With half of its population under 25 and the unemployment rate at four-decade high, India faces an uncertain future. The question on young people’s minds: what kinds of jobs will we have? Quartz asked leaders across India’s biggest industries about that one job in their company or field that will be the most crucial in the coming decades.
India is a giant in the international energy employment market. A report by the International Renewable Energy Agency reveals that India was among the top four countries creating employment in the sector globally. According to the National Resources Defense Council, India’s overall growth in employment over the years is tied to the enormous growth in solar and wind energy. However, 2019 was a far slower year for the energy sector in India with only 12,400 new workers added, compared with 30,000 the previous year.
Sumant Sinha, the chief executive officer of ReNew Power, India’s largest renewable energy company, told Quartz:
There are four jobs or domains that are most important for us—three of them are common to all companies, and the fourth is specific to renewables. The first is human resources; second is digital analytics. All of our machines—be they wind turbines or solar farms—generate huge volumes of data. How we graph our assets is critical to our long-term performance. Therefore, making sure that we have the right people to gather the data, analyze it, and make meaningful conclusions based on it is very important.
The third is the finance function. We’re a capital-intensive sector. We have to build assets, operate them, and also finance them. Our entire investment in any project is totally upfront. Once the asset is put up, there are no real operating issues. Therefore, how and when you raise finances, which sources you raise the financing from, the interest rates you pay, all are very critical, especially in a country like India with high interest rates.
The fourth is the role that focuses on assessing natural resources. Typically, these people would be engineers who have a background in fluid dynamics and specific training in wind modeling and wind assessment.
Natural resource assessment is very critical to us, because the asset that we put up doesn’t have any variable operating cost. The only thing that determines how well a project performs is how well we were able to assess the wind quality or solar radiation in a certain location. Having the right people who are able to assess natural resources becomes very critical to our overall profitability. If the assessment is wrong by even a little bit, it can have a negative impact on our financial performance.