levels of government drive short-term response measures, heat action plans (HAPs) seem to have a weaker effect on policy: Many of the life saving short-term actions reported across cities are a product of emergency directives from higher levels of government, including national and state disaster-management and health authorities, issued before or during a heat wave. HAPs, which often house long-term measures, seem to have a weaker effect on shaping heat actions because they are weakly institutionalised.

3. Many important long-term actions are entirely absent or poorly targeted: Actions like making household or occupational cooling available to the most heat-exposed, developing insurance cover for lost work, expanding fire management services for heat waves, and electricity grid retrofits to improve transmission reliability and distribution safety are missing from all cities. Expansion of local weather stations for more granular data on heat variation within a city, mapping urban heat islands, and training heat plan implementers were only seen in some cities. Other actions like expansion of urban shade and green cover, the creation of open spaces that dissipate heat, and the deployment of rooftop solar that could help with active cooling, among others, were implemented without adequate attention to populations and areas that experience the greatest heat risk.

Figure 1: Reported heat actions (n=150 solutions) largely focus on short-term actions, while a significant proportion with potential long-run benefits fall in the ‘incidental’ category, meaning they do not target areas or populations at highest risk. ‘Intentional’ actions are few and sporadic when health system measures, which are meant to deal with the effects of a heat wave rather than reduce their initial impact, are removed. The figure in brackets represents the number of cities, out of nine, in which the action is observed.


4. Long-term actions are focused mostly on the health system: Long-term solutions were most commonly reported for the health system. These included actions like heat-specific training for health workers and creation of systems to monitor heat deaths. As a result, what emerges is a picture of very weak mainstreaming of long-term heat concerns in other crucially important sectors such as urban-planning departments. Health-system preparedness, while foundationally important to heat resilience, is meant to deal with the consequences of heat overwhelming the adaptive capacity of societies rather than prevent such situations from occurring.

5. Short-term actions are inexpensive, the shift towards long-term climate adaptation will require more finance: Over two-thirds of respondents reported adequate funding for heat actions and that they were drawing from a diverse range of existing sources spanning local, state and national funds. This is a consequence of a focus on short-term actions that are relatively inexpensive and temporary. Long-term structural changes, such as those mentioned above, will require dedicated resources.

6. Institutional constraints limit the possibilities for long-term action: The top problem identified by respondents was local coordination between government departments, both within and between municipal, district, and state government departments. More than half of all responses identified an inter-linked mix of personnel shortages, competing priorities, weak technical capacity, and insufficient acknowledgement of the heat problem as constraints.

Figure 2: Coordination problems emerged as the single largest institutional constraint, followed by competing priorities limiting the focus on heat. A substantial portion of implementers did not see heat as a policy problem. Rows represent department-types interviewed in nine cities; brackets contain responses per department-type. The top row averages responses across all respondents.


Recommendations

1. Institutional Changes
(a) Strengthen HAPs in local governments: HAPs could help institutionalise long-term actions and monitor their effectiveness. They could also make crucial targeting mechanisms such as vulnerability assessments and the identification of urban heat islands mandatory.

(b) Draw on disaster mitigation funds that provide for heat wave preparation: As of late 2024, sub-national governments were allowed to draw on National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds to execute projects that mitigate heat wave risks. States should harness this line of finance to set up a pipeline of long-term risk reduction projects.

(c) Heat officers need appropriate institutional backing: Nascent conversations about creating Chief Heat Officer-type (CHO) positions should also consider how to equip them with adequate authority to solve the underlying institutional problems we have identified. In their absence, CHOs will probably face the same hurdles ‘nodal’ heat officers face today.
 
2. Capacity Building
(a) Create a targeted capacity-building programme for HAP implementation across India’s most heat-vulnerable cities: A sustained, multi-year capacity-building effort aimed at those in charge of executing departmental actions at the city/district level, in India’s ten most heat-vulnerable cities could rapidly improve India’s heat resilience prospects. We recommend starting with a small group with high potential impact and expanding over time to other cities.

(b) Establish trained disaster management support staff capacity at the district level: We recommend creating permanent and funded specialist positions in the most climate-vulnerable districts, with training for long-term risk mitigation.

3. Technology
(a) Create a highly-targeted active cooling programme: The rapid increase in temperatures and gap in long-term heat resilience strongly suggest that at-risk urban populations will turn to air conditioning to protect their lives and incomes. State and national governments should deploy a subsidy or large-scale purchase programme that allows these families to buy energy-efficient ACs. They must be targeted at portions of Indian cities with the highest heat risk, determined by the vulnerability assessment of its HAP. 

(b) Use climate projections to expand the range of heat actions on the table: Only two out of 42 respondents asked had access to climate projections. Most implementers therefore did not know what the most dangerous days in a 1.5 degree world would look like in their cities. We recommend a national programme, anchored by national technical institutes, to make this information available to key state and city officials in the cities most vulnerable to rapid warming. 

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The Regulatory and Market Landscape for Climate Finance Into India’s Renewable Energy Sector

Executive summary

India’s clean energy landscape has developed rapidly over the last decade, enabled by an improving policy and regulatory architecture. Nevertheless, challenges remain that have impacted the scale and direction of climate finance flows to this sector, particularly from international sources. As India aims to further ramp up the pace of its RE deployment, both large- and small-scale, this brief analyzes these challenges from regulatory, institutional mandate, coordination and market development angles, and explores ways to address them.

Based on a literature review and 13 expert interviews in the large scale renewable energy, rooftop solar, and energy efficiency sectors, we find that regulatory challenges are relatively minor in the large scale RE sector, and that this may cause international funders to channel finance accordingly. In other words, the established governance structure facilitates a relatively easy flow of climate finance. On the other hand, the small scale renewables and energy efficiency sectors have received comparatively less policy support, and a lack of awareness and scale contributes to considerably less funding flowing to these sectors.

Overall, while the government has an important role to play in continuing to improve the policy and regulatory environment for clean energy finance – including international flows into the country – there is an equal role for funders to adapt their funding processes and scopes to the domestic context. Harmonizing these parallel efforts will require improved coordination between the various actors, including through more defined processes for consultations within the overall institutional architecture for climate action in India.

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Energy Transitions Preparedness Initiative: Buildings Sector

Executive Summary

  • India’s buildings sector will play a critical role in meeting the country’s climate targets while promoting resilient cities (IEA 2021b). Buildings also represent the demand side of the energy transition, which is otherwise generally dominated by discourses on the supply side. The sector is undergoing clean energy transition while also contributing to it. Urgent political attention and coordinated action between national and sub-national actors across the buildings value chain are needed if energy transition goals must be achieved in a cost-effective and timely manner.

  • The Energy Transition Preparedness Initiative (ETPI) provides a framework to study and understand state-level plans, actions, and governance processes towards energy transition. The framework covers multiple themes in 24 indicators, representing crucial aspects of energy transition in the electricity, buildings, and transport sectors. The buildings sector covers many themes across five indicators.

  • Buildings are a state subject and therefore energy transition actions in the sector must be studied at the state level. Evidence suggests that buildings are contributing to national and state-level energy transition goals in many ways. There are examples of effective and ambitious policy initiatives with varying scales of action to facilitate transition. Despite the progress, greater efforts are required to implement stated policies in order to achieve the sector’s transition objectives.

  • This study aims to understand the energy transition preparedness of the buildings sector of 10 states in India and highlights good examples from the states. Drawing on information available in the public domain, it sheds light on the level of energy transition preparedness in these states for FY 2020-21.

  • This report studies energy transition preparedness across multiple states, facilitates cross learning between them, and promotes adoption of approaches suitable to their specific contexts.

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