Kalyan Bhattacharjee | ET Manufacturing

June 17, 2026

How Sustainable Manufacturing Can Support Viksit Bharat 2047
– By Kalyan Bhattacharjee, Chief Sustainability Officer, Jindal Stainless

Sustainable manufacturing is no longer an environmental choice alone; it is increasingly becoming a competitiveness imperative for India’s manufacturing sector.
As India advances towards Viksit Bharat 2047, future industrial growth will be defined not only by scale and output, but also by energy security, resource efficiency, emissions intensity, and supply chain resilience.
The transition to low-carbon manufacturing will require a combination of renewable energy, energy efficiency, waste heat recovery, circularity, and emerging technologies such as green hydrogen.
Circular manufacturing presents one of India’s biggest opportunities, helping reduce emissions, strengthen resource security, and improve long-term industrial competitiveness.
Infrastructure decisions made today will shape India’s sustainability outcomes for decades. Materials that offer durability, recyclability, corrosion resistance, and lower lifecycle costs must become central to future infrastructure planning and procurement.
Embedding low-carbon benchmarks into industrial approvals can help future-proof India’s manufacturing growth.

Every generation inherits a different industrial challenge. Earlier phases of economic development were focused on building capacity, expanding infrastructure, and accelerating growth at scale. Today’s challenge is more complex: how to sustain that growth while strengthening energy security, improving resource efficiency, reducing emissions, and remaining globally competitive.

For India, this challenge is also an opportunity. As the country pursues its Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, it has the ability to build manufacturing systems that are not only larger, but smarter and more resilient. The scale of India’s manufacturing ambition and the depth of its sustainability commitment need not be competing priorities. Increasingly, they are becoming two sides of the same growth story.

Viksit Bharat 2047, at its core, is a demand signal for infrastructure, for energy systems, for mobility. NITI Aayog estimates this will require sustained GDP growth of 7–10% annually. For manufacturing, that means competing not just on price and production volume, but increasingly on emissions intensity, energy sourcing, resource efficiency, and supply chain transparency. Global markets are already factoring these into procurement and trade decisions. For export-facing manufacturers, carbon performance is already commercially consequential. ESG-linked procurement is a reality for European customers today. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is actively reshaping how industrial goods are priced today. Fossil fuel price volatility is a structural threat to margins. The real risk, for companies that defer action, is not regulatory but competitive.

India has an advantage that developed economies do not – the opportunity to build differently from the outset, rather than spending decades retrofitting systems designed for a different era.

The energy transition is structural, not incremental

Within Indian manufacturing, the shift to renewable energy has moved well past the stage of environmental signalling; it is now a business continuity and energy security decision. Long-term renewable power purchase agreements offer manufacturers cost predictability and insulation from fossil fuel price volatility. For companies that consume energy at industrial scale, this matters as much as the environmental logic.

That said, renewable integration in heavy industry is not without genuine complexity. Steel production requires continuous, high-intensity power – a requirement that does not sit easily with the intermittent nature of solar and wind. No single technology resolves this predicament. The transition requires a portfolio: renewable energy, storage, grid strengthening, waste heat recovery, and efficiency improvements working together across long investment cycles.

Leading manufacturers are already deploying this approach, combining captive solar, large-scale wind-solar hybrid projects, and waste heat recovery systems to drive meaningful, measurable reductions in carbon footprint year on year.

Green hydrogen: Why early movers will win

Few technologies have generated more genuine industrial excitement and more sobering reality check than green hydrogen. At an industrial scale, it remains expensive. Electrolyser costs need to come down, renewable electricity needs to be reliably available and supply chains need to mature.

The toughest trade-off for any manufacturer is balancing the pace of scaling with economic viability. Green premiums are still real – the cost of green hydrogen, driven by electricity prices and electrolyser economics, remains significantly higher than conventional alternatives. In that sense, every scale-up decision is a deliberate economic bet that costs will converge. The interim cost differential has to be absorbed in the expectation of long-term structural advantage.

And yet, the case for moving early is compelling. In a stainless steel plant, hydrogen has always been part of the process, traditionally derived from cracked ammonia. The shift to green hydrogen, produced through electrolysis powered by renewable energy, requires new engineering systems, upgraded safety protocols, and extensive workforce retraining. These are not changes that can be compressed into a short implementation window. Companies that begin now build the operational knowledge, infrastructure, and partnerships without the pressure of compressed timelines. When the ecosystem matures, and it will, early movers will be structurally better placed than those who waited for certainty before acting.

Circularity: The most underappreciated lever

There is a thin but important distinction that is sometimes lost in conversations about sustainable steel – between steel as a sustainable material and steel as a sustainably made product. The first is well established. Stainless steel is over 85% recoverable at end of life, infinitely recyclable without loss of quality, and specified across the most demanding, long-lifecycle applications in the world. The second is more complex, and the gaps are real.

Production remains energy-intensive. Scrap quality and traceability continue to constrain the ability to scale circular manufacturing. High-grade stainless steel requires clean, well-segregated scrap, something that domestic collection and processing infrastructure has not yet fully enabled. Scope 3 emissions, those generated across the value chain rather than within the factory gate, remain inadequately tracked across the industry. Progressive manufacturers have pushed scrap utilisation in production inputs well beyond 70%, a meaningful step toward lower embedded emissions and reduced dependence on virgin raw materials. But closing the loop fully requires the entire value chain – suppliers, recyclers, logistics partners, and customers – to move together. Circularity is not a factory-level decision; it is an ecosystem shift.

India’s infrastructure opportunity

India’s infrastructure pipeline is enormous: 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity targeted by 2030, over 9,000 projects under the National Infrastructure Pipeline, full railway electrification, and 100 smart cities in development. Each of these will consume steel. The question that policymakers, developers, and specifiers have not yet asked loudly enough is: what kind of steel? Do we consider steel that has lower operational emission footprint or Stainless Steel with longer lifespan and lower emission footprint spread over comparable life?

Green stainless steel, produced with lower carbon intensity, higher scrap content, and clean energy inputs, is positioned to move from a niche specification to a mainstream procurement requirement as India’s carbon disclosure frameworks evolve and align with global supply chain expectations. Meanwhile, a sustainable material like stainless steel is already embedded across the applications that will define India’s built future: metro systems, modern rail coaches, coastal bridges, water infrastructure, airports, and hospitals. Along India’s 11,000 km coastline, where corrosion drastically reduces the lifespan of conventional steel, the case for stainless is not even primarily a sustainability argument but of lifecycle economics, and an increasingly hard one to ignore.

The shift towards its much wider adoption, however, will depend significantly on demand creation. If government procurement begins mandating environment-friendly material specifications for public infrastructure, as is the case in parts of Europe, adoption will accelerate sharply. What is needed is the policy signal that moves sustainable and long lifespan steel from commercially interesting to operationally standard.

Regulators, too, have a more consequential role to play than currently understood and recognised. Environmental approvals for new industrial projects can move beyond baseline compliance to actively assess whether proposed investments are aligned with low-carbon process technologies. Embedding such benchmarks into approval frameworks would ensure that each new asset entering the system is not locking in avoidable emissions for the decades ahead.

Government-led initiatives such as Make in India and Aatmanirbhar Bharat have highlighted the importance of bolstering manufacturing capabilities domestically, minimising imports, enhancing competitiveness through exports, and positioning India as a global manufacturing destination. All of this forms the core of Viksit Bharat 2047. But whether it is built to last will depend on decisions being made right now, in boardrooms, policy chambers, and on factory floors. Sustainable manufacturing is not the responsible version of industrial growth. For India, at this moment, it is simply the intelligent one.

This article was published on ETManufacturing on 9 June 2026:
https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/how-sustainable-manufacturing-can-support-viksit-bharat-2047/131609497