India will cross 300 GW of renewable energy capacity this year. It will also import more coal than any other country on earth. These two facts coexist in the same economy, in the same year, and they represent a contradiction that India's climate diplomacy has not yet resolved honestly.

The renewable buildout is genuine and impressive. The solar deployment trajectory, the falling tariffs, the battery manufacturing investment — these are real. No country of India's size has moved as fast in renewable energy deployment, and that achievement deserves recognition without constant qualification.

But the coal trajectory is also real. Industrial electricity demand is growing faster than renewable capacity additions can serve it. Baseload power for steel mills, cement plants, and data centres — sectors that are themselves growing because the economy is growing — requires dispatchable power that intermittent solar and wind cannot alone provide. Coal fills this gap today, as it has for forty years.

The question that India's energy planners have not answered satisfactorily is: at what year does coal consumption peak, and at what year does it begin declining significantly? Without an explicit answer to that question — not a diplomatic aspiration but an engineering plan — India's climate commitments cannot be evaluated. Targets without trajectories are intentions, not policies.