Publication Year: 2026

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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From Fire Suppression to Climate Adaptation: Reimagining Forest Governance in a Warming World

Summary

Read the brief

Forests are central to India’s climate and development agenda, underpinning the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, land restoration, and cultural benefits. Yet, they are increasingly vulnerable to climate change, with ~36% of the country’s forests being prone to fire. Moreover, the fire season is projected to lengthen by up to 61 days across India by the end of the century, with nearly 55% of forests expected to experience more severe seasonal fires.

Regional variation in forest-fire seasons, forest types and reported climatic drivers
Source: Author’s compilation based on Kumar et al. (2025)

While a growing body of research shows how climate is driving changes in forest fires across India, limited attention has been paid to how governance systems are addressing these changes. To fill this gap, our issue brief uses forest fires as a case to ask two related questions. First, how do current forest fire responses fare in addressing climate-induced changes? Second, which governance frameworks may be better suited to anticipating, responding to, and adapting to forest fires?

To answer these questions, our brief conceptualises forests as Socioecological Systems (SES) where ecological processes, such as those shaping species composition and distribution or disturbance regimes such as fires and droughts, coevolve with social processes including governance, institutions, markets, and communities. We then use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate risk framework to classify forest fire responses into four types:

– Building adaptive capacity covers responses that enhance the forest system’s ability to anticipate, respond to, and recover from fire risk, such as improving institutional coordination and early warning systems. 
– Sensitivity reduction (ecological and social) focuses on lowering the inherent susceptibility of ecosystems and communities to fire through measures such as fire-resilient species mixes, improving forest health, and livelihood diversification. 
– Exposure reduction aims to limit how much systems come into contact with fire hazards through measures including fire lines and spatial planning. 
– Residual risk management covers response and recovery measures aimed at minimising damage during and after fire events, such as suppression, emergency response, post-fire rehabilitation, and relief mechanisms.

We use the above classification to analyse India’s forest fire policies and their evolution. Our findings show that despite a shift  in discourse from a fire-suppression approach to an ecosystem resilience-building approach, forest fire response in India remains dominated by residual risk management through suppression, with funding heavily skewed toward firefighting infrastructure and personnel. Although policies such as the National Action Plan on Forest Fires (NAPFF) introduce fire risk mapping, these assessments do not incorporate climate variables, projections, or scenario-based analysis, and instead rely on static, historical indicators. 

Evolution of forest fire management in India
Source: Author’s analysis
Fund allocation for forest fire response types under the Centrally Sponsored Scheme, Forest Fire Prevention and Management (CSS-FFPM), in 2023-24 and 2024-25
Source: Author’s analysis based on Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change data

Furthermore, we find that community engagement is largely confined to awareness campaigns and firefighting support, with limited attention to fire’s socio-economic impacts. Decision-making remains largely concentrated within forest departments, with limited devolution to local and community institutions. As a result, governance remains administratively decentralised but functionally centralised, and fire continues to be treated as an external threat to be suppressed rather than a climate-driven process co-produced by underlying social and ecological vulnerabilities.

Indian forest fire governance’s focus on suppression, along with limited climate information, fragmented institutions, and limited community engagement, creates a structural mismatch in the face of emerging climate risks. Addressing this requires a shift towards adaptive governance that integrates climate risk, strengthens socioecological understanding, and enables flexible, learning-based, and multi-level decision-making systems. 

While recent forest policy articulation has begun to recognise resilience and risk, this intent is not consistently translated into planning, financing, or implementation. Addressing forest fire risk under climate change requires moving beyond residual risk management towards a more balanced approach that also reduces exposure and vulnerability. This presents a critical opportunity to reimagine 21st-century forest governance that sustains the ecological, economic, and social functions which forests support in a warming world.

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