Across Western climate commentary, India is frequently portrayed as a coal-dependent laggard whose rising emissions threaten to offset progress elsewhere. This framing obscures a more complex reality: While coal continues to dominate India’s power supply, the country is also building clean energy at one of the fastest rates in the world. Understanding this contradiction requires reassessing how climate progress is conventionally measured.

The concerns behind India’s continued use of coal are real. India recorded the world’s largest absolute rise in emissions in 2024, and thermal power still generates around 70 percent of its electricity. Yet these figures describe where India stands today, not where it is heading.

At the 2015 Paris climate conference, India pledged that 40 percent of its installed power capacity would come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030. It reached that goal in November 2021, almost a decade early. After raising its target to 50 percent, India crossed that threshold in June 2025, this time five years ahead of schedule.

As those figures suggest, India’s renewables expansion is significant. India’s non-fossil fuel energy capacity passed 300 gigawatts in July 2026, more than half of its total installed capacity. The country added a record 55 gigawatts of clean capacity in the 2025–26 financial year and now ranks third in the world for installed renewable energy. On July 29, 2025, renewables met more than half of India’s electricity demand, a record share and, in the Indian government’s words, “a remarkable sign of change.”

Many of today’s high-income economies industrialized on coal for over a century before shifting to cleaner energy. India is attempting to do both simultaneously, expanding electricity access and industrial growth for 1.4 billion people while building one of the largest clean-energy systems in the world. 

Yet significant challenges remain. The largest is the gap between capacity and generation. Although more than half of India’s installed capacity is now non-fossil, these sources produce under a third of the electricity the country consumes. Solar output peaks in the afternoon while demand often peaks in the evening, and the storage and transmission networks needed to bridge this gap are still under construction. Until they are complete, coal will remain the backbone of reliable energy supply.

Rising demand compounds the difficulty. Rapid economic growth, urbanization and more frequent heatwaves are driving up electricity consumption, which is why India’s total emissions continue to climb even as its power mix becomes cleaner. Clean capacity is being added quickly, but demand is rising almost as fast.

Heavy industry presents a further hurdle. Steel and aluminum are among the hardest sectors to decarbonize. Indian exporters now face carbon border rules in key markets; the Global Trade Research Initiative estimated that Indian steel and aluminum exporters may need to cut prices by 15 to 22 percent to remain competitive in Europe. Smaller firms struggle the most with the cost of measuring and reporting emissions.

Finance is the final, perhaps most binding, constraint. A transition of this scale requires enormous investment, much of it in grids and storage with long payback periods. At COP29, India objected to the new climate finance goal of  $300 billion a year, which was less than one-fourth of the $1.3 trillion that developing countries had demanded.

Still, India continues to push forward. Its national carbon market became operational in January 2025, providing industry with a price signal to reduce emissions. The growth of India’s fossil fuel emissions is projected to have slowed sharply in 2025. 

Energy transitions are rarely linear, as recent Western experience shows. During the 2022 energy crisis, several European countries temporarily returned to coal to maintain supply before renewable growth resumed. This was a reasonable response to an emergency, and it illustrates that every country balances climate goals against energy security and affordability. India faces the same trade-offs at a lower income level and with more people still gaining reliable power.

International partners can also play a constructive role. Expanded financing for grid infrastructure and battery storage would directly address India’s generation gap. Mechanisms that recognize domestic carbon pricing, such as India’s carbon market, could ease the burden of border carbon rules on smaller exporters. The International Solar Alliance, which India co-founded, already offers a strong base for wider cooperation on clean technology and supply chains 

Coal will remain part of India’s energy mix for some time, and the obstacles ahead are real. But measuring climate commitment through coal dependence alone risks misreading one of the world’s largest clean-energy transitions. 

Assessments of India’s climate performance should therefore shift their focus. Rather than asking whether India still uses coal, the question should be whether it is moving decisively away from it. A fairer yardstick would weigh a country’s direction of travel, per capita emissions, and historical responsibility alongside its current energy mix. After all, the average Indian emits about 2.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, less than half the global average, and India has contributed under 4 percent of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since the industrial revolution.

Future analysis of India’s climate role should account for both its achievements and the constraints shaping its choices.