As the events over this past week demonstrate, India is clearly facing an inflection point in terms of its future role in the cleantech revolution: either it can continue to function with a business as usual attitude, which relies on coal-run power plants as the primary source of energy supply, or it can step up and embrace the use and development of clean energy. The scale of the energy challenges it faces is huge: earlier this week an estimated 620 million people were left without electricity after India’s northern, eastern and northeastern grids cascaded into failure. It was the second massive outage, as on Monday the failure of the northern grid left 370 million people powerless. In addition to the disruption of the lives of over 50% of the country’s population (or 10% of the world’s population) the events also … Read More »

What is it about India that makes it both a compelling place to do business while at the same time being complex? This dichotomy is what first drew Raj Narula and I to create TaraSpan. India represents tremendous market potential for products and services of all kinds. But where does one start? How does one validate the opportunity? And how much investment, in time and money, does one need to make in order to capitalize on the opportunity? These are questions we set out to answer in 2005, on behalf of our customers and, as well, to satisfy our own curiosity. Our journey has taken us across multiple market verticals, from telecom to financial services to cleantech, just to name a few. We’ve grown from four employees to over 150 employees. We tested and innovated with many models for market … Read More »

At a recent conference in Delhi on the telecom infrastructure market in India, cost optimization, and not government policy, emerged as a key issue dominating the agenda for tower companies. Within these cost-conscious times, energy management has emerged as the ‘Holy Grail’ in the scale-up of the greening of the Indian telecom industry. And with the pan-India deployment of 3G and broadband wireless technologies, more energy storage will continue to be required.

But let’s backup a bit…India today has the second largest and fastest growing mobile telephone market in the world. The country has over 900 wireless subscribers and continues to add between 15 and 20 million new mobile subscribers each month. The number of telecom towers is currently around 400,000 and with the number of wireless subscriber to reach 1 billion over the next year, an additional built-out of 250,000 … Read More »