India’s power ministry has its work cut out. India needs to achieve about 350GW of new renewable energy capacity in nine years to meet the commitment of 500GW of RE by 2030. Power from biomass is not economical yet, the wind is still expensive, and planners may not want to be completely dependent on solar. Therefore, hydropower in India is going to be ramped up, at least by 30GW. The problem is, hydropower is quite expensive, bad for the ecology, and significant carbon is emitted from it too. Very aggressive targets for switching to clean energy may actually harm the environment more. Sometimes not committing, but waiting to do good can lead to better outcomes.

Micro hydel power plants have a major advantage over larger hydroelectric plants due to the limited damage to ecology, lesser or no need for submerging land, and generally lesser damage due to construction of associated infrastructure. On a per unit energy basis, they are far too expensive. A solution catching momentum in Africa is modular and therefore cheap micro hydel plants, that are also safe for aquatic life. Aggressive RE capacity creation targets in India however will motivate planners to go in for larger projects routed through a few large (mostly public sector) firms, and therefore I don’t see large-scale adoption of such micro technologies becoming a reality in India.

India does have a serious methane problem. Roughly 200 million odd cattle release significant amounts of methane, and so do rice fields. Research conducted primarily in the west has therefore labelled India as a major methane emitter. Some claim that Indian cattle are of a different variety with different food consumption patterns and therefore don’t release western levels of methane. Whether true or not, it would be good for a proper all-India study on methane from cattle and rice fields. Let us confirm the scale and characteristics of the problem to better identify local solutions to a global problem.

Pune has received global recognition for its work on public transport, specifically its BRT, and the Shiv Sena is taking all the credit for it. Delhi’s Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, is now quite unhappy with Delhi’s public for demanding the removal of its BRT, which as per his election promise he had to remove. Now there is neither the BRT nor the reward, only pollution remains. The Delhi government is now considering not carrying out any of its election promises, in case it misses out on other awards. All political parties are now looking at the Delhi government for leadership, with all the promises they need to make in coming elections.