Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is a treaty-based international intergovernmental organisation dedicated to supporting strong, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth in developing countries and emerging economies. GGGI’s India portfolio — spanning low-carbon buildings, industrial decarbonisation, renewable energy investment, subnational green finance, circular economy, and clean cooling — reflects the full breadth of the country’s green growth agenda.
EVolution Auto India presents an exclusive interview with Soumya Garnaik, India Country Head, Global Green Growth Institute on its role in India’s climate and development commitments.
Q: As India Country Head of GGGI, how do you define “green growth” in the Indian context? What are your major priorities?
Soumya Garnaik: There is a story I often tell when people ask me this question. In January 2015, our Prime Minister launched a programme called UJALA — Unnat Jyoti by Affordable LEDs for All. At the time, an LED bulb in India cost INR 350 to INR 400. LED, by technology is energy efficient, hence consumes 60%-80% less energy for producing same output. Most households could not afford to switch to LED from the incandescent bulbs. A demand aggregation model at national scale, crashed the price to INR 70 per bulb, and put energy-efficient lighting into the hands of tens of millions of homes. By its tenth anniversary in January 2025, the programme had distributed over 360 million LED bulbs, generating annual household savings of over INR 19 crore, and cutting approximately 38 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year — with no direct subsidy to consumers. That story, more than any policy document, captures what green growth means in the Indian context: it is a development agenda, not purely an environmental one.
India is not choosing between growth and sustainability — it never had that luxury, and frankly, it shouldn’t want it. The country is simultaneously urbanising at extraordinary pace, industrialising, building out infrastructure, expanding energy access, and creating livelihoods for one of the world’s youngest populations. The question is not whether this growth happens, but how it can be made cleaner, more resource-efficient, more resilient, and globally competitive from the outset. So, green growth is an approach to economic development that promotes growth and prosperity while protecting the environment, reducing pollution, and using natural resources efficiently
At GGGI, our priorities emerge directly from that framing.
The first is sustainable finance at scale. As per reports, India’s net-zero transition by 2070 will require cumulative investments of approximately USD 10 trillion. Yet current tracked climate finance flows amount per year is roughly about 25% of what is needed. That gap is not a technicality. It is the single most binding structural constraint on India’s transition. Closing it requires robust climate finance taxonomy with stronger green bond markets, blended finance instruments, transition finance frameworks, and — critically — a pipeline of bankable projects that institutional capital can deploy into. Our work to support REC Ltd. to raise $ 500 million through green bonds gives ample learning to explore such avenues in clean energy sector.
The second is low-carbon buildings and industrial transition. India’s commercial building sector is expanding at over 9% per year, and more than 50% of the buildings that will exist in 2030 are yet to be constructed. This is, simultaneously, India’s greatest carbon lock-in risk and its greatest opportunity. Through our Asia Low Carbon Buildings Transition (ALCBT) project with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs — targeting EUR 60 million in investment mobilisation by 2028 — and our forthcoming SMARTEE-B programme, which targets USD 400 million in investment mobilisation by 2031, we are working to make low-carbon design and energy-efficient construction the default, not the exception.
The third is industrial decarbonisation and electrification. Through our ongoing partnership with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) on electrification potential in India’s core industrial sectors, we are helping for a policy pathway for industry to transition to more electrification applications in a way that is economically feasible. The work spans sectoral marginal abatement cost curves, real-world electrification case studies in MSMEs and heavy industry, and possible national level programs on technologies like heat pumps.
The fourth is subnational execution. India’s transition will ultimately be won or lost at the level of states, cities, utilities, and local institutions. Our portfolio spans Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Telangana — each with distinct resource endowments, industrial structures, and financing needs. The diversity of that portfolio is itself a statement about how we approach the challenge.
Q: How does GGGI align its work with India’s climate and development commitments?
Soumya Garnaik: India’s climate architecture is more ambitious than most international observers appreciate — and recent milestones are making that harder to dismiss.
In June 2025, India achieved 50% of its cumulative installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources, accomplishing a key NDC commitment five years ahead of the 2030 target. As of March 31, 2026, total non-fossil fuel capacity stood at 283.46 GW — including 150.26 GW of solar, 56.09 GW of wind, 51.41 GW of large hydro, and 8.78 GW of nuclear — out of a total installed base of 532.74 GW. India now ranks third globally in renewable energy installed capacity, surpassing Brazil, according to IRENA’s Renewable Energy Statistics 2026. On July 29, 2025, a historic first: renewables met 51.5% of India’s total electricity demand of 203 GW on a single day, with solar alone generating 44.50 GW, wind 29.89 GW, and hydro 30.29 GW.
These numbers matter. But what matters even more, from our perspective at GGGI, is the direction of the underlying economics. Solar capacity has expanded 53-fold since 2014 — from 2.82 GW to 150.26 GW as of March 2026. Domestic solar module manufacturing capacity has surged from 2.3 GW in 2014 to approximately 172 GW as of March 2026, with solar module imports declining threefold — from USD 2.15 billion in FY 2025 to USD 758 million by January 2026. This is not just energy transition — it is industrial policy running in parallel with it.
India’s recently approved 2035 NDC targets — a 47% reduction in emissions intensity from 2005 levels, and 60% of installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources by 2035 — give us the policy scaffolding we need to orient long-term investment.
Our role at GGGI is to help translate these national ambitions into investable and implementable pathways. In practice, that means developing bankable project pipelines in states that lack transaction advisory capacity; mobilising long-term finance into sectors like energy-efficient buildings and clean industrial processes; and building the institutional credibility of state and sectoral entities to access green capital markets. Our collaborations at national or sub-national level typically see strategic outcomes like GHG emission reduction, investment mobilized, jobs created, people getting clean energy access etc. apart from integrating capacity building into our overall deliverables.
Q: What roles do state governments play in India’s green transition, and where do you see the greatest opportunities?
Soumya Garnaik: Here is the structural reality: climate policy in India is made nationally, but climate outcomes are delivered locally.
Almost every sector that will define India’s transition over the next two decades — electricity distribution, urban land use, building codes, industrial siting, water management, transport, cooling — is either a state subject or primarily implemented through state institutions. The ambition embedded in national targets only materialises when states, cities, and utilities have the technical capacity, financial health, and institutional bandwidth to act on it.
GGGI’s subnational portfolio illustrates both the opportunity and the complexity. Our work in Himachal Pradesh helped catalyse a USD 250 million World Bank Line of Credit for power sector reforms, with technical support for integrated resources planning and digitisation. In Madhya Pradesh, bid advisory and technical due diligence support helped unlock USD 176 million in investment for a 600 MW floating solar project. In Odisha, we are conducting a preliminary techno-commercial assessment for 100 MW+ floating solar with GRIDCO to create an investment-ready project pipeline. In Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, our cool roofs programme is demonstrating, with measurement and verification, how passive building interventions can reduce thermal discomfort and energy demand in the existing building stock — with direct policy recommendations flowing to State Designated Agencies. To add to this is our work on Asia Low-carbon Transition project (ALCBT) in Kerala, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh where we target EUR 60 million investment in building retrofits.
What unifies these engagements is a recognition that states are increasingly viewing sustainability not as a compliance burden but as an economic development strategy. There is fierce competition today among states to attract renewable energy manufacturing, green hydrogen investments, EV supply chains, and battery manufacturing parks. That competitive dynamic is one of the most powerful accelerants of ambition in the Indian system.
And yet the gap I consistently encounter — which deserves greater recognition in policy discourse — is in project preparation capacity. Climate finance does not flow because targets exist. Capital flows when projects are technically prepared, financially structured, and institutionally credible. DISCOM accumulated losses across India stand at approximately USD 75 billion, and unpaid dues to power generators were estimated at over USD 9 billion as of early 2025. These are not accounting problems — they are structural constraints on the pace of India’s entire clean energy deployment. Reforming DISCOM finances — through tariff reform, operational efficiency improvement, and financial restructuring — may ultimately be more consequential for India’s energy transition than any individual renewable energy programme.
Q: What are the most significant lessons from implementing green growth initiatives across India’s diverse regions?
Soumya Garnaik: The first and most important lesson is one that took years to fully internalise: India does not have a single transition pathway.
The realities of a Himalayan district like Kinnaur, a coal-dependent corridor in Jharkhand, a drought-prone farming belt in Vidarbha, and a rapidly urbanising peri-urban cluster around Hyderabad are fundamentally different — different resource endowments, different economic structures, different institutional capacities, different political economies. Strategies designed at the national level without regional differentiation either become irrelevant in practice or create new distortions.
Our portfolio reflects this directly. The intervention needed in Himachal Pradesh — supporting grid integration of abundant hydro capacity and upgrading digitisation infrastructure — is structurally different from what makes sense in Odisha, where floating solar on reservoirs offers a spatially efficient pathway to clean energy without competing with agricultural land. And both differ from Kerala, where the built environment challenge is primarily about retrofitting existing housing stock with passive cooling solutions in a warm, humid climate — which is precisely what our cool roofs work with the Energy Management Centre (EMC) is addressing.
The second lesson is about the implementation gap between policy and outcome. India has strong policy frameworks. ECBC 2017 provides three tiers of efficiency performance for commercial buildings, with the highest — Super ECBC — delivering 50% or more in energy savings over a conventional building. But only 22–23 states have notified ECBC, and compliance monitoring remains uneven across most of those states. The ALCBT project — our five-year programme with MoHUA — is specifically designed to address this implementation gap. By March 2026, it had developed a buildings registry covering 1,687 buildings across three states, completed Building Emission Assessments (BEAT) on 302 buildings, and trained over 2,400 professionals across 18 states — with 24% female participation.
The third lesson is about narrative and resonance. Climate action gains real political traction in India when it is connected to lived experience: cleaner winter air in Delhi and the Indo-Gangetic Plain, lower household electricity bills, less heat stress in poorly ventilated urban homes during a May that regularly sees temperatures at or above 45°C. Framing the green transition as an investment in livability, resilience, and economic modernisation — rather than in abstract carbon metrics — is not just communication strategy. It is empirically the most accurate description of what this transition is actually about.
Q: Which emerging technologies will shape India’s green transition? How do digital systems fit in?
Soumya Garnaik: If I had to identify the sectors where India’s defining technological bets will be placed over the next decade, I would point to four: green hydrogen and its derivatives, advanced cooling, long-duration energy storage, and digital infrastructure for the transition.
Let me start with green hydrogen, because the ambition here is remarkable. India’s National Green Hydrogen Mission, launched in 2023 with an outlay of INR 19,744 crore, targets 5 million metric tonnes (MMT) of annual production capacity by 2030, supported by approximately 125 GW of dedicated renewable capacity. As of May 2025, 19 companies had been allocated annual production capacity of 862,000 tonnes, and 15 firms had been awarded 3,000 MW of annual electrolyser manufacturing capacity. The Mission is expected to attract over INR 8 lakh crore in total investments, create six lakh jobs, and avoid nearly 50 MMT of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2030. Our own technical work with MNRE on bridging the grey-to-green hydrogen cost gap is directly embedded in this national ambition.
The challenge — which we need to be honest about — is cost. Green hydrogen currently costs[1] approximately USD 4–5 per kg, compared to USD 2.3–2.5 per kg for conventional grey hydrogen. The cost convergence trajectory depends on falling renewable electricity prices, electrolyser scaling, and policy continuity. India has the renewable energy base and increasingly the manufacturing capacity to get there — but it will require sustained support through the demand-side development phase.
Then there is cooling — perhaps the most underappreciated policy challenge in India’s entire sustainability agenda. India’s cooling demand is projected to grow eight-fold by 2037–38, according to the India Cooling Action Plan. In 2024, cooling-related emissions already stood at approximately 156 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent; without effective intervention, that figure could nearly double to 329 Mt CO₂e by 2035. AC penetration remains below 20 units per 100 households, with projections suggesting a two-to-six-fold increase over the next decade as incomes rise and extreme heat intensifies.
The intersection of cooling with buildings, urban planning, public health, and energy infrastructure is where GGGI’s work has direct relevance. Our cool roofs demonstration programme in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh — a programme of its kind in India to link passive cooling interventions with rigorous measurement and verification, and policy recommendation pathways to State Designated Agencies — is a small but important prototype of what large-scale cool building transition can look like.
On digital systems, India’s existing capacity is genuinely a strategic asset. The same institutional creativity that produced Aadhaar, UPI, and ONDC can be brought to bear on sustainability outcomes. Our work on building-level emissions assessment being developed under ALCBT is an example. The combination of satellite data, AI-driven grid analytics, smart metering, and geospatial planning tools has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency and resilience of India’s infrastructure systems — provided the data governance and institutional ownership questions are resolved in parallel.
The larger point is this: the next phase of the global clean economy will belong to countries that can combine clean physical infrastructure with digital intelligence at scale. India has the ingredients. The question is whether they get connected fast enough.
Q: How do you assess India’s progress toward a low-carbon future?
Soumya Garnaik: India’s progress over the last decade is, in several important respects, one of the most under-recognised stories in global climate action — and the pace is accelerating.
In FY 2025–26 (April 2025 to March 2026), India added a record 55.3 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity in a single year — the highest annual increase ever recorded, nearly doubling the previous record of 29.5 GW in FY 2024–25. Solar additions alone reached 44.6 GW, an 87.2% year-on-year increase. In Q1 2026 alone, India installed 15.3 GW of new solar capacity — the highest quarterly addition on record, representing a 143% year-on-year jump over Q1 2025. Solar energy has grown 53-fold since 2014, from 2.82 GW to 150.26 GW as of March 2026. India now holds the third-largest solar capacity globally and the fourth-largest wind capacity.
What gives me equal confidence, however, is what is happening in manufacturing. India’s domestic solar module manufacturing capacity has grown from 2.3 GW in 2014 to approximately 172 GW as of March 2026, with solar module imports declining threefold — from USD 2.15 billion in FY 2025 to USD 758 million by January 2026. This is a supply chain transformation occurring alongside the capacity rollout, and it fundamentally changes India’s exposure to import risk and price volatility.
At the same time, I want to be clear-eyed about where the next chapter gets harder. Despite 53.21% of installed capacity coming from non-fossil sources, coal continues to account for roughly 67.7% of actual electricity generation. The gap between installed capacity and dispatched generation is partly a storage problem, partly a transmission problem — approximately 60 GW of renewable capacity has struggled with evacuation constraints — and partly a financial problem rooted in DISCOM distress.
The harder transition lies beyond the power sector. Buildings consume 31% of India’s energy, and the commercial building stock is projected to triple by 2030. Heavy industry — steel, cement, chemicals — remains difficult to decarbonise quickly. The Carbon Credit Trading Scheme and the Renewable Consumption Obligation being implemented through BEE, are the institutional architecture through which India will eventually extend market-based signals into hard-to-abate sectors.
The deepest strategic insight I hold is this: India is still building the infrastructure it will use through mid-century. The buildings being designed today, the industrial facilities being commissioned, the urban systems being laid out — these will shape India’s emissions and resilience profile for the next forty to fifty years. That creates both a risk of lock-in and a rare opportunity that very few major economies have had: the chance to build it right from the start.
Q: What does a successful green growth story for India look like by 2030?
Soumya Garnaik: A successful story by 2030 is not a single milestone — it is a direction of travel made structurally irreversible.
In energy, it means reaching and credibly operating 500 GW of non-fossil capacity — a Panchamrit commitment that India is on track to meet — but, more critically, it means battery storage, grid infrastructure, and DISCOM financial health keeping pace with capacity addition, so that clean electricity is actually dispatched rather than curtailed.
In buildings, it means ECSBC and the Eco Niwas Samhita being enforced meaningfully across all 28 states, not just the 22–23 that have notified them today. It means the investment pipeline activated by ALCBT — EUR 60 million mobilisation target for low-carbon buildings in India by 2028 — proving that green building finance can be institutionalised and scaled. And it means SMARTEE-B’s USD 400 million mobilisation target by 2031 demonstrating that energy efficiency in buildings is a genuine investable asset class, not a policy aspiration.
In industry, it means the CCTS and RCO which BEE is operationalising generating real price signals that shift capital allocation in energy-intensive sectors. It means green hydrogen costs moving toward cost parity, with the Mission’s 5 MMT target serving as both a volume anchor and a manufacturing scale enabler.
In circular economy and food systems, it means programmes like our Food Loss & Waste (FLW) initiative in Telangana — targeting 84,000+ tonnes per year of direct GHG reduction and USD 30 million in green investment mobilisation across the food supply chain from farm to fork — demonstrating that the green transition encompasses biological cycles and agricultural systems, not just energy infrastructure.
And running through all of this is an inclusion dimension that I believe is foundational to whether this transition holds politically. India’s shift away from fossil fuels will reshape the economic geography of coal-dependent states and communities. Workers in mining, logistics, and carbon-intensive manufacturing will need pathways into the new economy. That is not a peripheral concern — it is the political economy of the entire transition. A green growth story that generates jobs, strengthens livelihoods, improves public health, and enhances resilience across income groups will be far more durable than one narrowly optimised for emissions metrics.
If by 2030 sustainability is structurally embedded in India’s investment decisions, infrastructure standards, and industrial policy — and is widely perceived as a driver of competitiveness rather than a constraint on growth — India will have created a development model that the rest of the Global South will study and adapt for decades.
Q: What challenges in India’s green transition deserve more attention than they currently receive?
Soumya Garnaik: I want to name five — each of which I consider consequential and consistently underweighted.
First: subnational financial and institutional capacity. India’s state distribution utilities carry approximately USD 75 billion in accumulated losses and owed over USD 9 billion in arrears to generators as of early 2025. These are not accounting problems — they are structural bottlenecks in the physical delivery of clean energy to consumers. Reforming DISCOM finances may ultimately be more consequential for India’s energy transition than any individual renewable energy programme.
Second: cooling. Cooling demand is projected to grow eight-fold by 2037–38. Cooling-related emissions, already at 156 Mt CO₂e in 2024, could nearly double to 329 Mt CO₂e by 2035 without intervention. And yet AC penetration remains below 20 units per 100 households, with a two-to-six-fold surge expected over the next decade as incomes rise and extreme heat intensifies. India’s India Cooling Action Plan has set targets to reduce cooling demand by 20–25%, refrigerant demand by 25–30%, and cooling energy requirements by 25–40% by 2037–38. But ICAP’s implementation has been fragmented and underfunded relative to the scale of the challenge. Getting cooling policy right — through passive building design, efficiency standards, district cooling, thermal storage, and refrigerant transition — is one of the most time-sensitive challenges in India’s entire sustainability portfolio.
Third: the buildings-finance nexus. India’s building sector currently consumes 31% of the country’s energy, and commercial floor space is growing at over 9% per year. A Super ECBC-compliant building is 50% more energy efficient than a conventional one. Yet the market for green building finance remains thin, and the gap between code adoption and enforcement is wide — only 22–23 states have notified ECBC. Closing that gap is precisely the mandate of our ALCBT and SMARTEE-B programmes, but it requires a sustained, multi-year commitment to building both the technical infrastructure and the financial ecosystem simultaneously.
Fourth: industrial decarbonisation signals. The Carbon Credit Trading Scheme and Renewable Consumption Obligation represent India’s first genuine attempt to extend market-based decarbonisation incentives into designated consumer industry. Getting the price signal right, the verification infrastructure credible, and the compliance pathway clear for energy-intensive industries — including the MSMEs that constitute the vast majority of India’s industrial base — will determine whether these frameworks drive real emissions reductions or become another compliance formality.
Fifth: food systems and circular economy. The link between food loss and waste, land use, methane emissions, and green economic development is still underappreciated in India’s transition narrative. The food systems sit at the intersection of agricultural livelihoods, nutrition security, land use efficiency, and emissions, and they deserve a much more prominent place in India’s green growth agenda than they currently occupy.
The underlying theme across all five is the same: the supply of clean technology and green infrastructure in India is increasingly adequate. The binding constraints today are institutional capacity, financial depth, market design, and implementation quality. Those are less photogenic than a solar farm or a hydrogen facility — but they are what will ultimately determine whether India’s extraordinary ambitions translate into equally extraordinary outcomes.