India, the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged ambitious goals to increase its clean energy capacity in its submitted Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement on climate change. However, transformations in the Indian electricity sector will be a complex process, as Aniruddh Mohan, Research Fellow in the Division Energy, Transport and Climate Policy at the Wuppertal Institute, and Kilian Topp, former project Co-ordinator in the same Division, show in their paper "India's energy future: Contested narratives of change". They state that there is a lack of social consensus on what the preferred policy pathway for this transition should be.

The authors find two dominant narratives in energy policy debates in the country: 'energy for development' that privileges energy as critical to economic growth and long term strategic security, and 'energy for all' that prioritises the role of energy for basic development and ending poverty. One of the conclusions of the article is that while these narratives find common ground on certain issues such as the role of coal, they clash in the socio-technical imaginaries they represent about India’s energy future.

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