With , India is progressing to expand its renewable energy sector with a particular focus on solar and wind.
According to the , within this financial year, between April 2024 and January 2025, India’s installed capacity in solar power increased from 81.8 GW to 100.3 GW, and that for wind from 45.9 GW to 48.4 GW. Expansion in renewable energy implies an expansion of jobs in the sector too.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data published by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme (MoSPI) confirms this too. For the sector ‘electric power generation using solar energy’, the number of workers went up from 16,844 in 2017–18 to 150,000 approximately in 2023–24.
However, for ‘electric power generation using other renewable (non-conventional) sources’, the number of workers fluctuated yearly: from 56,466 workers in 2017–18 to 90,000 in 2020–21 to 5,695 in 2021–22 to 50,680 in 2023–24.
These numbers are puzzling given that have been undertaken by MNRE to train workers for installation, operation and maintenance of renewable energy projects.
Two key initiatives are the ‘’ and ‘’ – with an aim to create a skilled workforce for India’s solar and wind energy sectors respectively, and thereby help achieve India’s aforementioned green energy targets.
According to the programme portals, till date and have been trained.
These trained personnel would be expected to take up relevant jobs in the solar and wind energy sectors and should therefore be reflected in India’s employment statistics.
But are these workers being adequately captured in the statistics? If not, how can there be better accounting for such workers in the growing green energy sector?
Deep dive into statistics
To answer this question, we need to look at occupational data. Let us first consider solar energy. The ‘Suryamitra Skill Development Programme’ trains workers to fulfill the occupation requirements of a solar panel installation technician. The occupation code for a solar panel installation technician, according to the National Classification of Occupations (NCO 2015) is 7421.1401.
Considering that PLFS provides data on workers at a relatively aggregated NCO-3-digit level, all solar panel installation technicians should be reflected under the broad heading of NCO 742 within the sector ‘electric power generation using solar energy’.
As it turns out, according to PLFS 2022-23 data, there were no workers reported under NCO code 742 and therefore in effect solar panel installation technicians were not covered in the data. In the latest PLFS 2023-24, of the 150,000 workers engaged in generation of solar energy, about 5,600 workers (four per cent) were reported under NCO code 742.
Despite the fact that the Suryamitra programme has been running since 2015, has trained more than 57,000 technicians, and that solar related schemes have been promoted with much fanfare over the last few years, it is confusing to find an absence of installation technicians during 2022-23. And while there are some workers reported sporadically under NCO code 742, for instance in PLFS 2021-22 and 2023-24, there is no way to ascertain if any of these are solar panel installation technicians.
Let us now consider wind energy. The three segments of the ‘Vayumitra Skill Development Programme’ train workers to fulfill the occupation requirements of , , and .
Their respective occupation codes in NCO 2015 are: 2165.9900 (Cartographers and Surveyors, Other), 3115.0102 (Maintenance Technician- Mechanical), and 3113.0102 (Maintenance Technician- Electrical). The data on these workers should be available in PLFS under the 3-digit NCO codes of 216 and 311.
However, unlike solar electricity generation, there is no dedicated sector accorded to wind electricity generation in India’s .
Rather, wind energy is subsumed with other renewable sources, such as biogas and small hydro power, under ‘electric power generation using other non-conventional sources’. Within this sector, there are no workers reported under the NCO code 216 since 2021-22, and sporadically under NCO code 311– though they are missing in the two latest rounds of PLFS 2022-23 and 2023-24.
Coding woes
Training programmes for the solar and wind sectors have been undertaken by MNRE based on the needs evinced by the stakeholders in the renewable energy industry.
Hence, solar panel installers, wind plant O&M technicians, and wind resource assessors and site surveyors can be regarded to be in demand, and therefore to be employed in such occupations. Their absence in India’s labour statistics is a matter of concern. It also questions any quantitative projections concerning the future number of workers needed in the sector using existing data. What measures can help overcome such data gaps?
Firstly, workers’ occupations are being assigned NCO codes in PLFS at the 3-digit level, while the sector skill councils are assigning NCO codes to occupational qualification packs (as for Suryamitra and Vayumitra) at the 8-digit level. Is it possible that the workers in question are being captured in PLFS under a different NCO, other than the ones expected? The slightest potential for any mismatch calls for an alignment in the attribution of NCO codes to different occupations, between the data producing and skilling agencies, which could help capture the worker data with better accuracy.
Secondly, occupations differ between wind, biogas and small hydro sectors – but there is no way to distinguish since all workers are reflected under a single industrial classification of ‘electric power generation using other non-conventional sources’ in PLFS.
This limits our understanding concerning job creation, and policy measures concerning skill development, in each of these renewable sectors. With concerning the progress on installed capacity for wind, small hydro and biogas (along with solar), and the focus on green energy sources in recent years (including green hydrogen), there is a need for dedicated industrial classifications for each of these.
There cannot be concerns about mis-alignment with the international standards set within , since the disaggregated classification (by sources of electricity) under the broad industrial grouping of ‘Electric power generation, transmission and distribution’ has been performed at the national level.
Lastly, PLFS is a household survey and it is possible that with differences in respondents surveyed in each round, there are corresponding changes in the occupations being reported. Overcoming such issues requires supplementing the existing PLFS with dedicated and appropriate data collation at the sectoral and occupational level.
Isha Dayal is Fellow and Bornali Bhandari is Professor at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). The authors are grateful to Dr Gurucharan Manna, Senior Advisor at NCAER, for his guidance.
Views expressed are authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect that of Down To Earth.
