India’s grand sustainability vision, aiming for 50% non-fossil fuel power capacity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2070, is setting off seismic changes across its workforce landscape and throwing up exciting opportunities. But there is a caveat.
On paper, the net-zero agenda translates into millions of green jobs. In reality, however, the country is confounded by a widening skill gap, threatening to jam its sustainability engine. India simply does not have anywhere near the number of appropriately skilled people it needs to achieve its climate goals. Going ahead, in the absence of a credible game-plan, the people pinch could get a lot more painful, stunting the country’s sustainability ambition.
The writing is on the wall: After the multi-trillion-dollar finance question, the poser bedevilling the world’s fourth-largest economy and third-biggest emitter is, how to fill millions of shoes in the sustainability space. And quickly.
Since academia typically lags newly-forming job market demands by three to ten years, depending on the complexity of the skills and the responsiveness of the education system, it is a question that brooks no quick or easy answers.
The Expanding Green Workforce
India’s renewable energy sector is clearly an emerging employment powerhouse. Already, more than a million Indians are engaged in varied roles across the green industry, according to the Renewable Energy and Jobs Annual Review 2024 by IRENA and ILO. When compared with traditional industrial sectors like manufacturing (66 million) and construction (42 million), this seems small. But wait! The 1 million ILO figure is just an indicator of an approaching windfall of demand for the right people.
By 2030 India will need 3.4 million boots on the ground and by 2050 that figure is likely to swell to 10 million, twice as many as the number of people presently employed by the country’s thriving IT sector. For the record, at present 453,000 people are employed in hydropower and 318,000 in the solar industry.
The Dire Skills Gap
A 2023 LinkedIn study shows how incredibly challenging the problem is with only one in eight workers armed with green skills globally. Although comparative India-specific figures are hard to come by, experts agree that the situation in the country is unlikely to be any better due to the disproportionate focus on fossil fuels in its engineering and skilling schools, such as the ITIs. Another contributing factor is the rapid emergence of the sustainability sector as a major employer. As noted, academia often lags emerging job market demands by up to ten years.
Indian institutions offering energy-related programmes, like the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies and Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, remain focused on fossil fuel technologies, mirroring a universal reality: Nearly 70% of the 6142 global universities offering energy-related programmes worldwide, prioritise non-renewable energy over sustainability. Result? Parched pipelines of people skilled in critical sustainability domains like green chemistry, climate modelling, and greenhouse gas accounting. Training in supplementary skills, such as programme design, marketing and consulting—essential for scaling green solutions—also languishes. Santhosh Jayaram, sustainability advisor at HCLTech., sums up the problem. “Higher education curricula have not evolved to include sustainability. Even in business schools, sustainability is often an elective, not a core subject.”
So, what must change? For an answer, Jayaram stresses on the need to integrate sustainability across all disciplines, such as embedding green principles into chemistry. Doubtlessly, this is the way to go. However, already there are some green shoots of hope in the shape of the Government-backed Skill Council for Green Jobs and the Green Skill Development Programme. Together these initiatives aimed to train 560,000 individuals between 2018 and 2021 in pollution monitoring, waste management and renewable energy operations, according to Skill Reporter. Though impressive, this is hardly enough to cover for the fact that less than 10% of students in the Indian education system receive training in sustainability and related skills (2023, Sattva Consulting report).
“Subsidising MSME-led training has worked in other countries and could be a game-changer in India,” suggests Rwitwika Bhattacharya, CEO of Swaniti Global, alluding to the near absence of academia-industry collaboration in the sustainability space. This is clearly a wasted opportunity as, by partnering with renewable energy firms, institutions could co-create industry-relevant curricula, internships and training programmes. In this respect, “MSMEs, expected to emerge as the largest green job employers, should receive incentives to train workers,” says Bhattacharya.
Nowhere is the incongruity of India’s capacity-building outreach more conspicuous than in its top-down approach. These programmes typically bypass the very communities they aim to serve, the rural and disadvantaged populations, which are most deeply affected by transition. “The people designing these programmes are not the ones facing the problems,” notes Raisha Galib of Climate Asia. Ensuring accessibility to training centres and tailoring curricula to local needs is crucial for inclusivity.
India’s sustainability expedition is an uphill march, fraught with formidable HR challenges, ones it must overcome to avert a talent-deficit that could easily unravel its net-zero ambitions. As Bhattacharya asserts, “Skilling for a green transition requires efforts at every level—from government policies to grassroots initiatives.” With the right investments in education, partnerships and policy reforms, India has a realistic chance of bridging the gap. For businesses, the message is clear: tackling the HR challenge is not just about meeting demands—it’s about shaping the future of sustainable growth.
