Energy transition must be just or it will not be permanent

A 2024 Greenpeace map of India's coal heartland tells a story of two arithmetics. Across Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal and eastern Madhya Pradesh, around 13 million livelihoods depend directly or indirectly on coal — miners, truckers, washery hands, railway porters, contract labour, small shopkeepers, restaurant cooks, school-fee-payers. Coal India Limited produced 778 million tonnes in 2024, a record. In the same year, India added 17 GW of renewable capacity, also a record. Both arithmetics are real. An energy transition that abandons the workers, communities and regions of the first arithmetic cannot be permanent. Justice is not a sentimental supplement to the climate calculation. It is the structural condition of sustainability. A transition that is unjust will be politically reversed before it is technically complete.

India's targets are now well known. By 2030, 500 GW of non-fossil installed capacity, 50 per cent of total energy from non-fossil sources, and a reduction of emissions intensity per unit of GDP by 45 per cent from 2005 levels — these commitments form the country's Nationally Determined Contributions submitted at COP26 Glasgow in November 2021. The longer horizon is net-zero by 2070, articulated in the Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy at COP27 in 2022. The implementation map already covers PM-KUSUM for farm-pump solarisation, the Production-Linked Incentive scheme for solar PV manufacturing, the FAME II scheme for electric mobility, and the National Solar Mission. The PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, launched on 15 February 2024, aims to rooftop-solarise one crore households, redistributing not just generation but ownership. Solar installed capacity has crossed 90 GW; wind 47 GW; and the Khavda renewable park in Gujarat at 30 GW will be the world's largest single-location project.

Just-transition challenges form the harder track. South Africa's 8.5 billion dollar Just Energy Transition Partnership, announced at COP26 in 2021 with the European Union, United Kingdom, France, Germany and United States, became the global template — though its implementation has been bumpy. Indonesia and Vietnam followed with their own JETPs. India has declined a JETP arrangement of similar form, preferring sovereign-led financing, but established the NITI Aayog Just Transition Working Group in 2024 to build district-level transition plans for coal-belt regions. The cases are difficult: Dhanbad has 27 coal-dependent townships; Korba's electricity output runs entire states; Singrauli's mines feed thermal plants that power Delhi. Each needs not just alternative employment but alternative identity — what does a third-generation mining family do when the seam closes? The Coal India Ltd's diversification into solar parks and aluminium-grade alumina, while welcome, requires retraining timelines longer than current planning has accommodated.

The horizon extends well beyond electrons. The National Green Hydrogen Mission, approved on 4 January 2023 with an outlay of 19,744 crore rupees, targets 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen production capacity by 2030 — for steel, fertiliser, refining and shipping. The BioE3 Policy of August 2024 places bio-manufacturing at the centre of India's circular-economy ambitions. The Critical Minerals Mission of January 2025 secures supply chains for lithium, cobalt, rare earths and other elements that the energy transition consumes voraciously. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act 2022 enabled the Indian Carbon Market, with compliance and offset segments — converting decarbonisation into a price signal that can shape investment. The Battery Energy Storage System obligation from FY 2024 onwards, integrating storage into renewable tenders, addresses the intermittency problem that has long haunted solar and wind.

One counter-view deserves attention. The 2022-23 European gas crisis, triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, demonstrated that hasty energy transitions in the absence of robust alternatives create severe security and welfare costs. Germany returned to coal in winter 2022. The United Kingdom delayed several phase-out deadlines. The lesson is sequencing, not capitulation. India's 2025 baseload requirements still depend significantly on thermal capacity, and abrupt closures would risk grid instability that hurts the poor first. The discipline is transition realism: build renewable capacity, build storage, build transmission, train workers, retire coal in planned phases — not in panic. The 'phase-down' language adopted at Glasgow 2021 reflects this realism; phase-out is the destination, phase-down is the route.

The deeper political economy is that an energy transition without justice will face local resistance that no climate target can survive. The Hasdeo Aranya struggle in Chhattisgarh between 2023 and 2025 was not against renewable energy; it was against being treated as resource colonies for someone else's development. The protests at Sterlite Copper in Thoothukudi in 2018 were not against industrialisation; they were against pollution borne by communities who did not benefit. The just-transition challenge is, fundamentally, a question of voice: do the people most affected sit at the planning table, or merely receive the consequences? The Niyamgiri precedent of 2013, where the Supreme Court empowered gram sabhas to decide on mining in their territories, is the constitutional answer that energy planners can no longer ignore. The Forest Rights Act 2006 community-rights provisions must be honoured in transition planning, not deferred for it.

The skilling question is decisive. The Skill Council for Green Jobs estimates that India will need 3 million green-collar workers by 2030 — solar installers, wind technicians, battery storage engineers, hydrogen plant operators, EV mechanics, grid integration specialists, carbon-credit auditors. The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana 4.0 has begun green-skill modules; the Industrial Training Institutes are being upgraded; the National Skill Development Corporation has signed Memoranda of Understanding with solar and wind developers. But the speed of skilling is currently slower than the speed of capacity addition, which means the social adjustment will lag the technical transition. Closing this gap is not optional.

Equity within transition matters as much as equity around it. Rooftop solar that reaches only the urban middle class entrenches energy poverty in rural areas. Electric vehicles that remain affordable only to upper-income buyers slow public adoption while transferring public subsidies regressively. Carbon markets that monetise corporate decarbonisation without addressing community displacement become accounting exercises. The PM-KUSUM model — subsidising solar pumps for small and marginal farmers — and the PM Surya Ghar prioritising lower-income households are structurally important precisely because they push the transition's benefits downward.

The International Labour Organization's Guidelines for a Just Transition (2015) commit signatories to 'a just transition for all towards an environmentally sustainable economy'. The phrase 'for all' is doing most of the work. India's coal worker, solar installer, mineral miner, EV battery technician, hydrogen plant operator and electricity consumer must all see themselves in the new energy map — not as casualties of an externally imposed climate timetable but as participants in a national reinvention. Skilling, social protection, livelihood diversification, regional industrial policy, schools and clinics in transitioning districts — these are not soft accompaniments to the energy transition; they are its hard architecture. Justice is the only adhesive long enough to hold a transition spanning five decades. Without it, the renewable miracle of 2030 will produce the political crisis of 2040. With it, India can build the model the developing world is watching for.