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12 March 2016,

India’s 100GW solar power target safe despite adverse WTO ruling

Amit Bhandari, Fellow, Energy and Environmental Studies, Gateway House, was quoted by Sunday Guardian Live in an article.

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Below is the quote from Amit Bhandari;

Local manufacturing received an impetus after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India push. Recently, the Bharat Solar Power Development Forum (BSPDF), floated by the RSS, announced that it wanted India to impose anti-dumping duty on imported solar cells and modules as well as focus on building capacity within the country. However, bringing local manufacturers at a par with foreign companies will take time, said Amit Bhandari, Fellow, Energy and Environment Studies at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.
“There are two options open to the government: one is to continue business as usual and second is to basically delay the programme until local manufacturers catch up, which is unfeasible,” he said. In fact, Bhandari argues that countries like US and China, from where chips are imported, are not just manufacturers but innovators as well, and they find it relatively easy to keep up to date with the rapidly changing solar cell technology. Without dedicated R&D, India loses out in this area.
“The problem is that companies which manufacture solar chips in India (like Indosolar and Moser Baer) are in very bad shape financially and, hence, they can no longer invest in large scale manufacturing or in new technology. The second set who could have potentially invested in large scale manufacturing would be the power generation companies but, again, these companies are also highly indebted and they do not have any experience of innovating in the high-tech area. It is an unfortunate situation but we don’t really have a very strong base in India,” Bhandari said