The success or failure of solar power in India will go a long way toward determining the speed of the world’s clean-energy transition—and the severity of our climate emergency.
Every morning in the Tumakuru District of Karnataka, a state in southern India, the sun tips over the horizon and lights up the green-and-brown hills of the Eastern Ghats. Its rays fall across the grasslands that surround them and the occasional sleepy village; the sky changes color from sherbet-orange to powdery blue. Eventually, the sunlight reaches a sea of glass and silicon known as Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park.
Bhargavi Rao and Leo Saldanha are trustees of the social-justice nonprofit Environment Support Group, which advocates in part for rural residents.In 2010, India launched its National Solar Mission, a sun-powered moon shot with a staggering goal: twenty thousand megawatts of installed capacity by 2022. Six months later, in a village several hours southeast of Pavagada, the state of Karnataka opened what was then the nation’s largest solar installation.
When K.S.P.D.C.L. approached landowners with its offer to lease their land, the Nagalamadike Dam reservoir, situated less than ten miles from Pavagada, was dry. The reservoir is now full of water. Ashok Narayanappa drives a bullock cart carrying hay, along a stretch of road lined with pylons, in Pavagada Solar Park.
The solar company had the resources to support local villages, the authors of the report said. They estimated that five million dollars would be enough to build community toilets, equip households with small-scale solar panels, and guarantee income for out-of-work farmers as they trained for new jobs, among other things. K.S.P.D.C.L. has set aside more than that for local development.
“Solar people are building schools in all the villages, building roads,” Varshitha Gopala, an eighteen-year-old who lives in Vollur, told me. “For people, they haven’t done anything.” Gopala’s family lives in a Dalit-majority area, and her mother, Alvelamma, told me that Dalits were given farmland to work generations back. Before solar came, all women who could work did work, she said, whether on their own lands or as laborers for their landowning neighbors.
I thought of Amaranath, the solar C.E.O. When we met, he had acknowledged that of the thousands of construction jobs at Pavagada, many had been given to men from other states, such as Bihar in the north. But Mongabay, an environmental-news service,around eighty per cent of the roughly sixteen hundred permanent jobs at the solar farm—engineers, technicians, security guards, grass cutters—have gone to locals. “You can’t satisfy every soul,” Amaranath told me.
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