India scores lower than other large-sized emerging economies in energy transition index

Despite an ambitious target of 175 GW from renewable resources by 2022 and the consistent aggressive push from the stakeholders, both government as well as the private sector, India has been placed at 78^th rank in the latest World Economic Forum’s Energy Transition Index. The index prepared on the basis of renewable related initiative trends in as many as 114 countries has Sweden leading the global pack while India’s rank is lower than other leading emerging economies like China  Brazil, and Russia.

The agency has released a report titled “Fostering Effective Energy Transition” which has complimented India for taking bold measures for the deployment of renewable sources of energy. However, in the same breath it has underlined that for the country the transition to alternative sources would quite be a task.   “India is at the crossroads in its energy transition journey… energy transition in the country will require large investments, and an enabling environment and robust regulatory frameworks to support the transition.” Among the large-sized emerging economies, the best rank has gone to Brazil ( 36^th) while Russia and China have been slotted at 70^th and 76^th rank respectively. The top three slots have gone to Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.

The report has made some specific comments on India citing the lack of electricity and clean cooking fuel to a sizeable chunk of its population which could be major impediments for its proposed energy transition.  “Recent initiatives to improve electricity access have experienced some success and the outlook is positive; however, the road to continuous access to power and clean cooking fuel for all is long,” it added. India, however, has been notified in the report as an emerging country that is approaching the leapfrog category.” The report has also underlined that between 2013 and 2018, India has shown a modest improvement of 5.6 percentage points in its performance score which is the basis of the ranking of the countries covered in the index.