NGO versus Government's solar energy provision in India: A feminist perspective

•Feminist analysis of solar rollouts in India reveals strong gendered asymmetries.•Technical ‘solutions’ are often insufficient in addressing broader inequalities.•Grassroots innovation can support just transition and greater gender equality. India is aiming at achieving a major shift in energy production and provision from a fossil fuel-based economy to one focussing on clean energy. As a financially constrained context, the move to the use of renewable energy is happening also through foreign investment and centres mostly on large-scale solar rollouts across the country. Analyses of such initiatives disclose uneven distribution of the benefits and challenges across and within adjacent communities, which particularly affect women and girls due to their gendered roles and responsibilities. This perspective reviews solar energy initiatives focusing on women's engagement run by NGOs and partially funded by the Indian central government, and gendered analyses of large-scale solar energy rollouts, through a feminist lens. A feminist approach to the analysis of large-scale solar rollouts discloses asymmetric power relations and energy inequalities against women and girls, which often reproduce those linked to fossil fuel. In contrast to this scenario, NGOs have a long-standing tradition in India of addressing socio-economic issues where governments failed to do so. Yet, available evidence of the impacts of their engagement in small-scale energy projects in India is quite new. Grassroots solar energy innovations, by being shaped by local communities, have the potential to challenge constraints on a just transitions while promoting greater gender equality and responding to communities’ energy needs.