Can India Mind the Skill Gap, or Will Its Green Dreams Fall Through the Cracks?

India is riding the green wave, but is also at risk of drowning in it. Reason? The country could be overwhelmed by a tide of demand for people required to achieve its ambitious climate goals. From highly skilled niche professionals to entry-level engineers and even helpers, technicians and power plant cleaners, the shortage is acute. And widespread.

The renewable industry alone faces a deficit of 1.2mn skilled workers, a number that could swell to 1.7mn by 2027, according to TeamLease, a contractual staffing company.

If it is any consolation, India is not the only country swimming against the HR tide. LinkedIn says that while demand increased by 11.6% from 2023 to 2024, supply shrank by 5.6% worldwide.

Green jobs have ballooned in India by 41% in just two years. This is just a start. By 2047, there could be 35mn jobs up for grabs according to the Skills Council for Green Jobs (SCGJ).

In the meantime, the cracks are showing everywhere from core renewable energy (RE), electric vehicles (EV) and waste management sectors to retail, finance, IT, manufacturing, real estate, logistics and aviation, among others. Energy auditors, ESG analysts, climate finance experts, sustainability reporting specialists, sustainability consultants…there aren’t nearly enough of any of them.

But How Did We Get Here?

The surge in demand for green professionals was fast but certainly not sudden. After countries submitted their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) at the Paris COP (Conference of Parties) in December 2015, Indian companies started talking to sustainability officers to drive their decarbonisation agendas.

However, the real action started in 2021 when the Securities Exchange Board of India (Sebi) introduced the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework, mandating the top 1,000 companies by market capitalisation to disclose their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance.

The chief sustainability officer at ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel (AM/NS) India, Arvind Bodhankar, says, “Global investors started assessing Indian companies on the ESG parameters, prompting them to appoint sustainability or ESG officers on their boards.” 

Upshot? Large corporations like Reliance Industries (RIL) and Tata Group began adopting climate change mitigation strategies, followed by the rest, including MSMEs, which have started realising the importance of sustainability compliance, ESG reporting and sustainable operations. This has led to the greening of existing roles and the creation of new green roles.

The shortage of skilled people has driven up salaries, with green professionals commanding a premium of up to 40% over carbon-intensive workers, according to a World Bank report. “The general MBA job market is saturated with every student having almost the same skill set and competing for the same limited jobs,” says Neetu Yadav, an assistant professor in strategic management at the Management Development Institute (MDI) Gurgaon. “For students, sustainability is a promising niche—an emerging white space in the red ocean of the MBA market.” This is true for other sectors as well. “I have seen even chartered accountants and those with technical backgrounds pivot to this space to differentiate themselves.”

Glaring Gap

With the widespread adoption of green technologies, demand has spiralled both for basic engineers and people with specialised technical expertise. However, because these domains are still relatively new, an ever-widening gap has opened between demand and supply. ReNew CEO Sumant Sinha points out, “This is clearly visible in technologies like green hydrogen, energy storage and advanced grid integration.”

For a large manufacturing unit or an RE plant, the requirement just for helpers, technicians and power plant cleaners can run into thousands. Facing the heat are placement companies. “There are loads of jobs in the sector, but positions remain open endlessly due to the paucity of right talent,” says Subburathinam P, chief operating officer at Teamlease. “Even someone with just a three-month vocational course would fit the bill, but they are not easily available.”

Contractual roles, which offer even greater job opportunities, saw significantly higher exit rates of up to 33.5% in FY24 in the RE sector. “A paucity of trained people is resulting in high attrition rates, which raises costs in an industry vying with intense international competition,” says Sinha.

The demand-supply gap at higher levels is especially acute. Sandeep Chandna, chief sustainability officer at Tech Mahindra, recently interviewed about 100 people but could shortlist only one. “This is unsurprising,” says Maya Nair, executive director at Elixir Consulting. “Many candidates mention sustainability on their resumes, but scratch the surface and you realise they have no idea.” Posting ESG-related jobs on LinkedIn does not work either. Says Bodhankar of AM/NS, “Only a few candidates from the massive number of applicants make the cut.”

Pushed to the wall, many companies are recasting senior executives from entirely different functions in sustainability roles. Chaitanya Kalia, climate change and sustainability services leader at EY, says, “They are mostly playing double roles. Some are doing well, while the others struggle.”

The decarbonisation space and hard-to-abate sectors are among the most severely affected by the HR crunch. Kalia remarks, “Many companies in these sectors are still taking it as an add-on role. Therefore, I suspect their net-zero transition will take longer.”

It’s not just the candidates applying for these roles who lack the necessary skills; the gap is evident on the employers’ side as well. Nair of Elixir Consulting says, “Many companies don’t have a clear understanding of what to expect from candidates, highlighting the need for HR training within organisations on how to recruit for such roles.”

Slow-to-Adapt Education System

Job markets are dynamic, wired to technologies, lifestyles, social needs, government policies and so on, which can all change quickly and at times suddenly. Not so education systems. These are tethered to structured curricula, academic rigour and, most importantly, the availability of the right subject matter experts, to not only craft new curricula but also impart them. Because of this, there is a 5-7-year industry-academia lag not only in India, but globally. It’s like pitting sprinters against marathoners, with education typically plodding several laps behind fast-moving (and changing) job market demands.

This is particularly true for areas like sustainability, which wasn’t even recognised a decade ago, but is now a $ 30-billion global industry, projected to hit $105.26bn by 2032.  

Says Sunayana Sarkar, senior faculty at Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering in Mumbai: “Such a lag is unsustainable in fast-evolving job landscapes. By the time students graduate to jobs, their learning is already obsolete.” Of the 1.5mn engineering graduates India produces annually, very few leave with job-ready skills in RE or any discipline across the sustainability spectrum.  “Traditional colleges are not equipped to teach RE or other green domains because sustainability is still on the academic fringe,” says Yadav of MDI Gurgaon. "It is a systemic issue. AICTE recommended some exposure to sustainability a few years ago, but without a clear mandate to include it as a core or graded subject, few take it seriously.”  It is offered almost as an afterthought, either as a bridge course or an audit option. For example, environmental studies is among the available courses at the University of Delhi. “However, since it does not count towards grades, students remain indifferent,” notes Yadav. 

Recently, educational institutes such as the TERI School of Advanced Studies, Symbiosis Institute of International Business in Pune and Xavier School of Management have unveiled specialised, sustainability-related courses. Premier engineering and management schools have followed suit—notably the IITs in Delhi and Kharagpur and IISc Bengaluru— with master’s programmes in climate finance, environmental engineering and RE technologies. IIM Mumbai offers an MBA in sustainability management.

However, these are relatively recent, starting around 2017, and, in the face of the magnitude of demand, too few to make a real impact.  Moreover, these programmes mainly feed entry-level roles. Says Kalia of EY: “Students passing out or those who are taking sabbaticals to upskill are yet to reach senior levels.”

Points out Tech Mahindra’s Chandna, “There's a severe shortage of people with genuine ESG expertise because it's a niche skill, and the need for formal training is underestimated. Take the example of Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions: the understanding of these concepts must be precise, but people don’t have it.”

Government Programmes Lag Behind

Through its 200 training centres, 10 assessment agencies and 400 certified trainers, the SCGJ has rolled out a flurry of training programmes and, in collaboration with the Green Skill Development Programme, trained one million individuals in pollution monitoring, waste management and RE operations. However, this is still nowhere near enough because the government-funded skilling infrastructure is nascent, and most programmes are out of sync with the fast-evolving demands of the industry. According to experts cited in a Reuters report, to bridge the skill gap, the government’s current training budget of around Rs 5–6bn needs to be ramped up tenfold.

“Government initiatives for green jobs exist but haven’t scaled up to match growing demand,” Rwitwika Bhattacharya, CEO of Swaniti Global, told Outlook Business earlier. Referring to MNRE’s Suryamitra Skill Development Programme, she adds, “It hasn’t translated into solar sector jobs recently.” The present infrastructure is not only small in scale given the requirements of a nationwide green transition, but also not designed for the complexity of the skills required in the corporate world. There is a need for an infrastructure that provides high-quality training in line with industry demands in the long run.

However, sustainability is here and now, and companies simply cannot wait for systemic transformations to happen. And so, many of them have turned to training their employees in-house. ReNew and Tata Power, for example, run skilling programmes to raise a sustainability-ready workforce. The latter’s 11 training facilities train a large number of people in solar installations, battery management and other green technologies.

Bodhankar of AM/NS says, “We identify and train people with the necessary competencies so they may migrate to sustainability roles.”  Some companies have opened academies, like the ONGC Academy and the Schneider Sustainability School; others have partnered with institutes like MG Motors, which works with 22 engineering colleges and ITIs to upskill students in EVs.

“At Tech Mahindra, we’ve developed internal green IT certification tools to enhance employees' understanding, supported by comprehensive training programmes conducted regularly to explain ESG concepts in-depth,” says Chandna. “Our sustainability team collaborates with the training department to ensure that new employees, right from induction, are sensitised to ESG principles and the company’s sustainability initiatives.”

Similarly, entities like EY, CII and CSE run sustainability certification programmes to contribute their mite to the massive talent pool required, as do edtech platforms like Coursera, edX, Udacity, LinkedIn Learning and upGrad. Sarkar says, “Edtech platforms and collaborations with corporates are enabling quicker curriculum updates and faculty training.” She adds, “Since all senior-level sustainability jobs are multidimensional in nature, people with core branch training with added certifications on climate change and sustainability studies command the best salary packages in the market.”

While these initiatives are commendable, they cannot be a substitute for an education system geared to turning out highly skilled people at scale—this is because the need is colossal and getting increasingly complex. “What’s needed now is a systemic push to bring sustainability into the mainstream. Regulators like UGC and AICTE need to mandate these courses,” says Yadav. “Proper training, targeted courses and active industry engagement are required to build a solid foundation in sustainability and truly integrate it with the SDGs,” says Chandna of Tech Mahindra.

India’s green transition hinges on policy and investment but probably most critically on people. The lack of the right talent is proving to be a significant hurdle on the road to net zero. A widening green skills gap threatens to derail both climate goals and economic gains as industries race to decarbonise. Without urgent investment in workforce development, India risks missing its net-zero targets. The momentum is here, but without the skilled professionals to drive it, the opportunity could slip away.