Efficiency mandates can build India’s clean tech sovereignty [Commentary] – Mongabay India

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For decades, India’s approach to advanced technologies has followed a predictable, high-stakes pattern. Each time a global technology goes through a generational shift, a mad scramble ensues to import the latest machinery, components, or manufacturing lines. We saw it in the early phases of thermal power automation, witnessed it during the electronics boom, and today we are seeing it play out acutely in the clean energy transition.
While importing technology serves as a necessary jumpstart, relying on it as a permanent strategy creates a fragile foundation. In an era defined by geopolitical volatility, trade barriers, and fractured supply chains, the strategy of continuous imports is no longer just economically draining, but also a risk to national energy security.
To build a truly resilient, low-carbon future, India must pivot from being a passive consumer of global technology to an active creator of indigenous innovations. The key to unlocking this shift does not lie in blunt import bans or open-ended subsidies alone. Instead, it lies in a regulatory mechanism that India has already proven. Anchoring long-term procurement frameworks to progressively tightening, non-negotiable efficiency standards can work. By announcing these escalations well in advance, India can compel industry players to move away from quick-fix imports, invest heavily in domestic research, development, and demonstration (RD&D), and forge deep, lasting linkages with local academia.
India’s climate targets are among the most ambitious in the world, requiring the deployment of hundreds of gigawatts of renewable energy over the next few decades. Yet, much of this transition remains tethered to foreign supply chains.
Solar cell technology has evolved rapidly — from older Al-BSF cells, which lost significant energy through their aluminium rear surface, to PERC cells that recover that lost energy through a smarter reflective coating, and further still to newer TOPCon and Heterojunction technologies that push efficiency even higher. Each time the global industry moves to the next generation, Indian manufacturers are left playing catch-up, importing new production equipment and turnkey lines all over again.
This perpetual cycle of technology imports introduces three distinct vulnerabilities. First, global supply chains are increasingly weaponised or disrupted by trade disputes, geopolitical conflicts, and shipping bottlenecks, meaning India’s decarbonisation timeline remains hostage to external shocks as long as it depends on foreign suppliers for core components.
The second is the hidden cost of obsolescence. Foreign technology is rarely cheap, and buying it repeatedly through every major technology cycle steadily drains capital. When local developers must price in the cost of importing next-generation production lines each time, those hidden expenses ultimately travel down the energy value chain.
The third, and perhaps most structural, is the hollow manufacturing problem. Assembling imported components or operating imported machinery does not build a deeply rooted knowledge economy. True technological sovereignty is achieved only when the core design, engineering, and iterative improvements happen domestically.
An indigenous supply chain is inherently cheaper and more reliable over the long term. But to build one, the domestic market needs a clear, predictable signal that rewards innovation over importation.
The most effective way to stimulate domestic innovation is to leverage the purchasing power of future procurements by linking them to strict, forward-looking technical standards. Rather than trying to pick winning technologies or protecting inefficient local industries, the state should mandate performance outcomes — specifically, energy efficiency.
Consider the solar sector as a primary case study. If India were to immediately announce a progressive grading mandate for all future public and utility-scale solar procurements, it would fundamentally alter the investment horizon for developers and manufacturers alike.
A realistic, forward-looking roadmap could unfold in stages. If the government were to mandate a minimum cell efficiency of 22% in the near term, it would be achievable largely through advanced PERC and baseline TOPCon technologies. Both technologies are already within domestic reach. Raising that bar to 27% by 2030 could push the sector toward advanced silicon and early tandem-cell architectures, compelling manufacturers to invest in next-generation capabilities rather than consolidate around current ones. A further mandate of 30% by 2035 could make perovskite-silicon tandem architectures the dominant technology — a frontier that India could help shape rather than simply adopt.
An immediate announcement of this multi-decade escalator completely changes the corporate calculus. If a developer knows that a standard 22% cell will be legally ineligible for future procurement rounds within a few years, they can no longer rely on a business model built around importing depreciated, older-generation manufacturing equipment from abroad.
Faced with an unyielding efficiency escalator, industry players are forced to look ahead. They must calculate the compounding costs of repeatedly importing newer, highly protected foreign technologies versus the viability of developing in-house RD&D capabilities. Over a ten- to fifteen-year horizon, building local capacity is the economically superior choice.
This approach is not a theoretical experiment; India has successfully deployed it before. A flawless historical parallel can be found in the domestic air-conditioning market, which is driven by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE).
Years ago, the Indian air conditioning sector was heavily dependent on imported compressor technologies and foreign designs to meet shifting consumer demands. To disrupt this dependency, the BEE introduced the Standards & Labelling programme, which continuously raised the efficiency baseline required to achieve coveted star ratings. Crucially, India went a step further by introducing an India-specific metric: the Indian Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio (ISEER).
Unlike the earlier standard that evaluated cooling performance based on a constant, moderate temperature, ISEER was custom-engineered to reflect India’s unique, highly variable climatic zones and higher ambient temperatures.
By anchoring market access and consumer visibility to a tightening, India-specific efficiency standard, and backing it with financial incentives through the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, the regulatory framework left manufacturers with a clear choice: either keep importing expensive foreign components that were not optimised for Indian heat, or invest in domestic engineering to build compressors and heat exchangers tailored precisely to the local climate. PLI scheme was introduced in 2020 and has helped in creating a manufacturing ecosystem in India, even though it doesn’t inherently enhance efficiency.
The strategy worked beautifully. The market shifted decisively. Global and domestic brands such as LG Electronics, Daikin Airconditioning India, and Mitsubishi Electric India established deep manufacturing and engineering bases within India, drastically reducing the country’s reliance on completely built-up or knocked-down imports. The policy proved that when you change the rules of market entry to favour long-term efficiency, the supply chain naturally reorganises itself around domestic innovation.
Setting a strict efficiency roadmap is the demand-side trigger, but the supply side requires a robust ecosystem to deliver the necessary breakthroughs. A major historical failure of Indian industrial policy has been the profound disconnect between laboratory research and commercial deployment. India possesses a deep pool of talent within its Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) labs, think tanks, and premier universities, yet much of their cutting-edge research remains confined to academic journals.
A progressive efficiency mandate forces the private sector to bridge this chasm. When an industrial house faces a looming deadline to reach 27% or 30% solar cell efficiency, it can no longer treat academic collaboration as a token corporate social responsibility (CSR) exercise. It must actively seek out academic partners to solve deep-tech material science, chemical, and engineering challenges.
To accelerate this process, the state must back its mandates with targeted institutional and budgetary support across several fronts.
For instance, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) should play a catalytic role by structuring co-funding mechanisms. If a solar manufacturer or advanced manufacturing firm partners with an academic institution to achieve the next tier of the efficiency roadmap, the ANRF can provide matching grants to de-risk the early-stage, high-uncertainty phases of research.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST), meanwhile, can refocus its funding away from purely exploratory research toward dedicated demonstration and scaling hubs. These hubs would provide the physical infrastructure — such as pilot cleanrooms and testing facilities — where university-developed prototypes can be scaled up to commercial-grade manufacturing speeds.
Cutting across both is the question of intellectual property. Streamlining IP sharing between universities and private entities ensures that when a breakthrough is made, it can be licensed and integrated into domestic factory floors without protracted legal friction.
Achieving true self-reliance in clean tech requires a departure from traditional, protectionist defensive strategies. High import tariffs can temporarily shield domestic industries, but without internal performance pressures, they risk breeding stagnation and keeping the market anchored to older, less efficient technologies.
The path forward must be offensive, strategic, and performance-driven. By designing a system where future procurement is inextricably linked to an escalating ladder of efficiency, India can unleash the latent innovative potential of its private sector and scientific community.
Together, these interventions create a self-sustaining virtuous cycle. Strict efficiency mandates force industry to plan across decades rather than procurement cycles, creating the conditions for deep academic partnerships backed by ANRF and DST funding. Those partnerships, in turn, drive the commercialisation of indigenous technologies — which progressively lower system costs and build supply chains that are resilient by design rather than by accident.
When the core technology is engineered, optimised, and manufactured within our borders, the supply chain shortens, geopolitical exposure drops, and the cost of energy falls.
India has already demonstrated through the transformational restructuring of its appliance sector under BEE that it can rewrite the rules of domestic markets to foster world-class efficiency. It is time to apply that exact same ambition to the broader clean energy landscape. By announcing a clear, progressive, and unyielding efficiency roadmap today, India can finally break free from the import trap — ensuring that the green transition is not just environmentally sustainable, but technologically sovereign.
 
Banner image: Machine operators work on cell printing for solar panels in Mundra, Gujarat, at a manufacturing unit where solar energy components are made from scratch. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
The author is a professor at the School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi and previously served as Director General of the International Solar Alliance (2021–25) and the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (2006–12 and 2013–16).
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