New Delhi – India has awarded incentives for 862,000 tonnes a year of green hydrogen production. It has commissioned roughly 8,000. The gap between those two numbers is the story of the National Green Hydrogen Mission so far.
The mission carries an outlay of about 19,744 crore rupees. Nearly 89 per cent of it, some 17,490 crore, sits in the SIGHT scheme, which runs two separate incentive tracks: one for domestic electrolyser manufacturing, one for hydrogen production itself.
Awards are not capacity
On the manufacturing side, 3,000 MW a year of electrolyser capacity has been allocated across fifteen companies, among them Reliance, Adani New Industries, Larsen and Toubro and BHEL. On the production side the awarded figure is 862,000 tonnes annually.
Commissioned capacity as of early 2026 stands near 8,000 tonnes a year. That is under one per cent of what has been allocated, and a rounding error against the mission target of 5 million tonnes.
Why the conversion is slow
Three constraints bind, and none of them is subsidy design.
The first is demand. Green hydrogen costs more than the grey hydrogen Indian refiners and fertiliser plants already use. Without a mandate or a contract for difference, a producer has no creditworthy buyer to underwrite a plant.
The second is power. The mission assumes roughly 125 GW of additional renewable capacity dedicated to electrolysis. Round-the-clock renewable supply at a price that makes hydrogen competitive remains the harder half of the equation.
The third is that electrolyser manufacturing and hydrogen production are being incentivised in parallel rather than in sequence, so domestic equipment supply and project demand are not yet meeting in time.
What to watch
Announced capacity is a weak indicator. The figures that matter are commissioned tonnes, signed offtake agreements with investment-grade buyers, and the delivered cost per kilogram at the plant gate. Until offtake firms up, awarded capacity will keep outrunning built capacity.
Source: Ministry of New and Renewable Energy statements on SIGHT scheme allocations and National Green Hydrogen Mission outlay.
