India’s clean energy transition extends beyond targets to institutions, markets, and delivery. Dr Ajay Mathur, associated with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) and the International Solar Alliance (ISA), now an IIT Delhi professor, explains policy-to-ground realities.
India’s clean energy transition is often discussed through capacity additions, targets and timelines. Alongside these measurable outcomes, the process also involves institutional design, market responses and implementation pathways that shape how policies translate into action on the ground. Dr Ajay Mathur, who has led two institutions closely associated with India’s energy transition, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) and the International Solar Alliance (ISA) has worked across both domestic and international settings where such questions are central to policy execution. Presently, a professor at the School of Public Policy at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Mathur brings a practitioner’s perspective to ongoing discussions around energy transitions.
One of the key challenges is to get a viewpoint that all stakeholders agree to. Whether it was the BEE or the ISA, the issue always was that you have to get to a view, to a policy, that is acceptable to all. This means that in the BEE, we did a lot of stakeholder consultations with industry on the one hand and with various ministries of the Government of India on the other hand.
In the ISA, we had to talk with a large number of countries to figure out their views and essentially also help them in building up their views on what a successful policy may look like. Sometimes countries themselves are not very clear about what they should have, and then it behoves us to make sure that the policy works. And for a policy to work, what I have found is you need to create a clear institution and a clear set of principles, guidelines, standard operating practices—call it what you meant—and you need a budget to make it happen. If these two things happen, then you have got a successful policy; you also got a success in implementing it.
Let me give you an example: if you take a solar lantern or a solar lamp, as soon as you changed the incandescent bulb to an LED bulb—an energy efficiency action, right—the amount of energy declined considerably. Even though the price of the bulb was more, the solar panel reduced to about six, seven, eight times what it was earlier. So did the battery, and they reduced the price, and the overall price of the solar lamp is much lower. It is one-sixth of what it was earlier.
What it implies is that you first have to have energy efficiency products and then move to renewable energy. In my view, the country did well globally by first positioning itself as an energy efficiency leader and then as a renewable energy leader as well.
Energy efficiency policy often depends less on technology and more on behavioural and market response. In your experience at the BEE, what did that teach you about designing policy that actually changes consumption patterns?
If you look at the Standards and Labelling programme, the Star programme as we call it, it is really about behavioural nudges. It is about getting you and me to adopt a more efficient device. And what did we do? We put labels with stars on it. A five-star was more efficient than a two-star.
But what is also important is that, from a five-star to a one-star, the narrative needs to be told to you and I, who are the consumers of that device, who are the buyers of that device. So an outreach effort with the narrative is also equally important. In my view, people do change their behaviour if it is in their interest and value system.
So what we saw was that here was something which saved you money, or in the case of five-star, here was something which clearly was said to be the best. If I want the best, I want the best of air conditioners also. The problem was I was not sure what is the best. The star labelling did that. And what it therefore did was give the nudge—that was needed by you and I to make our decisions.
There are two major changes occurring in most developing countries at the same time. On the one hand, as in India pre-1990 or pre-2003, all investment in the electricity sector and the energy sector was government-based. Now, most of the developing countries who were members of the ISA—there is no more government funding because they are up to their ears in debt, in borrowed money. So, they need to move to a model that attracts the private sector and its money. Therefore, that is the first transition they are going through—from government to private sector.
At the same time, there is a second revolution in which you are talking of moving away from fossil fuels to renewables. And therefore the regulations, the thinking, the overall structure of the grid is all based on fossil fuels. With renewables, that will change.
So, convincing governments that they needed people, new technologies and new finances for this to happen—that was a tough task. You had to essentially show it country by country: this is what you need to do.
At the end of the day, you need to enable the Indian industry to have global markets. That is the defining point. Now, what is important for that to happen is, number one: that they adopt policies that make it happen, that create the demand. And the second is that there is adequate local skills to choose the right equipment and install and service the right equipment. Therefore, to me, the change of the regulations and the skills development go hand in hand. And that is where India is positioning itself and needs to position itself more strongly in the years to come.
