Overview: Globally, renewable energy costs have hit a new milestone. In 2025, the “levelized cost of electricity” (LCOE) for solar PV in the Middle East & Africa was recorded to be as low as US$37/MWh (Mackenzie, 2025), signalling that renewables are now among the most competitive power sources, visible proof that the clean-energy transition is underway. Yet beneath that hardware lies a critical, often invisible layer, the digital architecture that enables transparency, interoperability, and trust across supply chains. In India’s case, the building blocks of this architecture already exist in its digital public infrastructure (DPI), be it identity platforms, payment rails, and data-exchange frameworks. What if those same rails could power the transformation of clean-energy manufacturing and trade? This essay argues that DPI is not an optional adjunct to clean energy; it is a strategic enabler of supply chain resilience and global competitiveness. Through a three-stage narrative, I explore the evolving supply-chain challenge, the DPI foundation, and the India-China interplay, aiming to demonstrate how India can leverage its digital advantage to gain a clean-energy industrial edge. Along the way, I also propose concrete suggestions for integrating DPI into trade negotiations, manufacturing strategy, and governed digital ecosystems.
Assessing the Challenges of Clean-Energy Supply Chains
The shift towards solar photovoltaics (PV), battery storage, and green hydrogen, spurred by falling technology prices and renewed commitment to act on climate change, has accelerated rapidly across the globe. However, the concentrated manufacturing and control of the value chain in only a few countries presents a serious risk to supply chain resiliency. China accounts for more than 80 percent of the world’s production capacity for critical solar PV components, such as polysilicon, ingots, and wafers, with estimates suggesting a potential rise to 95% in the coming years. (Solar PV Global Supply Chains – Analysis – IEA, 2022).
This sectoral concentration exposes the global clean energy space to two primary risks. First, disruptions caused by a public health emergency, supply shortage, or geopolitical event will quickly reverberate across international markets. A single production hub in Xinjiang produces nearly 40 percent of the world’s polysilicon, indicating the severity of its vulnerability. Second, there is increasing scrutiny of compliance and certification, which has created a need for better traceability. Producers are increasingly being asked to verify the origin of the material, to quantify emissions over the life cycle, and to account for the changing compliance mindset. As such, improving the resilience of the supply chain would also include evaluating diversification, transparency, and international collaboration to protect the future of clean energy technology.
India, for its part, has signalled major ambition in the clean-energy domain. This ambition is evident in its 50% non-fossil fuel power capacity attained in July 2025, achieving its renewable energy goals ahead of schedule and demonstrating a shift from conventional energy
sources (India’s Renewable Rise: Non-Fossil Sources Now Power Half the Nation’s Grid, n.d.). Over the past decade, India’s renewable energy capacity has expanded more than fivefold, from under 35 GW in 2014 to over 197 GW today (excluding large hydro), despite barriers
such as supply-chain disruptions, unstable module prices, and financial conditions. The country continues to add between 15 and 25 GW annually, one of the fastest growth trajectories across the globe (India Reframes Its Renewable Revolution: The Next Big Leap from Speed to System Strength for Viksit Bharat, n.d). These milestones reflect India’s strategic commitment to accelerating its energy transition and strengthening infrastructure for a sustainable energy future.
The Role of Digital Public Infrastructure
When discussing Digital Public Infrastructure, it is natural to think of identity, payments, and data rails for welfare or finance. However, these have relevance beyond a welfare-stack framework, in industrial and governance contexts. In India, the DPI stack consists of a biometric identity system (Aadhaar), a real-time payments network (UPI), and data management. By July 2025, UIDAI recorded nearly 230 Cr Aadhaar authentication transactions, and UPI recorded 18.39 billion transactions in June alone.
This is more than inclusion; it signifies scale, interoperability, and trust. To have a system in place where identity verification, payments, and data exchange can all technically interoperate across sectors and actors is the underlying backbone of not just social services, but industry as well. The same attributes will be equally relevant in industrial contexts. Can I verify the identity of my component supplier? Can I share and verify emissions or sustainability data across borders with a trusted digital trail? DPI acts as a platform to respond to such questions.
Integrating Digital Public Infrastructure into Clean Energy Supply Chains
The clean energy sector relies on complex global supply chains, which include several aspects right from the mines to the assembly of finished technologies such as solar modules, and these supply chains cross national borders, regulatory regimes, and technical fields. For procurement entities, including governments and renewable energy developers, verifying the environmental integrity and the origin of each component is a prerequisite to ensure the quality of the final product and to maintain trust throughout the supply chain. In this scenario, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) provides structure to the governance, interoperability, and trust in the clean energy manufacturing ecosystem.
Digital identity systems can provide authentication for each actor and asset within the value chain, from mining firms to component manufacturers, to laboratories testing devices’ emissions, in order for all involved to be accountable and verified. Consent-based exchange of data approaches via secure APIs can enable simple flows of information, even emissions data, to be shared among authorized actors. Programmable payments and smart contracts can facilitate the connection of financial disbursements to verified sources, releasing funds only once compliance with environmental and quality requirements has been demonstrated.
Approaches to this digital-industrial integration are varied across multiple countries, indicating DPI’s strategic significance. China’s model, for example, is explicitly state-directed, resting primarily on tightly integrated platforms that link manufacturing, digital systems, and trade policy into a singular platform in a vertically coordinated ecosystem, emphasizing a model of centralized control resulting in the swift implementation of industrial policies. On the other hand, India’s DPI is a modular, open standards, dispersed approach, leading to a more flexible and interoperable system of digital-industrial integration. In a multipolar, fragmented global trade environment, this modular standards-based architecture is a strategic asset, where neither partner is obliged to adhere to a single system, let alone accept state dominance over any potential inter-system relationship. By integrating its DPI into clean-energy manufacturing, India can better position itself as a credible partner alternative in global supply chains based on verifiable trust and transparency, and not simply push back against a centralized, state-owned system or negotiate its reliance on a more centralized state system.
Leveraging India’s Strategic Advantage
India’s aspiration to assert itself as a clean-energy superpower is unambiguous in its intent. Such an ambition requires India to leverage its digital public infrastructure (DPI) advantage to induce practical global engagement, which will mean a comprehensive and strategic use of the three pillars. First, India must proactively position transparency as a competitive advantage. Manufacturers from India, utilizing DPI-enabled verifiable credentials, end-to-end supply-chain traceability, and auditable environmental data, will be well-positioned to comply with increasingly rigorous international green procurement policies and carbon-border adjustment mechanisms that stress more than mere declarations, thereby attracting global buyers.
Second, it must leverage trade negotiations as an instrument of digital diplomacy. In forming free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral arrangements, India must advocate for mutual recognition, as well as shared registries, of digital credentials and green products. This
would align India’s digital infrastructure more prominently within its trade policy and form new pathways for market access.
Third, and finally, it must establish initiative for the support of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) through DPI. If it can support these smaller organizations with easy access to the identity, data, and payment rail of DPI, India can help them participate in certified global value chains, which have long been unattainable due to scale and compliance barriers.
Nevertheless, this also presents its own perils. If India does not integrate this digital strategy deeply into the fabric of its industrial and trade policy, India could attain manufacturing scale but lose the strategic advantage. As global disclosures and international market regulations increasingly demand certified origins, digital product passports, and a high bar for supply-chain audit, Indian firms could be rolled out of premium markets if they lack proof. Meanwhile, China’s significant role in shaping regional technical standards and digital norms remains a persistent issue. For the Indian model to succeed, its DPI cannot simply be a domestic asset; it must be embraced and recognized globally as a credible, open-standards alternative to state-owned platforms.
Concluding Reflections
The upcoming years are of utmost importance for policymakers, trade negotiators, and industrialists. India would be able to accelerate its digital-industrial lead by executing a green DPI Stack that connects identity, payments, and data for a particular clean-energy value chain. From the industry’s point of view, utilizing digital traceability tools linked to DPI rails instead of proprietary systems will give firms access to the preferred suppliers’ list in the emerging green-compliance market. Lastly, the continuous monitoring of metrics such as the percentage of exports with certified digital credentials, average audit time, and digital-verification costs will assist in management calibration.
The worldwide shift to clean energy is no less than a double transformation. On the one hand, the digital part, and on the other, the industrial one. India has a strategic chance with this. The DPI that the country has already established would also serve as a digital tool to push the clean energy ecosystem. India can achieve more than just the scale of its production. It can make this ability a power of the state, change its inclusive model into global competitiveness, and bring transparency to be a form of international leverage that is very hard to contest. The future of green value chains will rest not on the capability to control the production lines but on the ability to create the trust protocols that are to support them.
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Her academic and research interests lie in the realms of global governance, foreign policy, international development, climate technology, and digital transformation. She is particularly interested in understanding the evolving nature of statecraft and policy frameworks in a rapidly changing world order driven by technological innovation and climate imperatives. Through her research, she aspires to contribute to informed policy discourse and the advancement of interdisciplinary approaches to governance, sustainability, and international relations..