Unfortunately, renewable energy is being promoted on prime farmland rather than wasteland. A policy solution is needed.
India is blessed with a variety of these clean renewable energy alternatives – biomass, solar energy, wind energy and hydro power. This has encouraged the Government of India to set ambitious targets for renewable energy.
The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) has set an ambitious goal of a one per cent annual increase in renewable energy generation. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNSM) has set its own ambitious target of adding 1GW of capacity between 2010 and 2013 and seeks to increase combined solar capacity from 9MW in 2010 to 20GW by 2022. However, India’s interest and efforts in promoting renewable energy may soon create newer sustainability concerns. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy appears to have overlooked the growing conflict between renewable energy and land.
Scarce resource
Land is an already scarce resource in India, with demand from farmers to industrial houses to service institutions and the Government. To this list another claimant has been added; many forms of green energy, especially solar, wind and biomass, rely on huge tracts of land in order to be viable. Setting up renewable energy plants can lead to both direct land transformation that comes with the setting up of the project, and land degradation created by pollutants from fuel and material cycles associated with running these plants.