Ratul Puri: Why India's Clean Energy Transition Needs Patient Capital
Talk to enough people in India's energy sector and you'll notice something odd: nobody really argues about whether the country can hit its clean energy targets on paper. The panels get built, the projects get announced, the auctions get won. The real trouble starts later, in the boring middle stretch between "project awarded" and "power flowing" — and that's the stretch Ratul Puri keeps coming back to when he talks about what's actually holding India back.
His argument is fairly simple, even if the finance world tends to dress it up in jargon: solar parks and transmission lines and battery storage don't pay back on the timelines most capital is looking for. These are projects that take years to build and years more to earn out. And a lot of the money currently chasing India's energy boom behaves more like it's looking for a quick flip than a decade-long bet. Ratul Puri calls this a mismatch, and once you hear it framed that way, it's hard to unsee it in almost every stalled project you read about.
It's Not a Technology Problem
This is probably the part of Ratul Puri's thinking that stands out most. He's not out there arguing that India needs better panels or smarter grid software or more land — most of that groundwork already exists. What's missing, in his view, is patient money. Capital that's willing to sit with a project through its slow, unglamorous early years instead of expecting returns to show up on a three-year fund cycle.
He points to institutions like IREDA as proof that this kind of financing can work — patient, sector-specific lending that actually understands what a long-gestation infrastructure asset looks like. But he's also quick to say that one agency, however well-run, can't carry the financing load for an entire national transition. India needs a lot more of this kind of capital, not just a good example of it.
Why the Gap Gets More Painful Every Year
As 2030 gets closer, this stops being an abstract financing debate and starts becoming the actual bottleneck. Every gigawatt India wants to add needs someone willing to underwrite years of construction risk before a single unit of power gets sold. Without that, Chairman Ratul Puri warns of a pattern that's honestly already visible if you look closely: ambitious targets, competitive auctions, plenty of headlines — and then projects quietly stalling at the financial closure stage because nobody's capital actually fit the risk.
Financing Deserves as Much Attention as Policy
Ratul Puri has made this case in rooms far beyond just energy conferences — including through his work with CII's power sector committee, where he's pushed the idea that financing structure and capacity targets can't really be discussed separately. It's a fair point. India has spent a lot of energy (no pun intended) refining auction design and land acquisition rules. Far less attention has gone into asking whether the capital markets around clean energy are actually built for the kind of decade-long bets this sector demands.
What he'd like to see more of: sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, long-duration infrastructure investors — the kind of money that's structurally comfortable waiting. Not because it's virtuous, but because that's simply what this asset class requires. Getting more of that kind of capital interested in India, he argues, deserves just as much policy energy as anything happening on the auction side.
The Honest Takeaway
Strip away the finance vocabulary and Ratul Puri's point is almost disarmingly simple: hitting a target on a government roadmap is only half the job. The other half — quieter, less photogenic, easy to overlook — is building a pool of capital patient enough to actually see these projects through to completion.
India's clean energy transition isn't short on ambition. What it's short on, if Ratul Puri is right, is patience — the financial kind. And that's arguably the harder thing to build.
About Ratul Puri
Ratul Puri is the Chairman of Hindustan Power, an integrated power generation company with a strong presence in renewable and transitional energy generation. Over the years, Chairman Ratul Puri has been involved in the development of large-scale energy infrastructure projects that support India’s growing power requirements and its transition toward cleaner energy.
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