Mehreen Amin is studying in the fourth semester at the Government Degree College for Women in Zakura, Srinagar. Ms. Amin recently completed an intensive solar technical programme through a Kashmir-based training institute registered with the Skill Council for Green Jobs (SCGJ). When the institute was initially mobilising students in her community, she felt an instinctive urge to enrol.

“I wasn’t thinking about career benefits or the future of solar energy back then; my only interest was a hands-on desire to learn how to install the panels,” Ms. Amin recalls. “But now, I realise we will all need these skills in the future. I want to know exactly how to handle and operate this equipment myself.”

Ms. Amin’s training is part of the training of thousands of students and professionals to become “Suryamitras,” or certified solar photovoltaic (PV) technicians. This is a three-month-long programme from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, conducted by the National Institute of Solar Energy, to promote job creation in India’s solar industry.

Back in 2023, some of the Suryamitras were also considered potential candidates for working in the German solar industry.

Within a month of former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to India in February 2023, the Bundesverband Solarwirtschaft (BSW), or the German Solar Industry Association, and the SCGJ signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote skilled worker migration in the solar sector between India and Germany.

BSW is a trade body representing over 1,000 companies in the solar energy and battery storage sector in Germany. The SCGJ is a non-profit, autonomous, industry-led organisation associated with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

As per the MoU, the promise was to place at least 20 Indian Suryamitra electricians in Germany’s solar sector. Another objective was to promote skilled workers exchange to help address and accelerate skilled worker migration in solar between the two countries. By conservative estimates, Germany is facing a shortage of over 1,00,000 workers in the solar sector.

Three years since that MoU was signed, not a single Indian Suryamitra has migrated to Germany.

This is not the first time an official Indo-German agreement promising the transfer of skilled labour has failed to materialise. Two years earlier, the State of Maharashtra and the German State of Baden-Württemberg had signed an agreement on the transfer of skilled labour, promising to send 10,000 skilled workers in 34 trades from the Indian State to Germany. By December 2025, reports confirmed that not a single professional had migrated under the agreement.

Big promises

The BSW-Solar and SCGJ agreement repeats a pattern where not a single skilled professional migrated from India to Germany. It was during Chancellor Scholz’s 2023 visit to India that Germany increased its cap on professional visas for Indian professionals from 20,000 to 90,000.

According to a 2025 study by the German Economic Institute (IW), around 32,800 Indian professionals work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, a nine-fold increase since 2012.

A third of full-time Indian workers aged 25 to 44 are employed in the STEM sector. But the picture isn’t as rosy for non-STEM sectors, especially in areas where vocational training is a must — such as the solar industry.

“Our understanding is that the primary objective of this initiative was to support domestic workforce training and skills development within India to meet the needs of its booming local market, rather than facilitating international placements,” noted David Wedepohl, managing director of International Affairs at BSW Solar and also a signatory of the MoU.

As per BSW Solar, they were not operationally involved in the training programme.

The signatory from the SCGJ, Arpit Sharma, noted that the Suryamitras were already trained under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy scheme, and that the idea of the partnership was to upskill them in German technical standards and provide German-language courses.

“Unfortunately, no candidates were upskilled during the tenure, and no funds were provided to the SCGJ for any task,” noted Mr. Sharma.

According to Mr. Wedepohl, throughout the entire solar value chain, there is a particular demand for skilled workers in building electrical systems, such as DC assembly, AC installation, PV planning and construction management for the PV sector.

According to a 2024 study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, only 18% of companies were actively recruiting workers from abroad, even though 70% were facing a worker shortage.

The reason — language and bureaucratic hurdles such as recognition of professional qualifications. In vocational fields, German companies are strict about on-the-job practical knowledge.

As per Mr. Wedepohl, “The aim was to identify the already trained Suryamitras, which were supported by the National Institute of Solar Energy and if needed, upskill them to German standards.”

Jana Fingerhut, Senior Project Manager (Sustainable Social Market Economy) at Bertelsmann Foundation, notes that German companies are strict about the accreditation of certain professions in addition to language proficiency.

“The accreditation process can cause delays. The government is also cutting down on language and integration courses, which makes it even harder for many qualified people to enter the German job market. We hope that changes in the future,” noted Ms. Fingerhut.

Mr. Sharma noted that a list of 30 Suryamitras was shared with BSW Solar. “The candidates couldn’t make it through the upskilling programme as the German migration laws changed,” said Mr. Sharma.

Speaking to various other students, such as Ms. Amin, it also emerged that many trainees are not enrolling with the objective of building careers in the solar sector. Some trainees said they enrolled for the stipend associated with the programme, while others did it while being engaged in a different occupation.

It emerged that institutes are assigned enrolment targets but receive little guidance on how to identify or recruit candidates genuinely interested in green-sector jobs. As a result, the emphasis often shifts from attracting motivated trainees to simply filling seats.

Structural roadblocks

One thing both sides agree on is the changes to migration frameworks on the German side that further complicated matters.

“When the partnership was originally formed, labour shortages and market conditions in Germany differed from today. The German market grew by roughly 100% between 2022 and 2023. The cooperation provided a valuable opportunity to better understand the Indian solar sector and to explore whether labour mobility between the two countries could be feasible in the future,” said Mr. Wedepohl.

According to a 2026 report from the Bertelsmann Foundation, the number of people employed in Germany’s renewable energy sector reached a record high of 4,36,000 in 2025, a sub-4% increase over 2023. The report notes that the current federal government’s energy policy changes could put thousands of jobs in the sector at risk.

“The previous government placed a strong emphasis on expanding renewable energy and implemented this through new, ambitious expansion targets and faster approval procedures for renewable energy installations. Under the current federal government, a political shift appears to be emerging that could slow down the expansion of renewable energy. However, this is not yet 100% certain, as four energy-sector laws are currently being developed. The initial draft laws, however, suggest that they could lead to lower investment in renewable energy and, as a result, a reduction in jobs,” said Ms. Fingerhut.

In March 2026, Germany’s Economy Minister, Katherina Reiche, discontinued state subsidies for rooftop solar installations up to 25 kW, citing a drop in photovoltaic prices.

“This cut would mean that fewer people have an incentive to install solar panels, which could have a negative impact on investment and, in turn, on employment in the solar industry,” noted Ms. Fingerhut.

At the moment, the BSW and SCGJ partnership focuses on ongoing discussions around skill development for manufacturing and industrial workers across the solar value chain.

“Continued cooperation between governments, industry stakeholders, and training institutions remains important to align qualifications with actual labour market needs,” said Mr. Wedepohl.

(This article is part of the India-Germany Climate and Energy Journalism Programme organised by Clean Energy Wire, supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung)

India’s announcement of its revised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement — the term applied to the mitigation and other climate action targets that countries voluntarily commit to under the agreement — represents a considered step forward when India’s energy and development policies are encountering serious headwinds. It is clear that the government has opted for continuity and incremental advance with respect to India’s earlier NDCs. It is also clearly confident that its commitments will nevertheless be more than adequate in relation to its equitable share of global climate action, in keeping with climate justice and within its expected commitments as a developing nation.

Three climate goals

As the press communique after the Cabinet approval of the updated NDCs noted, there are three specific enhancements that have been committed. The first is an increase in the reduction of emissions intensity of its GDP, from 45% below 2005 levels by 2030 to 47% below 2005 levels by 2035. The second is ensuring that 60% of installed capacity for power generation is from non-fossil fuel sources, while the third is the enhancement of forest and tree cover carbon sinks to 3.5 – 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent above 2005 levels.

India’s climate policies are best understood in the context of its structural constraints as a lower middle income developing country, that determine its available choices for climate action. Over the last three decades, these constraints have not substantially changed, which is also why India continues to insist on the relevance of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But apart from these, given the structure of the Paris Agreement that requires renewed and enhanced commitments to climate mitigation every five years, short-term considerations have also begun to have a considerable weight in the formulation of the NDCs. The rapid deterioration of the global environment for climate action over the last year has undoubtedly brought this issue to the fore.

Enthusiasm for climate action

Structural constraints have not, however, dampened enthusiasm for climate action in India, both at the level of the Centre and the State governments. There is a considerable range of activities designed to set India on the path to low-carbon development, drawing significant public and private sector efforts and resources, including electric vehicles, enhancement of energy efficiency, promotion and deployment of non-fossil fuel sources of electricity generation, new technologies such as green hydrogen and more recently, the active promotion of carbon capture and storage efforts.

But given India’s developmental levels today, it is clearly premature for India to convert all such efforts into the significantly more onerous and accountable commitments that are the NDCs, the progress towards which is to be reported every two years in the Biennial Transparency Report (BTR) to the UNFCCC.

A section of global and domestic public opinion has raised the issue of the adequacy of India’s NDCs relative to a global temperature goal of 1.5 degree warming above pre-industrial levels (the more ambitious part of the Paris Agreement’s goals). Some have downplayed the new targets, one commentator going so far as to call it “a walk in the park”. Others call for increased generation from renewables as the metric and not installed capacity. Even some sections of opinion that have welcomed the NDCs, appear nevertheless to be uncertain on whether these new commitments are genuinely the best that India can make at this time.

The cost of going green

All the above variants of the “India can (must) do more argument” ignore some critical realities that contextualise India’s climate actions. Given that India’s natural energy source is overwhelmingly coal, it is inaccurate to view improvements in emissions efficiency of GDP and the corresponding bending of its emissions trajectory as a “natural” corollary of India’s growth story. Priority to electricity from renewable sources comes with significant costs, including backing down readily available and often cheaper or comparably priced coal-based thermal power, further tilting a playing field that privileges renewable energy to sustain our climate commitments.

Renewable energy (RE) projects including utility scale battery storage have begun to make their appearance in India’s power sector. But the corresponding scaling up of India’s battery storage capacity, required for ensuring the stability of generation even from the proposed 2030 RE targets will run into a few trillion rupees at least. Part of such expansion would have to be funded by the government, deploying resources that would have been utilised in other sectors. At the very least, the deployment of such large-scale battery systems is not immediately feasible. The most globally widespread option of energy storage in reverse pumped hydropower systems, has very limited scope in India at present. Additionally, environmental concerns, and water needs for competing uses such as irrigation, as well as the regulatory challenges faced by all large hydro projects are likely to preclude any rapid expansion.

Optimistic RE projections, not only in India but even globally, have run into the lack of transmission capacity and the challenges of grid balancing, with the associated costs often omitted when referring to the cost-effectiveness of RE power.

Since, for India, coal is the mainstay of power generation when solar and wind cease, unlike the large-scale gas and hydro available elsewhere, the full utilisation of the available RE capacity will inevitably have to be “curtailed”, while adding to the operation and maintenance costs for thermal power operated in this cyclical fashion. These add further to the true cost that India bears for the pursuit of its climate commitments.

Improving energy efficiency in other sectors is also being pursued vigorously, including the introduction of mandatory emissions intensity targets in key industries. The early ramp up of electric vehicles, while the jump from BSIV to BSVI vehicle emissions standards was just coming into place, was another leap-frog moment, whose cost to the economy must not be underestimated. Since the 26th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change at Glasgow, every Central government budget has seen a range of initiatives and resource commitment across various aspects of climate mitigation. Indeed, a major knowledge gap today is that while future costs of increased mitigation action are routinely calculated, the cost burden attached to India’s mitigation initiatives undertaken so far, in the absence of any significant climate finance, have yet to be estimated in a reliable manner.

Accounting for India’s developmental future

At a more over-arching level, India’s mitigation challenge cannot be based on a simple extrapolation of the current structural features and trends of its economy.

India’s developmental future needs room for further large-scale growth in manufacturing and industry, expansion in the provision of goods and services to its population at adequate levels beyond the minimum, and an urban transition that has only just begun. In this context, the “India can do more” arguments that rely on such extrapolation of economic trends and the persistence of current structural features, miss the urgent need to hedge India’s developmental future.

India cannot commit its NDCs to preserving the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, when the goal is rapidly slipping out of reach. This a trend that India cannot reverse, given that its per capita emissions are a third of the global average. Even otherwise, under the voluntary emissions reduction NDCs of the Paris Agreement, the benefits of India’s reduction in emissions below any business-as-usual baseline, are distributed primarily to the big emitters globally, due to their inadequate efforts, and proportionately less to India, especially when the largest historical emitter has walked out of all climate treaties and seeks to dismantle climate action both at home and abroad

India’s climate commitments have to be strategic and circumspect, while its NDCs are formulated in informed self-awareness of its, to use the language of the Paris Agreement, “national circumstances.”

(T. Jayaraman is with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal.)

Published – April 07, 2026 11:01 pm IST