For decades, farmers had tilled the land outside the town of Nandgaon in western India, growing crops including corn and millet.
But in late 2022, Tata Power, one of the country’s largest energy producers, announced it would begin setting up hundreds of glinting photovoltaic panels stretching out across that sun-drenched patch of countryside in the state of Maharashtra.
The 100-megawatt solar development by the arm of the vast Indian conglomerate, which aims to supply clean electricity to domestic steel producer Viraj Profiles, alarmed the local community. Many see the solar plant as a corporate land grab of a slice of state-owned territory that their families had been granted permission to cultivate over multiple generations.
“We want the land to be ours again,” declares Malik Jhela Hire, a weather-beaten 75-year-old farmer. “We want justice.”
As construction began on the solar park, a group of farmers mounted protests and hunger strikes outside the offices of top local government officials, claiming their rights were being ignored.
Taking note, Maharashtra’s forest department, which claims purview over the land, ordered action against the Tata project. Codenamed “Operation Solar”, a morning raid in late March 2023 saw about 100 law enforcement officers descend on the site and seal it up.
The situation typifies the complexities India is facing as it embarks on its green energy revolution. In India, the third-biggest carbon polluter globally, billions of dollars are being poured into projects to meet a government target to more than double its non-fossil fuel sources of power to 500 gigawatts by the end of the decade.
But this breakneck effort is triggering land disputes across the world’s most populous nation, highlighting the difficulty of building out capacity in fast-growing, crowded and power-hungry developing countries.
The raid on Tata’s solar project is just one example of the stumbling blocks in India’s energy transition. Companies are frequently struggling to find available land and are becoming ensnared in ownership conflicts.
“It already is a challenge and I suspect that as more and more projects are being developed it will become an even greater challenge,” says Jason Pellmar, regional industry manager for infrastructure in India, Bhutan and Maldives at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.
Other obstacles include environmental hold-ups, such as the legal protection granted to the Great Indian Bustard, a gravely endangered and poor-sighted bird that flies into renewable transmission lines in India’s northern deserts.
India’s clean energy sector has also come under renewed focus after US prosecutors indicted infrastructure magnate Gautam Adani — who has raised billions of dollars from American investors — as well as some executives at the billionaire’s eponymous conglomerate. The charges relate to an alleged $265mn bribery scheme of Indian officials to secure solar deals.
Adani, who denies any wrongdoing, has had projects come up against marginalised communities as have many major power producers. According to Indian research group Land Conflict Watch, at least 31 disputes involving green energy projects have affected nearly 44,000 people — a figure that founder and director Kumar Sambhav calls a “conservative estimate”.
In a recent study, the New Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water estimates that currently only 35 per cent of onshore wind and 41 per cent of solar real estate potential in India is located in areas without historical contest over land — figures that will probably only worsen as the country makes strides towards its net zero aims.
“It’s becoming a big problem for the developers,” Sambhav adds. “Many projects get stalled or delayed.”
Those increasing constrictions come at a critical juncture for India’s green energy drive as companies like Tata expand their renewable businesses. When the conglomerate, which has set up and is constructing nearly 17GW of non-fossil fuel power capacity, first revealed it would set up the solar park near Nandgaon, Tata described it as “another step” in its mission to establish clean energy solutions throughout India.
Yet for farmers, the project represents an existential threat to practices dating back to the 1970s, when the government allowed them to farm the reserved forest land to boost food production as part of India’s agricultural Green Revolution.
At the heart of the matter is confusion over who holds the ultimate title of the more than 200 acres, a question that has now reached the High Court of Bombay. To secure the site outside Nandgaon, Tata, like many businesses, turned to a land “aggregator”, or middleman, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the people said the land had long been “delisted” as environmentally protected land.
But according to forest department officials and documents seen by the Financial Times, technically no notification was seemingly issued regarding its deforestation — meaning its sale should not have been authorised, despite it no longer being a wooded area.
Tata Power declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. Viraj Profile, India’s renewable energy ministry, Maharashtra’s state forest department and the local government in Nashik district, where the project is based, did not respond to requests for comment.
“We’re not against renewable development,” says Raju Desale, the Maharashtra state secretary of the All-India Trade Union Congress and an official with the Communist Party of India, which helped organise the farmer protests.
But with Indian bureaucrats under top-down pressure to open up real estate for green energy projects, Desale adds that “they encroached the land . . . that land is [the farmers’] livelihood”.
When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to the podium in Glasgow at the 2021 COP26 climate summit, he surprised the crowd by setting the country’s net zero target for 2070.
The announcement was seen as a major turnaround for the coal-rich country, whose government argues that developing nations, which are not to blame for historic emissions, should rightly tap fossil fuel resources at their disposal to power their industrial growth.
Modi’s stated ambition highlighted a shift that was already under way, with India scaling up its renewable capacity spurred by a dramatic fall in the cost of equipment such as solar panels, and a rush of green investment into the country.
But the sector has hit a familiar problem in India. Competing demands for land in this densely populated nation of 1.4bn people have long been cited by businesses as a critical bottleneck to investment. About 60 per cent of India’s land is farmed, compared with the 37 per cent world average, according to the World Bank, and agriculture is the main means of livelihood for the country’s majority.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimates India’s net zero goal may require up to 75,000 square kilometres of land for solar energy alone — equivalent to the size of the Republic of Ireland or about 2 per cent of India’s total area. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has also calculated that a single megawatt of solar power requires on average four acres of land.
“Availability of adequate land is a constraint for economic development and infrastructure growth broadly in India, and solar energy is not immune,” says Shayak Sengupta, India programme lead at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“I suspect it will get more difficult to acquire land as projects spread geographically, especially as the most attractive parcels get used first.”
The issue is compounded by the fact that land rights remain one of India’s most sensitive political issues. Attempts by Modi’s government to overhaul land acquisition laws in his more than decade-long rule have met fierce resistance. Massive protests by farmers in northern India forced the government to repeal controversial agricultural reforms in 2021, marking one of Modi’s most significant policy reversals.
In practice, securing large, continuous tracts of land requires lengthy negotiations with vast numbers of farmers in a country where the average size of agricultural holdings shrank by about a third to 0.74 hectares in the five years through March 2022, according to a recent government survey. Renewable developers often have to design projects in a “suboptimal way just by virtue of where you’re able to procure your land”, says the IFC’s Pellmar.
India’s land market is also notoriously opaque, with a widespread absence of easy-to-access ownership records and complicated government acquisition rules. Developers often resort to middlemen to secure holdings, which opens the door to graft and competing claims.
Those hurdles are frustrating corporate India, particularly carbon-heavy industries. “It’s time-consuming,” says Neha Soni, general manager for business development at ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India, which has built its own wind and solar capacity to curb factory emissions. “Land is a scarce commodity, so it’s a constraint.”
Modi has pushed India’s states to make more land available for renewable projects and many businesses now look to local governments for access to uncontested or barren land. Some states, including Maharashtra, have also allowed those setting up green energy parks to sidestep social and environmental impact assessment requirements.
“State and central governments have gotten creative in helping developers acquire land through leasing or offering government land,” says Sengupta.
But even this approach has limitations. In many cases, governments free up state-owned “common land” or “wasteland” for renewable energy projects, despite the fact that these areas are often used by local pastoralists and impoverished farmers for grazing or cultivation. These communities, which typically lack formal legal rights, are frequently left without adequate compensation or recourse when the land is repurposed.
Sambhav at Land Conflict Watch says these types of battles have a common theme. “Governments often present land as free of encumbrances, but on the ground, developers face protests from locals who have used it for generations.”
One potential solution mooted by energy experts is the wider deployment of so-called agrivoltaics — the dual use of solar panels typically raised above working farm land. Depending on the angle and space of the equipment, crops can be protected, or exposed to light and heat.
The first such project was tested in 2012 in the western India state of Gujarat. Since then more than a dozen pilots have been attempted. A study funded and published last year by the German Agency for International Cooperation calculated that potential agrivoltaic energy generation in India could reach anywhere between more than 3,000GW and almost 14,000GW.
Charles Worringham, who contributes analysis on India’s energy transition for IEEFA, says the potential of agrivoltaics to reduce land conflicts is “extraordinarily promising” and “could really benefit” the country’s vast rural economy.
“It’s got enormous potential, but there are fairly substantial financial barriers and policy barriers to get squared away,” he adds.
Holding back significant agrivoltaic generation is regulation and tax strictures across many Indian states that classify land for either agricultural or commercial use, forbidding dual use of farm land for business activity beyond harvesting.
Experts say the commercial viability of multipurpose cropland producing renewable energy has also not yet been tested, and many farmers will be reluctant to gamble on new technology until it is more established.
“It’s not been done at scale and in India often farmers learn from farmers, you learn from your neighbour,” says Arunabha Ghosh, chief executive of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water research institution. “The scale-up and acceleration of renewables in India is not going to come from one business model but an experiment with many.”
Other less land-intensive routes to net zero are being actively pursued by Modi’s government, including the expansion of rooftop solar. In February last year his administration launched a subsidy programme covering up to 40 per cent of the costs of installing panels on residential properties. The aim is to cover 10mn households under the scheme by March 2027, up from 630,000 currently.
Overall generation capacity of rooftop solar has expanded at a swift clip, adding more than 3GW to an almost 15.7GW total since April 2024 — though falling far short of an earlier target set by the Modi government to hit 100GW by 2022.
“Rooftop solar could and should be part of the solution,” says Pellmar from the IFC. “But I don’t think that’s going to be the ultimate answer, given the massive targets that the government of India has.”
For now, many producers at the forefront of India’s green energy ambitions still require large tracts of land, and some are bogged down in lengthy and heated contests. Shortly after its solar park near Nandgaon was raided and closed up, Tata Power filed a challenge against the action in the High Court of Bombay.
As the litigation winds its way through India’s sluggish and overburdened legal system, Maharashtra’s advocate general, the state’s most senior legal adviser, asked for the project to be reopened and work recommence in the interim even as the case remains pending, according to the people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by the FT.
While the farmers outside Nandgaon are not party to the court dispute, many of them told the FT during a recent visit to the area that they remain angry, claiming that they had been ousted from their land. Following the forest department’s raid, “we had expectations that everything would be all right”, says 30-year-old Sanjay Tikaram Sonawane. “But then they started work again.”
Some are now despondent and say there is little support for them after years of petitioning the government to grant them title to a swath of territory that they have in practice been living off for generations. “We’re on our own,” adds Sonawane, as uniformed security guards from the surrounding and enclosed solar park keep careful watch nearby.
Additional reporting by Andrea Rodrigues in Mumbai
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