Simson Ingti, a young law graduate from Bokajan in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district, has spent the better part of two years standing outside government offices, organising rallies, and writing letters that largely go unanswered. He and roughly 25,000 fellow residents, including Karbi, Naga, and Adivasi communities, are fighting to keep their land from being swallowed by a 1,000 megawatt solar park. The project, backed by a $672 million Asian Development Bank loan, would take 2,396 hectares of fertile, forested, and ecologically sensitive land: fields where families grow paddy, sesame, and lemongrass, and hillsides that serve as a corridor for wild elephants. “Free and informed consent is not just applicable to tribal areas but to the entire world,” Ingti told Down to Earth. So far, no one in power appears to be listening.
Meanwhile, India has been celebrating a remarkable achievement. By mid-2025, more than half of the country’s installed electricity capacity came from non-fossil fuel sources, five years ahead of the timeline India had committed to under the Paris Agreement. Solar capacity alone has crossed 132 gigawatts, making India the world’s third-largest solar power producer. The government is pushing hard toward 500 gigawatts of clean energy by 2030. These are real numbers. They represent a genuine national achievement. But they do not tell the full story.
Renewable energy is not land-free energy. A 2019 study estimated that meeting even India’s earlier, more modest target of 175 gigawatts would require between 55,000 and 1,25,000 square kilometres of land, an area roughly the size of Tamil Nadu at the upper end. Scaling those numbers to 500 gigawatts multiplies the demand proportionally. To meet that demand quickly and cheaply, planners have turned to land classified as “wasteland”, common land, forest fringes, and community commons. What the maps call wasteland is rarely waste to the people who live on it. It is often farmland, grazing ground, sacred grove, or wildlife corridor.
The Karbi Anglong case is not an exception. In Assam’s Nagaon district, Azure Power dispossessed 93 acres of Karbi and Adivasi farmland in 2020 for a 15 megawatt solar plant. That land fed 313 families and also formed part of a living elephant corridor. In Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, renewable energy developers have been pushing into Oran lands lands, the sacred community pastures that Bishnoi and Raika herders have maintained for centuries as living biodiversity reserves, home to the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard. In Purulia, West Bengal, tribal fishing communities are fighting a floating solar project on the Panchet dam, which would eliminate their ferry routes and fishing grounds. In each case, the state describes the project as green. The communities describe it as displacement with a new name.
This pattern has deep roots. Tribal communities make up roughly 10 per cent of India’s population but account for an estimated 40 per cent of all development-related displacements in the country. That figure was built through decades of dam-building, mining, and infrastructure projects. It is now being added to by solar parks and wind farms. Researchers have a term for this: “green grabbing”, meaning the appropriation of land in the name of environmental goals. India’s renewable energy programme has become one of its most prominent examples.
“What the maps call wasteland is rarely waste to the people who live on it. It is farmland, grazing ground, sacred grove, and wildlife corridor. And it is disappearing behind a promise of clean energy.”
India actually has laws designed to prevent this. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises tribal communities’ rights over forest land and requires the consent of local village councils, known as Gram Sabhas, before any diversion of that land. The Land Acquisition Act of 2013 also requires prior informed consent from affected communities in tribal areas. These laws were hard-won. They are now being systematically weakened.
The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 has removed the mandatory requirement for Gram Sabha consent before forest land is diverted for development. Critics argue it could open up to a quarter of India’s forests to industrial use, and exempts the transmission line corridors that carry electricity from solar and wind parks entirely from forest protection rules. The amendment contradicts the Forest Rights Act directly, and the Supreme Court began hearing constitutional challenges to it in July 2024, with petitioners arguing it violates the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) rights of forest-dwelling communities. The case is still being heard. In the meantime, clearances continue.
There is a larger irony here that India’s climate diplomats tend not to dwell on. At every major international climate summit, India rightly demands that wealthier nations pay for the damage their emissions have caused in the developing world. India argues, correctly, that those who contributed least to the climate crisis should not bear its greatest costs. That argument is called climate justice. But the communities of Karbi Anglong, the Thar, and Purulia are making precisely the same argument from inside India’s own borders: they did not cause the climate crisis, they are not the primary beneficiaries of the electricity being generated, yet they are the ones giving up their land, their livelihoods, and their ecologies to power a national target. India has no binding domestic framework to compensate, protect, or even formally recognise these communities as the transition’s true cost-bearers.
Fixing this does not require abandoning renewable energy. It requires building accountability into the transition, something that is currently missing. Every large-scale solar or wind project should enter into a legally binding agreement with affected communities, one that shares revenue from the electricity generated, guarantees local employment, and provides enforceable livelihood restoration. The Gram Sabha consent requirement stripped out by the 2023 forest amendment must be restored, and free, prior, and informed consent must function as a genuine legal threshold rather than a bureaucratic form that project developers fill in and ignore. India also needs a dedicated institutional body, a Just Transition Commission, to identify and compensate communities displaced by clean energy projects, separate from the general land acquisition process that has consistently failed marginalised communities across decades.
India’s renewable energy record is something to be proud of. The country’s engineers, planners, and policymakers have done something genuinely difficult at genuine scale. But a transition that runs on dispossession is not a just transition. It is the same old extractive logic wearing a solar panel. India has the constitutional tools, the legislative framework, and the democratic tradition to do this differently. Simson Ingti and the 25,000 people of Karbi Anglong are not asking India to stop building solar parks. They are asking to not be erased by them. That is not too much to ask.
Ankit Mishra is an ICSSR Doctoral Fellow and Research Scholar at G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj, where his work focuses on environmental politics, climate change, and public policy and governance.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth