India’s climate commitments imply a build-out of renewable capacity, grid infrastructure and storage that will require capital expenditure at a scale the country’s financial system has not previously had to absorb. Yet the instruments best suited to fund multi-decade infrastructure remain thin: banks lend short and at floating rates, private credit comes at high IRRs, and the corporate bond market barely extends past five years. To bridge this gap public lenders have stepped in - PFC, REC and IREDA now account for over half of power-sector debt - while discom stress that would once have shown up as stressed assets stays off balance sheets, and the emerging-market cost-of-capital gap keeps even viable projects expensive to finance. The discussion will bring together practitioners, researchers and policymakers for an open exchange on where India’s climate finance architecture stands today, where the real bottlenecks are: capital, cost of capital, or bankable projects and what institutional and policy changes could make the 2030 NDC financeable.
About the Speaker:
Jayant Sinha has spent the last decade working at the intersection of Indian public finance and climate policy. He is a former Union Minister of State for Finance and Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation in the Government of India, and served as the Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Finance and as a member of the Public Accounts Committee from 2019 to 2024. Before his career in public service, he was a venture investor and management consultant, including roles at Omidyar Network and McKinsey & Company. He is currently the President of Everstone Group and Eversource Capital. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and a Senior Advisor at the Indian Venture Capital Association. He now serves as Visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE Grantham Research Institute and the Global School of Sustainability, and advises climate investment funds across the Global South giving him a rare vantage point on both the policy and capital-markets sides of what it will take to finance India’s energy transition.
The event will be held in a hybrid format; however, in-person attendance is strongly encouraged to participate in the discussion. Registration is mandatory.
