Economy & Market

Is India on track to meet its Paris commitments

Published

7 years ago

January 12, 2019

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The country may not meet its targets completely but is within reach to achieve a substantial part of it.

India’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounted for 6.5 per cent of 2014 global total, according to data from the World Resources Institute. This made the country the fourth-largest emitter after China, the United States and the European Union. Per capita, India’s emission from fossil fuels (in 2017) is by far the lowest among major economies:

India: 1.83 MT carbon dioxide (CO2)
China: 7.72 MT in China
The EU: 6.97 MT
The US: 15.74 MT

Despite its low per capita emissions, India has made significant commitments in its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015 as part of the Paris Agreement.

The Climate Action Tracker website has rated its climate efforts as "2-degree compatible" = that can contribute to limiting warming by the end of the century to 2? Celsius; making India the only major economy to be so highly rated. India’s headline Paris pledge was to reduce the emission intensity of its gross domestic product (GHG emissions per unit GDP) by 33-35 per cent over 2005 levels by 2030. Assessing progress towards this target is tough: Official emissions data, which India communicates to the UNFCCC, is available until 2014 only. Also, data is available only for select years (1994, 2000, 2007, 2010 and 2014), not including the baseline year 2005.

This data (in conjunction with World Bank data for GDP) shows an unwelcome trend: A decrease in the rate of reduction of emission intensity during 2010-14 from 2007-10, as emissions continued to grow unabated despite a weakening of economic growth. More recent unofficial estimates indicate that this trend may have been temporary.

India’s annual GDP growth was only about 1 percentage point slower than the average in the years before, emission growth rate nearly halved, from 4.8 per cent before 2015 to 2.3 per cent in 2015 and 2.9 per cent in 2016 and 2017, according to the 2018 edition of the Trends in Global CO2 and Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions report by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. These fluctuations point to the perils of the assumption that the decoupling of economic growth from emissions is a straightforward process.

In its second Biennial Update Report submitted to the UNFCCC in 2019, India claimed to have reduced the emission intensity of its economy by 21 per cent by 2014. But it didn’t specify emissions data for 2005 or the GDP data series used to arrive at the conclusion.

Nevertheless, the figure indicates that India is on track to meet the 2030 emission intensity commitment. An analysis by US-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has gone so far as to argue that the figure indicates that India could meet its target a decade early.

A study by Navroz Dubash and others published last year in Environmental Research Letters analysed seven previously published energy / emission scenarios together with current policies, and similarly argued that India’s economy-emission trajectory was consistent with the Paris Agreement.

A note on emission intensity is in order. It is a quantity that has decreased over time in many economies. One study shows CO2 emission intensity of the global economy has been steadily falling since at least 1990. This is not just due to, say, an increasing usage of renewable energy or energy efficiency, but also due to the change in the sectoral composition of the economy as it shifts from industry to (often less energy-intensive) services.

There is little clarity as to the extent to which the claimed 21 per cent reduction between 2005 and 2014 is due to concerted climate action. For comparison, in its own NDC, China claimed to have reduced the CO2 emission intensity of its GDP by 33.8 per cent during the same period.

In addition, India’s NDC also committed to ensuring that 40 per cent of its installed power capacity is from non-fossil sources (renewables, hydroelectric and nuclear) by 2030. There is an interim target of 175 GW of non-hydel renewable power by 2022 (up from 35 GW in 2015). Non-fossil sources accounted for about 37 per cent of India’s power capacity, as of September 2019, according to the Central Electricity Authority (CEA). Thus, the larger 2030 target seems like an easy one to achieve. Indeed the CEA’s projections yield an installed non-fossil capacity equivalent to nearly 65 per cent of the total capacity by 2029-30. However, on the interim target of 175 GW of non-hydro renewables by 2022, despite strong initial progress, the Government’s plans appear to be floundering.

A recent CRISIL report indicated that India may fall short of this interim target by as high as 42 per cent. If at all the target can be met, it will require more concerted effort by the government and the private sector. India’s final key pledge at Paris was the creation of an additional carbon sink equivalent to 2.5-3 billion tonne CO2 by 2030 through additional forest and tree cover. Analysts agreed that progress on the forestry goal was far from robust.

The Green India Mission, which seeks to work towards the target is woefully underfunded and has been regularly missing its annual targets. This has rendered the fulfilment of the 2030 pledge hard if not altogether unlikely. Thus India is making reasonable progress on two of the three key pledges it made in Paris. The Government needs to correct course where its policy is faltering. It also needs to invest in generating data more regularly than the bare minimum required by the UNFCCC so that way claims can be validated and data analysed to understand the underlying trends.

Courtesy: Kapil Subramanian for Down to Earth Updated on Octoebr 23, 2019 to reflect that the India’s pledge was for 2030, not 2020.

Economy & Market

TSR Will Define Which Cement Companies Win India’s Net-Zero Race

Published

4 days ago

April 27, 2026

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Jignesh Kundaria, Director and CEO, Fornnax Technology

India is simultaneously grappling with two crises: a mounting waste emergency and an urgent need to decarbonise its most carbon-intensive industries. The cement sector, the second-largest in the world and the backbone of the nation’s infrastructure ambitions, sits at the centre of both. It consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuel, and it has the technical capacity to consume something else entirely: the waste our cities cannot get rid of.

According to CPCB and NITI Aayog projections, India generates approximately 62.4 million tonnes of municipal solid waste annually, with that figure expected to reach 165 million tonnes by 2030. Much of this waste is energy-rich and non-recyclable. At the same time, cement kilns operate at material temperatures of approximately 1,450 degrees Celsius, with gas temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees. This high-temperature environment is ideal for co-processing, ensuring the complete thermal destruction of organic compounds without generating toxic residues. The physics are in our favour. The infrastructure is not.

Pre-processing is not the support act for co-processing. It is the main event. Get the particle size wrong, get the moisture wrong, get the calorific value wrong and your kiln thermal stability will suffer the consequences.

The Regulatory Push Is Real

The Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules 2026 mandate that cement plants progressively replace solid fossil fuels with Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF), starting at a 5 per cent baseline and scaling to 15 per cent within six years. NITI Aayog’s 2026 Roadmap for Cement Sector Decarbonisation targets 20 to 25 per cent Thermal Substitution Rate (TSR) by 2030. Beyond compliance, every tonne of coal replaced by RDF generates measurable carbon reductions which is monetisable under India’s emerging Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS). TSR is no longer a sustainability metric. It is a financial lever.

Yet our own field assessments across multiple Indian cement plants reveal a sobering reality: the primary barrier to scaling AFR adoption is not waste availability. It is the fragmented and under-engineered pre-processing ecosystem that sits between the waste and the kiln.

Why Indian Waste Is a Different Engineering Problem

Indian municipal solid waste is not the material that imported shredding equipment was designed for. Our waste streams frequently exceed 40 per cent to 50 per cent moisture content, particularly during monsoon cycles, saturated with abrasive inerts including sand, glass, and stone. Plants relying on imported OEM equipment face months of downtime awaiting proprietary spare parts. Machines built for segregated, low-moisture waste fail quickly and disrupt the entire pre-processing operation in Indian conditions.

The two most common failures we observe are what I call the biting teeth problem and the chewing teeth problem. Plants relying solely on a primary shredder reduce bulk waste to large fractions, but the output remains too coarse for stable kiln combustion. Others attempt to use a secondary shredder as a standalone unit without a primary stage to pre-size the feed, leading to catastrophic mechanical failure. When both stages are present but mismatched in throughput capacity, the system becomes a bottleneck. Achieving the 40 to 70 tonnes per hour required for meaningful coal displacement demands a precisely coordinated two-stage process.

Engineering a Made-in-India Answer

At Fornnax, our response to these challenges is grounded in one principle: Indian waste demands Indian engineering. Our systems are built around feedstock homogeneity, the holy grail of kiln stability. Consistent particle size and predictable calorific value are the foundation of stable kiln combustion. Without them, no TSR target is achievable at scale.

Our SR-MAX2500 Dual Shaft Primary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive) processes raw, baled, or loosely mixed MSW, C&I waste, bulky waste, and plastics, reducing them to approximately 150 mm fractions at throughputs of up to 40 tonnes per hour. The R-MAX 3300 Single Shaft Secondary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive), introduced in 2025, takes that primary output and produces RDF fractions in the 30 to 80 mm range at up to 30 tonnes per hour, specifically optimised for consistent kiln feeding. We have also introduced electric drive configurations under the SR-100 HD series, with capacities between 5 and 40 tonnes per hour, already operational at a leading Indian waste-processing facility.

Looking ahead, Fornnax is expanding its portfolio with the upcoming SR-MAX3600 Hydraulic Drive primary shredder at up to 70 tonnes per hour and the R-MAX2100 Hydraulic drive secondary shredder at up to 20 tonnes per hour, designed specifically for the large-scale throughput that higher TSR ambitions require.

The Investment Case Is Now

The 2070 Net-Zero target is not a distant goal for India’s cement sector. It starts today, with decisions being made on the plant floor.

The SWM Rules 2026 are already in effect, requiring cement plants to replace coal with RDF. Carbon credit markets are opening up, and coal prices are not going to get cheaper. Every tonne of coal a cement plant replaces with waste-derived fuel saves money on one side and generates carbon credit revenue on the other. Pre-processing infrastructure is no longer just a compliance requirement. It is a business investment with a measurable return.

The good news is that nothing is missing. The technology works. The waste is available in every Indian city. The government has provided the policy direction. The only thing standing between where the industry is today and where it needs to be is the commitment to build the right infrastructure.

The cement companies that move now will not just meet the regulations. They will be ahead of every competitor that waits.

About The Author

Jignesh Kundaria is the Director and CEO of Fornnax Technology. Over an experience spanning more than two decades in the recycling industry, he has established himself as one of India’s foremost voices on waste-to-fuel technology and alternative fuel infrastructure.

Concrete

WCA Welcomes SiloConnect as associate corporate member

Published

3 weeks ago

April 13, 2026

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The World Cement Association (WCA) has announced SiloConnect as its newest associate corporate member, expanding its network of technology providers supporting digitalisation in the cement industry. SiloConnect offers smart sensor technology that provides real-time visibility of cement inventory levels at customer silos, enabling producers to monitor stock remotely and plan deliveries more efficiently. The solution helps companies move from reactive to proactive logistics, improving delivery planning, operational efficiency and safety by reducing manual inspections. The technology is already used by major cement producers such as Holcim, Cemex and Heidelberg Materials and is deployed across more than 30 countries worldwide.

Concrete

TotalEnergies and Holcim Launch Floating Solar Plant in Belgium

Published

3 weeks ago

April 13, 2026

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TotalEnergies and Holcim have commissioned a floating solar power plant in Obourg, Belgium, built on a rehabilitated former chalk quarry that has been converted into a lake. The project has a generation capacity of 31 MW and produces around 30 GWh of renewable electricity annually, which will be used to power Holcim’s nearby industrial operations. The project is currently the largest floating solar installation in Europe dedicated entirely to industrial self-consumption. To ensure minimal impact on the surrounding landscape, more than 700 metres of horizontal directional drilling were used to connect the solar installation to the electrical substation. The project reflects ongoing collaboration between the two companies to support industrial decarbonisation through renewable energy solutions and innovative infrastructure development.