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Solar park
The Skills Council of Green Jobs, set up by the Skills Ministry, estimates a total of 400,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector currently, with a projection of 18 lakh by 2030 if India achieves its 500 GW renewable energy target.
The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that solar energy projects employed almost 164,000 people in India in 2020, with hydropower accounting for an even higher number – 320,000.
The Council on Energy, Environment and Water, which partnered with the Skills Council for its research, found a little over 76,500 solar jobs cumulatively until the 2019 financial year.
“These ground-mounted projects, yes, are employing fewer people,” the Skill Council’s CEO Praveen Saxena said. “But you require a lot more when you are constructing [them], and for rooftop solar, you need even more – 20 to 25 people per megawatt.”
He added, “One of the biggest advantages of solar (for developers) is you have a ready-made plant coming quickly, getting installed, and then you don’t need (workers). That is the current situation and that’s how things are being done.”
For a growing group of energy researchers, the numbers don’t hold weight.
“Grid-connected renewable energy has not created many permanent jobs so far because India doesn’t manufacture much in the sector,” said Rohit Chandra, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, who studies India’s energy policies. “So far most of the jobs are temporary, which disappear at the end of asset construction.”
“The long-term employment multipliers around these massive solar parks in places like Bhadla and Rewa are quite low. They are ghost towns,” he added.
Wind power sites are even more deserted, said Iftekhar Ansari, who has had almost two decades of experience in both wind and solar energy and is currently the general manager at Renew Power, one of the largest renewable energy companies in India. For a mid-sized wind farm, with roughly 25 turbines or 50-megawatt capacity, only 10 skilled and 10 unskilled people would be needed for maintenance, cleaning, oil replacement, tree cutting, and general support, he said. “You will usually have difficulty locating anyone on a wind site during the day. Maybe you will find someone in the evening.”
Still, he argues that the solar parks built by his company have led to significant upliftment in the country’s remotest areas, if not in direct employment, then by the construction of new roads. He estimates that for every 20 MW plant, five skilled and 10 unskilled labourers are required. If the plant size goes to 100 MW, then 15 skilled and 35 to 40 unskilled workers are required. “There was nothing before in these areas. Jobs, roads – solar parks do bring in a lot of development.”
Others disagree. “The local economy around Rewa is completely dead irrespective of the fact that a sea of solar plants have been built there,” said Swati D’Souza, the former climate change research lead at the National Foundation of India. “This kind of a story is not spoken about… when everyone speaks about green jobs.”
Automation at the park
The manpower numbers at the Rewa project, like much of the solar parks in the country, are set to decrease further.
“Now (the employment is) going to become even less because of new features,” said Amitav Mukerjee, the Project Head of one of the units owned by Sprng Energy. The developer has bought almost 550 robot cleaners from an Israeli-based company which will trace up and down the panel rows and dry clean, saving on water usage and labour costs. This unit’s total 200-force force (including daily wage labourers hired by sub-contractors) will soon be slashed to 130.
Mukerjee said he saw the Mahindra unit of the plant adopt new panel tilt technology, which changes the degree of the panels according to the sun’s direction, and thought, “if they are going to add a new technology, then why not us, too.”
Upjeet Singh Arora, district renewable energy officer with the state-owned Urja Vikas Nigam Limited, who is overseeing seven districts including Rewa, said: “This field is such that you find something new every day. Whenever you have problems, the solutions come right away. The new panels coming in will mean even more energy in a smaller area. Then, it will be even fewer people per megawatt.”
He added that Madhya Pradesh is looking to build parks as concentrated as possible, meaning bigger plots of land that require even less manpower. Madhya Pradesh ranks the highest for utility-scale projects, as large-scale projects that feed into the energy grid are known.
The one job at solar parks across the country, however, that isn’t seeing any automation on the horizon is grass cutting.
Out of the 17 people in one of the Rewa units working in the brown grass patches butting up against the panels, Viran Pathak is a newer recruit. After seven years of working with Honda, the automobile company that makes two-wheelers, in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Gujarat, the lockdown in 2020 had brought his whole family back to Badwar, the village where the Rewa solar park is located. He used to get Rs 18,000 with Honda, but for the past two months in Rewa, he makes roughly Rs 10,000 a month depending on his workdays.
“I thought it would be better to do some work than sit at home, but this is still not enough money,” he said. He claimed the manager from Honda had been calling him every day, asking him to get back to the job, but for now, he had decided to stay. “I have made my pass to work here until June. Let’s see how much money I can make.”
All photos and videos by Karishma Mehrotra.
Reporting for this story was supported by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.
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