Thinking in Models: India’s Viksit Future and Net-Zero Ambitions Cannot Ignore the Land Crunch

In our ‘Thinking in Models’ series, we break down NITI Aayog’s latest reports on scenarios towards Viksit Bharat and Net Zero. After laying out big-picture impressions in Part 1, this piece focuses on the risks involved in widely used approaches to net-zero scenario planning and outlines a framework developed by CSTEP to explicitly address them.

NITI Aayog’s net-zero power pathway rests on aggressive electrification combined with near-total ‘RE‑fication’ of the grid, with solar capacity reaching ~5,600 GW and wind ~1,000 GW by 2070. This mirrors many Integrated Assessment Model-based 1.5 °C and net-zero scenarios, which assign India extraordinarily large solar and wind build-outs on the assumption that technology improvements, efficiency gains, and land availability will align smoothly.

In this scenario, extremely optimistic efficiency assumptions, such as solar land intensities of ~1.98 acres/MW and idealised multi-use wind landscapes, make the aggregate land requirement appear modest relative to national wasteland estimates. This framing can give the impression that the pathway is largely straightforward.

Yet, the NITI Aayog report itself acknowledges that net zero entails a profound socio-economic transformation, unfolding under tight land and water constraints. While roughly 11% of estimated wastelands may appear sufficient on paper, this masks intense, spatially concentrated competition in densely populated and ecologically fragile regions. Crucially, land and water requirements are estimated ex post, without feedbacks that allow land or water scarcity to reshape energy choices. The report notes this limitation and calls for future Climate, Land, Energy, and Water (CLEW)-type integrated modelling, where land and water constraints actively inform the energy pathway.

These gaps are not merely technical; they shape the credibility of net-zero pathways. In this article, we unpack these limitations and their risks and outline a framework designed to address them.

If solar land intensity does not decline as rapidly as assumed, or if multi-use configurations encounter social, ecological, or regulatory friction, the system risks hitting constraints precisely when electrified end-use sectors, such as transport and industry, are locked into grid dependence. At that stage, path dependence sets in: shortfalls in renewable capacity and land availability are likely to be met by coal and gas assets with multi-decadal (30-year) lifetimes, undermining the net-zero objective. While the NITI Aayog reports flag these risks, they stop short of testing counter-scenarios that actually challenge the underlying high‑efficiency, high‑renewable energy assumptions or show what happens when these levers underperform.

Our own sensitivity tests using NITI’s optimistic land-efficiency parameters reveal this structural fragility. At an all-India level, these assumptions suggest nominal land availability sufficient to host renewable capacity of a similar order of magnitude. However, relaxing efficiency assumptions even moderately makes it far more difficult to simultaneously meet renewable targets and other land-intensive objectives. Regional disaggregation is likely to exacerbate these tensions, as viable renewable land clusters in western and southern states are already water-stressed and ecologically sensitive.

India’s net-zero transition is unfolding on a very tight land budget. Per capita land availability, particularly arable land, is already well below the global average (0.11 hectares per capita in India versus 0.17 globally). Population growth and rising demand are intensifying pressures from agriculture, urbanisation, forest conservation, grazing systems, and ecosystem restoration. Net zero adds another competitor—solar and wind infrastructure—at an unprecedented scale.

Importantly, not all land is equally suitable for renewables. Technical viability depends on irradiance, wind regimes, slope, elevation, and proximity to infrastructure, meaning that gross land availability consistently overstates what is practically deployable.

In practice, land constraints emerge as overlapping claims on the same landscapes. RE-rich regions in western and southern India often coincide with grazing commons, open natural ecosystems, productive farmland, forests, and expanding settlements. This overlap drives land conflict, habitat fragmentation, and disruptions to pastoral routes. Over time, land degradation, climate impacts, acquisition challenges, and social resistance further shrink the effective land available for renewables.

Multi-use land strategies are often proposed to ease these conflicts. In practice, large solar parks optimise panel density for maximum output, leaving limited scope for parallel land uses, although approaches such as agrivoltaics and floating solar can partially alleviate pressure.

Wind presents a more nuanced case. Turbine spacing allows agriculture or grazing between installations, but land acquisition and compensation are often negotiated based on the turbine footprint alone (~1,000–1,200 hectares per GW), rather than the full wind-farm footprint, including access roads, substations, and disturbed land (~12,000 hectares per GW). This understates the true spatial footprint. While early wind projects may coexist with other land uses, saturation of feasible sites and rising land values are likely to turn this coexistence into a binding constraint over time.

Additional factors (noise impacts, buffer zones around settlements and airports, and proximity to transmission and transport infrastructure) further reduce effective multi-use potential. What appears viable during early deployment stages becomes increasingly contested as expansion continues.

To explicitly test land feedbacks, we developed a land-use dynamics module within our Sustainable Alternative Futures for India (SAFARI) system-dynamics framework. We harmonised India’s two official land-use datasets into six classes (forests, net sown area, fallow land, grassland, wasteland, and built-up land) and used multi-decadal trends to derive behavioural rules of land conversion. These were embedded in a stock-and-flow model coupled with national energy, food, and afforestation pathways.

In a high-electrification, high-renewable net-zero scenario comparable to NITI’s, activating land feedbacks causes solar capacity to saturate at ~2,900 GW (versus ~5,800 GW without constraints). This reintroduces coal and gas into the mix, exhausts wastelands by mid-century, and stalls forest expansion and carbon sequestration.

Recognising land as a binding constraint, we explored scenarios that moderate electricity demand and, consequently, the scale of renewable build-out. Even as a modelling exercise, it became evident that achieving development goals without deploying multiple, coordinated levers across sectors is extremely difficult. This is not a critique of the NITI scenario’s ambition on efficiency or demand-side management. On the contrary, it incorporates extensive measures and still projects electricity demand approaching 13,000 TWh by 2070. What cost-optimisation models largely miss is a land-resource budgeting perspective.

The core issue is therefore not merely the land footprint of the power sector. It is whether land that is dynamically constrained, socially contested, and ecologically sensitive can, over time, accommodate simultaneous demands of renewable energy expansion, food security, housing needs, and conservation objectives.

In the next article in this series, we turn to the most cited constraint on net‑zero ambition: climate finance and some less discussed modelling frameworks to interrogate the feasibility of proposed pathways.