Jun 29, 2026 11:58 am IST

Opinion | India's Solar Dreams Have A Big China Problem

The entire edifice of Indian solar, the panels, the parks, the rooftop schemes, the 500 GW of non-fossil capacity promised by 2030, rests, at its base, on a single supply line that runs across a contested border.

Aditya Sinha Aditya Sinha Analyst

In April 1933, John Maynard Keynes took the boat to Dublin to deliver the first Finlay Lecture at University College. He was by then the most famous economist alive, and what he said, in "National Self-Sufficiency", printed soon after in the Yale Review, caused a small, genteel scandal. Here was the man every undergraduate filed under free markets and open exchange, calmly taking apart a faith he had once held without question. "I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law." Having confessed the creed, he proceeded to renounce a good part of it.

I thought of that lecture while reading a notification issued by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy on March 18, 2026.The notification extends something called the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers, ALMM in the acronym-strewn manner of Indian administration, to solar ingots and wafers, with effect from June 1, 2028. ALMM began life as an order in 2019. List-I, for solar modules, became enforceable in 2021; List-II, for cells, from June 1, 2026; and now List-III, for the wafers and ingots that sit further upstream still. The mechanism is simple. Only manufacturers on the list may supply projects awarded under Section 63 of the Electricity Act, 2003, and net-metering and open-access projects besides. Chinese firms are, in practice, kept off it. ALMM is a non-tariff barrier dressed in the language of quality........

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