Green hydrogen represents a significant opportunity for India to lessen reliance on imported fossil fuels and foster a clean-energy manufacturing sector.
Photo : PTI
Green hydrogen is emerging as a strategic opportunity for India to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels, decarbonise energy-intensive industries and build a domestic clean-energy manufacturing ecosystem.
Green hydrogen could change where some of the world’s industrial work takes place and allow India to export the value of its renewable resources, according to Krishan Rattan, founding partner of global investment firm Terra Invest.
“India’s sunshine could become part of an industrial product bought on the other side of the world,” Rattan writes in a commentary published on the firm’s website. Renewable electricity can be converted into hydrogen and then into products that travel, such as ammonia or iron produced with hydrogen as a reducing agent.
Some of the most interesting trade, he expects, will involve shipping finished industrial products rather than energy itself. “I expect some of the most interesting trade to emerge where a product arrives ready to perform its industrial function,” he writes.
Rattan highlights the National Green Hydrogen Mission’s initial outlay of Rs 19,744 crore, including Rs 17,490 crore for the SIGHT programme supporting electrolyser manufacturing and hydrogen production. Linking a new industrial input with the ability to make the equipment behind it, he writes, “is how lasting industries begin”.
The commentary points to the International Energy Agency’s Global Hydrogen Review 2025, which describes demand concentrated in established industrial uses such as refining and chemicals, as the practical starting point: serve customers who already need the product, and build expertise from there.