Strategic Initiatives

Technology plays a crucial role in realising the sustainable development goals of India. In this context, the government has introduced various policies to support the indigenous development of technology and strengthen collaborations with foreign entities for technology sourcing and development. Time averaging of technology impacts has shown improvements in livelihoods, comfort, economy, and health. However, the advent of technology does come with some negative impacts.

India is now the eighth-largest lithium reserve country thanks to discovery in Jammu & Kashmir. This find has the potential to alter the speed of India’s decarbonisation. It puts India in much stronger position in the global critical materials trade, makes it attractive for investments in key forward-looking sectors.

There has in the last few years been a concerted push from policymakers and thought leaders in India to transition to a circular economy to, among other things, enable effective waste management. However, waste management in the solar photovoltaic sector still lacks clear directives.

There is little doubt that India’s water shortage problem is real and happening! Numbers confirm the alarming reality. According to the Ministry of Jal Shakti, India’s annual average per capita water availability was assessed at 1816 cubic metres and 1545 cubic metres in 2001 and 2011, respectively. This could further reduce to 1367 cubic metres in 2031. In 2019, NITI Aayog reported that nearly 600 million Indians are water-deprived and about 40% of the population will not have access to drinking water by 2030.

The ongoing transition from fossil fuel to green fuel is a giant step that every country is willing to take irrespective of its challenges—in a bid to achieve the net-zero emissions goals by 2050. Large-scale electric vehicle (EV) adoption is one of the ways of achieving these ambitious goals. However, the challenges associated with conventional lithium-ion battery (LiB) technology—a key component of EVs— threaten to slow down the adoption of EVs at a mass level.

India has the fourth largest installed capacity of wind energy in the world, with the addition of 41 GW as of June 2022. However, this figure is quite low when we consider India’s potential of 695.5 GW at 120 m hub height and 302 GW at 100 m hub height. To unlock the true potential of wind energy in India and generate power efficiently, current wind farm designs need to be optimised. Increasing the hub height and optimising the positioning of turbines are two options that play a huge role in efficient power generation and land utilisation.

India needs to grow a lot more food, and do it sustainably to be able to meet its future food security and also keep its climate commitments. Precision farming is still nascent in the country, but could offer a way forward.

The performance of an electric vehicle (EV) is largely dependent on a battery and its materials composition. Battery selection is based on performance characteristics, such as energy and power density, life cycle, safety, charging/discharging rate, cost, etc. Currently, the market is dominated by Lithium-ion batteries (LiBs). The most prominent material compositions in LiBs are Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt (LNMC), Lithium Nickel Manganese Oxide (LNMO), and Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) as cathode materials and graphite as anode material.

Among the various battery compositions available today for use in electric vehicles (EVs), lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are the most sought after. They are expected to dominate the EV market in the next decade, thus playing a substantial role in realising fossil-free transport. However, the cathode materials used in LIBs pose some environmental issues during various stages of their life cycle (mining, production, operation, and afterlife).