Author Archives: Dr. Samir Saran

Energy, Global Energy Transition, Viksit Bharat, Writing

India’s Cheapest Power Needs New Buyers

Nikit Abhyankar | Samir Saran

Manufacturing clusters, export-oriented industries, and data centres can procure clean electricity through open access or captive routes, gaining long-term cost certainty while absorbing large volumes of new capacity

For decades, India’s power sector grappled with scarcity and affordability issues even as it undertook complex and ambitious power-sector reforms. Today, we add 40 GW of renewable capacity every year, far more than in most developed economies and cheaper than in most geographies. The task is to organise markets, institutions, and demand. Absorption is becoming a constraint with nearly 42 GW of renewable capacity awarded through auctions yet to find buyer utilities. Distribution companies are cautious about additional clean energy commitments. To sustain clean-energy momentum, the pool of buyers must expand. Two structural shifts make this possible.

The first is the fall in clean-energy prices. Recent reverse auctions have closed at around Rs 3 per unit for solar power paired with storage — with prices remaining flat in nominal terms for 12 to 25 years. These projects can deliver near round-the-clock supply at the same prices. The second factor is a product of institutional reform. Open access and captive procurement allow large industrial and commercial consumers to buy power from anywhere in the country by paying network charges. Roughly a quarter of India’s renewable capacity addition is now driven by this. This transition will allow utilities to evolve into strong grid and reliability platforms while new demand absorbs low-cost clean power. Where will new demand come from?

The second factor is a product of institutional reform. Open access and captive procurement allow large industrial and commercial consumers to buy power from anywhere in the country by paying network charges.

First, manufacturing clusters, export-oriented industries, and data centres can procure clean electricity through open access or captive routes, gaining long-term cost certainty while absorbing large volumes of new capacity. Such clusters, offering Indian exports an edge under carbon border measures such as the EU’s CBAM, could unlock FDI and green finance, accelerating industrial growth and clean-power deployment. Second, nearly half of India’s industrial energy demand is to process heat, with a large portion supplied by imported oil and gas. Electric heat pumps and high-temperature heat batteries allow this demand to shift towards clean electricity.

Third, fertiliser and steel are important sectors, yet depend on imported gas and coking coal. Recent green ammonia auctions reveal fertiliser production using clean electricity is competitive. With continued cost declines, green steel could follow a similar path. Fourth, electrifying buses, commercial fleets, and freight corridors can create a large and flexible demand source for domestic clean power. When charging is aligned with daytime solar output, electricity demand rises when clean power is most abundant. Fifth, distributed rooftop solar across commercial buildings, MSMEs, and homes lowers bills and improves resilience. For utilities, it reduces peak demand, losses, and subsidy burdens.

Large buyers could transition faster if long-term clean-energy contracts were aggregated and securitised through dedicated finance platforms. Smaller consumers will need India Stack–connected fintech products to reduce transaction friction. Expanding demand for clean electricity is also the most effective way to absorb India’s excess solar panel manufacturing capacity. One concern is that key components, particularly batteries, are often imported. India has shown through solar manufacturing that such dependencies can be reduced with scale and policy certainty. Batteries can follow a similar trajectory, supported through partnerships with allied economies to secure critical minerals.

Robust domestic demand has always been the Indian economy’s greatest strength. It can now also work for its energy transition. India’s cheapest power has arrived. Building the markets, institutions, and end-use pathways will define the journey to Viksit Bharat.

Originally Appeared in Indian Express.

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Artificial Intelligence, Cyber and Internet Governance, Cyber and Technology, Cyber Security, Writing

Swords and Shields: Navigating the Modern Intelligence Landscape

SAMIR SARAN | ARCHISHMAN RAY GOSWAMI

As key custodians of a nation’s strategic intent, national intelligence services must account for and adapt to the wider socio-cultural and political factors shaping their operational environment. Today, shifting geopolitical tides in the form of accelerated multipolarity, scientific progress, and the erosion of accountability in global technological governance have converged to reshape national intelligence strategies. This paper seeks to make sense of these changes by discussing key features of the shifting global intelligence landscape. These include factors such as the role of ‘geotechnography’ in blurring distinctions between offline and online experiences, the consequences of growing inter-state competition over rare-earth elements and supply chains, the evolving character of human intelligence (HUMINT) amid ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS), and the role of private sector intelligence and Big Tech in a data-infused geostrategic terrain. The aim is to foster a discussion on how nations think about and use intelligence in changing times. It closes with an exploration of the implications of these changes for India’s national security.

Originally appeared here

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Global South, Green Technology, international affairs, Sustainable Development, Writing

Issue Brief : The Green Development Compact: Atlantic Ambition, Southern Scale

Amitabh Kant | Samir Saran

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) have shifted beyond market-led climate action toward state-backed green industrial policy, driven by competitiveness, economic security, and technological leadership concerns. Despite differences in approach, Atlantic strategies share an inward focus that positions the Global South primarily as a consumer market or supplier of intermediate inputs. Such models are politically unsustainable for developing economies and economically inefficient for achieving the scale required for the global energy transition. This brief argues for moving from competition-driven industrial policy toward co-development and shared prosperity across regions. It proposes a Green Development Compact that integrates Northern capital, innovation, and corporate capacity with Southern scale, speed, and renewable endowments. It outlines practical instruments to operationalise this framework, including long-term offtake guarantees, shared innovation commons, and financial mechanisms that reduce risk for Southern projects.

Read more here.

Source: ORF Website, January 3, 2026

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India, Writing

Growth story powered by indigenous engines

In the 1980s, a young India was being excited against older nation-states. In the 2020s, an ancient civilisation is leading the way in forging a new consensus

The year 2025 might well go down in Indian economic history alongside 1991 as a year that marks a decisive break with the past. These were both years that accelerated our intent, ambition, and execution as a nation. But, if in 1991, the initial burst of economic reform was driven by recognition of a balance of payments crisis, the 2025 reforms have been driven by understanding a balance of power opportunity. And this burst of reform, even more than those before, reflects how India’s leadership at the highest level — particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself — understands the way that growth is nurtured in this evolving, fragmented world.

By creating a political and geo-economic challenge, Donald Trump invited the Modi of the past to reappear: The political and economic revolutionary who thrives by confronting stale orthodoxy and refuses to outsource national destiny. By revealing international relationships as nakedly transactional, the US president reminded New Delhi of one basic truth: Nobody is going to celebrate India’s rise. In a progress-starved global economy, growth is not shared. Instead, growth is competed for, hoarded, weaponised. We might have been lulled into thinking, for a time, that growth would emerge from partnerships. But Modi has correctly identified that growth is DIY: We must do it for ourselves — and keep doing it. It must be incubated, nourished, and sustained domestically, like a household plant that needs constant watering, or a steel plant that can never be shut down. Global relationships matter, but the West is neither enemy nor saviour. It is simply a partner whose errant ways must be moderated through calm engagement.

In the 1980s, a young India was being excited against older nation-states. But, in the 2020s, an ancient civilisation is leading the way in forging a new consensus, through example rather than exhortation. This is what it means to be Bharat. Growth is the greatest, best example we can set for the world. And that is what Modi has given us in this year of reform on steroids: The building blocks of decades of growth.

Perhaps, the most consequential of these is the pushing through of the four labour codes. This is the biggest factor-market structural reset since the 1990s. Today’s India has finally understood the support businesses need to help us become a developed nation. Rules have been cut by three-quarters, reporting forms by 60%, and registers for returns by 90%. More than 60 million enterprises will benefit — five times the footprint even of GST.

But GST itself has been reshaped: Two slabs eliminated, compliance simplified. Lower tax enabled quarters of euphoric growth — but, even more importantly, the fatigue felt by small businesses was addressed. Reform is not just a one-off event, an initial investment; it requires maintenance, continual recalibration in response to lived reality, and attentive leadership.

Tax cuts are, in fact, stimulus by stealth. When Union Budget 2025 raised the cut-off for income tax exemption to ₹1,00,000 a month, Modi showed that the creation of an Indian middle class requires its protection from government — not just from extortionary taxes but from unnecessary harassment and criminalisation. The Unified Securities Market Code, the Jan Vishwas 2.0 Bill, and the new Income Tax Act show that clarity rather than coercion is the cornerstone of India’s emerging State.

Finally, in December, three reforms signal the strategic confidence that Bharat now has. In the past, a divided polity twisted itself into knots about foreign participation in sectors such as insurance and nuclear energy. Those days are gone. Without fuss or fanfare, nuclear power and insurance were opened to private participation, their legal framework modernised and brought into line with global norms, and our clean energy ambitions restated.

Each of these reforms is individually significant. Taken together, they are revolutionary. Modi is doing nationally what he once did in Gujarat, what he did later with Digital India and the GST — taking big bets and forcing an ossified state machinery into movement through sheer willpower. No longer will anyone pretend that external benevolence can carry India forward. The engines and energy that propel us will be indigenous.

Throughout 2025, unforeseen challenges arose abroad. But Modi’s response was domestic energy, domestic focus, domestic reform. Before restructuring its partnership with the world, India must rewrite its contract with itself. This is the time to write India’s future, and Indians will do it.

Source: Originally appeared in Hindustan Times

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