Best of BS Opinion: How India's renewable energy success turned sour

Hello and welcome to BS Views, our daily wrap of today’s opinion page. Today’s pieces cover diverse topics: our editorials examine how India’s renewable energy sector is now a victim of its own success, and ponder the government’s inexplicable pause on privatisation. Our columnists argue for the world to engage more with China than less, and why India needs to focus more on its social sector. Take a look.   

Renewable energy in India seems to have become the snake that devours its own tail, in a manner of speaking. Our first editorial points out that earlier tenders have failed to find buyers at auctions, despite solar power being the cheapest source of power currently. State electricity boards are loath to sign future contracts at higher prices now, given prices’ downward direction. Renewable energy accounts for over 45 per cent of installed capacity in India, but the success of scaling up has come at a high cost: actual power continues to be primarily coal-based.   

Our second editorial wonders why the government seems to have inexplicably put its divestment strategy on hold. Its reticence to divest PSUs flies in the face of its own earlier pronouncements. The reluctance to privatise opens up knotty financial issues, since it needs to raise money for capital expenditures without increasing the tax burden, which will anyway take a Rs 1 trillion hit because of the tax rebate. .   

Columnist Anirudh Shingal wonder if it is really possible to decouple from China, which has grown its share of global imports to 16.3 per cent by 2019? Despite tariffs, it continues to dominate indirect imports, in that raw materials to other countries still flow from it. And given its dominance in rare earth metals, and the world’s growing reliance on those for batteries and chips, it makes more sense to engage constructively with China without compromising on domestic interests.   

Our second columnist, Pritam Datta, points out that India’s commitment to the public health sector continues to shrink, and cautions that this could hit socio-economic progress, especially in addressing poverty, inequality, and access to basic services. While allocation to the sector has increased in the Budget for 2025-26, a welcome move, he says the Centre needs to do more to boost the social sector as an engine of development.   

In today’s book reviews, Shubhda Chaudhury delves into Stanly Johny’s 'Original Sin: Israel, Palestine and the Revenge of Old West Asia' which deals with issues of alienation and “othering” that affect people in the region. The book traverses the rich but complicated history of West Asia, as well as India’s evolving engagement with the region, and the power games that have brought it today to where it is, including the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas against Israel.