Social barriers risk leaving women behind in India's greener future
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When college graduate Mona Kumari came across a pamphlet circulating in her neighbourhood in Rajasthan about a government-sponsored solar power training course, she quickly signed up, hopeful of finding work easily at the many solar parks dotting her home state in northwestern India.
“I had heard about the solar power boom, that solar was this big industry and that there would be many opportunities. I joined the course for that reason. I wanted to financially support my family,” the 23-year-old said ahead of the COP29 UN climate change conference in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
She signed up for the three-month course, which is being offered across more than 500 centres in India to feed an ever-growing demand for green skills.
“I loved the training. I learned how to install solar panels, where to place them, how to connect the wires. I was even taken to a project site for installations during the training,” said Kumari, whose father works as a labourer in the local market and is the only earning member in her family of seven. “I was looking forward to starting work.”
But her parents did not allow her to take up work in the distant, remote places lacking transport infrastructure and other facilities, where many solar PV projects are located. This constitutes a societal roadblock many women face in joining India’s green energy workforce, according to officials overseeing India’s skilling programmes.
About 2,700 km away from Kumari's home, at COP29 in Baku, campaigners this week expressed despair over gender issues getting overlooked at the summit.
Negotiators have struggled to agree on renewing a programme to advance gender-responsive climate policies, as socially conservative countries stood in the way. Activists feared this would derail action to plug gender gaps like those already emerging in the green workforce as countries like India build their clean energy capacity.
Green job roles not yet gendered
India aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2070 and a total shift to clean energy by 2050 – and has the potential to create 35 million green jobs by 2047, according to a government report on the country’s green skills landscape.
But men make up 85 percent of all candidates who have undergone green skills training, data from the Skill Council for Green Jobs shows. Globally, women make up 32 percent of the clean energy workforce, according to a 2019 gender report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). In India, this figure stands at just 11 percent.
“In this green transition, job roles are not yet culturally determined as feminine or masculine. This is a great opportunity to bring both men and women to the same level,” said Lorena Aguilar, a gender expert who leads the Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls and has developed strategies and action plans to mainstream gender-related challenges in U.N. initiatives.
About two-thirds of the nearly 14 million jobs globally in the renewable energy sector are in Asia, according to an International Renewable Agency annual review last year, with solar being the fastest-growing sector.
While the solar power sector has created jobs for technicians and helpers post-installation, these roles require schooling up to twelfth and ninth grade respectively, which many girls do not have in rural India.
“Many of them drop out of school to help in agriculture,” said Arpit Sharma, who heads India’s Skill Council for Green Jobs, which was launched by the Indian government less than a decade ago and acts as the interface between industry and the candidates that it educates for the green sector.
Sharma said reluctance among families to send their daughters to a “male-dominated site” and not having toilets at projects were key reasons for low numbers of women.
“Women are able to do this work, but the conditions are not conducive. We are speaking to industry about creating at least washrooms on site, and training centres to induct more women,” said Sharma, adding that his expectation from COP29 was for the industry to come forward with funding for green skills trainings.
A greater focus on and the financing of green skills programmes will need to be accompanied with a dialogue on women’s participation at this global climate summit to help overcome mindset barriers, analysts said.
More women at top level, fewer on the ground
In India, coordinators at centres offering green skills training said they tell women applicants that these jobs often are in remote locations and may not be ideal for them, which has led to very few signing up for the programmes.
This is despite initiatives that have garnered global attention over the past years. At COP29, speakers have cited the “Barefoot” engineers case study of women spearheading solar panel installations and maintenance in a Rajasthan village for years and training other women to do so. And in India’s electric vehicle sector, women dominate shop-floors.
“More women are taking up climate and environmental sciences for their higher studies. In discussions on climate issues, I see a roomful of women. They are developers, are in think-tanks and in research,” said Vibhuti Garg, director for South Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), who attended COP29.
At the ground level, however, for women from some of India’s most marginalised communities, opportunities for learning and skilling are not always accessible.
“Creating a workforce from the community should be the goal. Industry needs to train students from the beginning. This would plug [the] demand-supply gap in skills. But that level of planning is not happening,” said Santosh Patnaik of Climate Action Network South Asia, adding that discussions at COP29 must focus on the needs of communities.
Green skills lag growing demand
A new report by jobs portal LinkedIn showed that by 2030, nearly one in five jobs requiring green skills could lack candidates to fill them, ballooning to one in two jobs by 2050 – a talking point at the ongoing COP29.
At multiple sessions on the demand-supply gap in green skills at the summit, industry leaders spoke of creating awareness and interest among young people for these jobs, through things like reality TV shows, and how a green future could see considerable labour workforce migration to fill these gaps.
“The demand for green skills is growing at twice the rate of supply. There is an intense competition for green skills… the intensity of competition will only grow,” said Allen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn, speaking at a panel discussion on green skills in Baku.
“Solar for She” push
In 2024, India launched a massive decentralised rooftop solar power project, with the aim of providing free electricity to 10 million households nationwide and to build renewable capacity and create jobs. Vendors have been enlisted from across the country to train youngsters to install solar panels.
While large solar projects do not create jobs at scale for both men or women, decentralised projects such as this can, said Ajay Mathur, director general of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), speaking at COP29, adding that past experiences have shown that women make for a better solar workforce.
“The industry realises that. Women stick to jobs. But preliminary numbers by and large do not reflect that,” he said, adding that the ISA has a “Solar for She” initiative to bring in more women into solar globally.
Back in India, the rooftop solar installation work is underway, with young participants being enlisted for a 15-day training course to carry out the work, in and around their villages - offering an opportunity for skilled women seeking work in the solar power sector not too far from their homes.
But two on-the-ground coordinators of the training told Climate Home they were taking men as there was use of heavy machinery, as well as lifting and installation of panels on rooftops – tasks they said were difficult for women to handle.
In Rajasthan, Kumari said she had not heard of the rooftop solar project. “I can work all hours, I have no difficulty lifting heavy weights. I have done this. I know this work,” she said.
This article was first published on Climate Home under the title “Weak gender focus at COP29 risks leaving women behind in greener future”. It was produced as part of the COP29 Cross-Border Energy Transition Reporting Fellowship, a programme organised by Clean Energy Wire and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.
