IREDA CMD Sees Potential For a Million Renewable Jobs By 2030

Pradip Kumar Das, the Chairman & Managing Director at IREDA (India Renewable Energy Development Agency), one of the earliest and largest renewables focused financial institution, said one can anticipate a million jobs in the renewable energy sector by 2030.

Das was speaking at a programme on Renewable Energy Management for cooperatives organised by the Centre for International Cooperation and Training in Agriculture Banking (CICTAB) under the sponsorship of Ministry of Cooperation at VAMNICOM, Pune, Maharashtra.

“India’s Renewable Energy (RE) sector could potentially employ around 10 lakh people by 2030, which would be ten times more than the existing workforce of an estimated 1.1 lakh employed by the sector,” he said in his keynote address at the event.

Highlighting how  90 per cent of renewable energy projects have come up in rural areas, Das spoke about their positive impact on the rural economy.  He also shed light on the potential from existing projects like the PM KUSUM project focused on rural areas, besides other projects at state level.

While Das makes a good point, the high rural bias is also a poor reflection of the failure to push through a strong solar rooftop push in the country, which is where urban centres should come into their own. While residential segment has been  completely underutilised, it is the corporate and industrial segment in India that have still managed to deliver whatever little numbers are being seen in the rooftop segment recently- a segment that can also deliver a far higher proportion of jobs than the utility segment that has delivered capacities and presence in rural areas so far.

Ironically, while the rural areas will continue to ‘benefit’ from clean energy moves, be it solar, wind or even green hydrogen as Das highlighted, India will continue to grapple with the issue land versus development conflicts in its heavily agrarian rural regions. We have already seen how even dry states with abundant ‘waste’ like Rajasthan and Gujarat have seen projects run into trouble, be it due to impact on protected species, or other factors including misclassification of land.