Bangladesh, India’s solar energy push faces a battle for land

Famed for its Sun Temple dedicated to the sun god, Modhera in Gujarat state became India’s first fully solar-powered village in 2022, but a legal case against the plant is still in court as residents seek compensation for losing 50 acres of grazing land.

Modhera’s 6 megawatt (MW) solar plant and a linked battery storage system, which provide energy to the village’s 6,000 people, were built in 2022 despite opposition from local farmers, who filed a case in the state’s highest court in 2020 against its construction.

It is one of 25 ongoing land conflicts linked to renewable energy in India, according to research group Land Conflict Watch. In neighbouring Bangladesh, there have been local media reports of solar projects being halted due to local protests.

A push by India and Bangladesh to boost the use of solar power and renewable energy is resulting in increasing land conflicts, experts say, as farmers worry about losing key agricultural land to renewable energy projects.

“The main cause of these conflicts is competing demands for land,” said Mudita Vidrohi, an environmental campaigner.

At the COP29 in Azerbaijan this month, global leaders are discussing funding to support priorities such as the transition towards clean energy, following a pledge at COP28 in Dubai last year to triple global renewable energy capacity.

India and Bangladesh have both said they will ramp up their solar energy capacity in the coming years to cut their reliance on planet-heating fossil-fuels.

India aims to be able to generate half of the country’s electricity from renewable energy by 2030 up from 46 per cent currently. Bangladesh has said it wants to be able to get 30 per cent of its electricity from renewable power by the end of the decade, up sharply from just about 4.5 per cent currently.

The 25 land disputes in India are having an impact on over 30,000 people and millions of dollars of renewable investment, according to Land Conflict Watch.

Vidrohi said most of the opposition in India is coming from smallholder farmers and pastoral communities, including nomadic livestock rearers, who depend on the common land for their food and income.

She said a large part of India’s 13 million pastoral communities live in the sunny, semi-arid south and west regions where solar projects are being built.

“This is putting the pastoral communities’ livelihoods in direct contest with India’s solar ambition,” she said.

Land procurement is proving to be a major challenge for Bangladesh to achieve its green capacity goals, according to research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a non-profit organisation.

“In Bangladesh, land plot ownership is highly fragmented, and thus pooling sufficient suitable space together for a solar project is difficult,” said Ijaz Hossain, professor at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

The government is cautious about agricultural land being used for renewable projects in a country where global nutrition monitor Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimates one in four face “acute food insecurity” in the last quarter of 2024.

Earlier this year, a local protest against the construction of a 200 MW solar plant in the southwestern district of Barguna led to the project being scrapped, according to residents and local media reports.

People from the local region, including farmers and activists, formed a human chain in the village of Agathakur Para, saying they were trying to protect their land where three staple crops grow each year.

Shahin Alom, a local businessman, said power generation should not compromise “even an inch of multi-cropping land”.

Bangladesh, which uses about 70 per cent of its land for agriculture, issued a government circular in 2023 making it illegal to build solar parks in land that is used for growing multiple crops a year. The agriculture sector employs some 40 per cent of Bangladesh’s population, according to the Asian Development Bank.

Plans for the construction of solar parks in Barapukuria, a coal mine area in the northwest of Bangladesh, have also been held up due to protests, said local resident Asad Sarkar, confirming local media reports.

Rohini Kamal, a research fellow at Bangladesh’s Brac University, stressed the importance of including local communities in discussions about renewables projects.

“Without a fair deal with the farmers, herders, fishermen and other land users, you cannot ensure solar growth that adds jobs,” she said.

While protests have put some solar projects in Bangladesh on hold, India is moving ahead with its clean energy plans.

India is using some of its wasteland -- which makes up 17 per cent of the country’s overall land area -- for renewable projects, but some ecologists warn this could hurt India’s biodiversity and livestock fodder.

Against this backdrop, India’s renewable energy capacity grew over 200 per cent in the last decade, largely led by solar power, according to government data.

But as India uses more and more of its land for renewable energy, land scarcity could eventually become a bottleneck for the country’s solar expansion, the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) said in a recent report.

India has to produce about 7,000 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy to meet its national target of net zero emissions by 2070 and generating anything beyond 1,500 GW could come with significant land conflicts due to population density and climate risks like floods and cyclones, think tank CEEW said in the report.

CEEW fellow Hemant Mallya said a possible solution could be for state and union territories to make “land banks” available to renewables developers. In India, government agencies create “land banks” by pooling together private and public land to be used for businesses and infrastructure.