By Vishal Thanvi • Namril Shah• Levin Shah
India’s energy transition is one of the most documented stories in domestic capital markets. And yet, the more deeply we researched it, the more we found that the conventional framing was leaving the most important parts of the story untold.
This report is the product of eighteen months of sustained research into India’s solar manufacturing sector — built from the ground up, from installation data, player-level production figures, policy documents and our own modelling across the full value chain.
What drew us in was a question that seemed simple: how much module capacity does India actually need? The further we pursued it, the more the answer diverged from what the market assumes. Demand, it turns out, is not one number. It is several, each driven by a different mechanism, each with its own trajectory. And when you account for how the nature of tenders is changing, the true module requirement looks very different from what the gigawatt headlines imply.
The supply picture surprised us too, not in the direction most expect.
Underlying all of it is a policy architecture of unusual deliberateness. India has not left its solar manufacturing ambition to market forces. The government has engineered a system in which the domestic value chain is protected, incentivised and progressively deepened, layer by layer, in a sequence that has a clear and knowable logic. Understanding that sequence is what separates a structural view of this sector from a thematic one.
And then there is the power generation story, which is where the real long-term conviction comes from. The economics of how India will power itself over the next two decades have shifted in ways that are still not fully reflected in how investors think about this sector.
Click here to read the full report.