Puri: Shri Pradip Kumar Das, Chairman & Managing Director(CMD) of the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Limited (IREDA), underscored the agency’s critical role in financing Odisha’s clean-energy transition and advancing India’s comprehensive sustainability goals at the Global Energy Leaders’ Summit in Puri today.
Speaking on the “Green and Clean: Balancing Ecology & Economy” panel, Shri Das stressed that achieving India’s net-zero and energy transition targets requires collective responsibility from leaders at all levels, extending beyond national and corporate bodies down to States, districts, villages, and individual families. He emphasized that this can be accomplished only through a holistic ecosystem supporting both renewable energy development and ecological preservation.
As India’s largest pure-play green lender, IREDA has sanctioned over ₹2.7 lakh crore and disbursed more than ₹1.7 lakh crore nationwide. Shri Das attributed this success to robust governance, digital paperless processes, and industry-leading asset quality, which continues to attract significant global and domestic climate-finance interest.
For Odisha, Shri Das reaffirmed IREDA’s commitment, noting the agency has already disbursed over ₹2,400 crore, with a current loan book of about ₹1,800 crore spanning Hydro, Solar, Ethanol, and Manufacturing projects. He announced IREDA’s readiness to finance new initiatives in the state, including shared green hydrogen infrastructure, plug-and-play RE parks, distributed solar projects, and foreign-currency loans via its GIFT City subsidiary.
Shri Das highlighted the increasing necessity of circular-economy practices, carbon markets, and biodiversity offsets for achieving sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Given Odisha’s prominence as a major steel and aluminium producer, he stated the state is ideally positioned to adopt circular manufacturing, including metals recycling and green hydrogen integration. This shift could enable the production of premium green steel for export and significantly boost state GDP.
He also outlined the potential for a Green Hydrogen Highway across Odisha, leveraging the state’s more than 7 MTPA of announced green ammonia capacity and multiple industrial clusters. Co-locating hydrogen production with key industries like steel, aluminium, cement, and chemical units, he argued, would unlock substantial industrial efficiency and competitiveness.
Finally, on carbon markets, Shri Das pointed out that Odisha’s extensive forests and India’s largest mangrove ecosystem offer unique opportunities for climate-finance mobilization through advanced Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems and digital carbon registries.
CMD IREDA, Shri Das concluded by stating, “Circularity, climate finance, and nature-positive development must move together,” and reaffirmed, “IREDA stands ready to partner with Odisha to deliver sustainable, community-centred growth for the future.”
The summit, organized by the Government of Odisha in association with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and IIT Kanpur, also featured the Deputy Chief Minister of Odisha, Shri Kanak Vardhan Singh Deo