On Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the NaMo Green Rail from Jind in Haryana and flagged off India's first indigenously-built hydrogen-powered train on its path to Sonipat, 89-kilometers away. The ten-coach rake is capable of carrying about 2,600 passengers and will be powered by a 1,200-kW hydrogen fuel cell system travelling at 75 kilometres per hour, with a design maximum speed of 110 kilometres per hour. The message is clear: as a nation of energy importers, the country can make the machines of a clean energy future, too at home. The time is a proud moment for Indian engineers, says Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, and the tagging around the launch has a distinct ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ theme of self-reliance.

Some of that is warranted. Germany has simply imported the completed Coradia iLint trainsets from the French firm Alstom and operated them, after introducing the first hydrogen passenger train in 2018. India did not import a turnkey system but designed and integrated the system in India, through the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai, and developed its own fuelling and storage solution at Jind. This is a real step up in engineering skills and it should be stated simply not under qualifiers.

However a hydrogen train can be considered as two machines stacked on top of one another; the first is a train and the second is a power plant, kind of. The fuel cell stack is the power plant that combines the hydrogen with oxygen from the air, and generates electricity and nothing but water vapour as a by-product. At that point, the first indigenous story comes to an end. The pilot retrofit that Indian Railways has awarded to Medha Servo Drives is on eight 100-kilowatt fuel cell modules procured from Ballard Power Systems of Canada, which are based on proton-exchange membrane technology, which Indian manufacturers are not producing. It's a car from India. It isn't the heart of the vehicle.

That would be less significant if the entire global supply chain that leads to these stacks were healthy. It is not. One of only a handful of companies producing this type of low-pressure hydrogen fuel cell, Cummins has been letting off steam on this business for several quarters and has taken write-offs of hundreds of millions of dollars and given its unit focused on rail services to Alstom because of lackluster demand for hydrogen technology around the world. In Germany, the market that pioneered hydrogen rail has gone on retreat. As of last August, four of 14 units of the Coradia iLint was still operating, while diesel locomotives have replaced hydrogen trains silently. Since then, the regional transport authority there has withdrawn the remaining orders for hydrogen trains and opted for 102 battery electric trains instead. The failures were not related to the railcar. They were due to faster degradation of fuel cell stacks than expected on schedule, to the hydrogen supply was not reliable, and to software issues in other words, the very components India is now procuring from overseas.

The economics are also a reflection of a technology in the process of maturating. The cost of constructing a train is roughly Rs 80 crore apiece and then there are Rs 70 crore for route-specific ground infrastructure, which would push the cost of each such train to the tune of Rs 150 crore before the first rupee of ongoing import cost of replacement fuel cell modules comes in under the Hydrogen for Heritage programme, which aims to install 35 such trains in hill and heritage routes. The project for the Jind-Sonipat line was sanctioned at the cost of nearly Rs 112 crore and also included ground infrastructure works of the project. The running costs of the hydrogen fleet will begin to be higher than for diesel-powered vehicles, railway officials have themselves admitted, but will only drop as the number of trains in the fleet increases a bet on volume that has yet to be proven. The cost of green hydrogen produced using the government's own competitive bidding mechanism is presently approximately Rs 397 per kilogram at Indian Oil refineries, which still needs to be significantly reduced to make hydrogen more competitive than fossil fuels on scale.

When you zoom out again, the difference between what is being desired and what is being delivered becomes even more pronounced. As of February this year, the National Green Hydrogen Mission, which was approved in January 2023 with an outlay of Rs 19,744 crore till 2030 and target of 5 million tonnes of annual green hydrogen production, has installed just around 8,000 tonnes of actual capacity, or one per cent of the goal. The story on utilisation of mission budget too is the same: total spending on the mission in the first three years adds up to approximately Rs 250 crore or 1.27 per cent of the total approved budget, although the annual allocation has increased year by year. Despite this, private investment is pouring in, with Reliance allocating Rs 75,000 crore to the new-energy push in Jamnagar, which aims to produce one million tonnes of hydrogen, and a group of 15 companies led by Adani, L&T and BHEL outfitting themselves with 3,000 megawatts of capacity for electrolyser manufacturing with a national target of 15 gigawatts by 2030.

All of this just doesn't take away from what came out of Jind on Friday. As for a near 70,000-kilometre network with almost all its line miles already electrified, it's a valid technical accomplishment and hydrogen may well be a part of the solution on the short stretch of hill and heritage lines where the economics of tracting electrification don't make sense. It doesn't yet boast complete self-sufficiency, however, because the component that does tend to fail more often than all the others in this technology the fuel cell is still sourced from outside the country and is being squeezed by commercial forces. Friday's ribbon-cutting will be the mere start of India's hydrogen journey. The next four years will determine if the country will establish its own fuel cell production and decrease the cost of green hydrogen production quickly enough to make the remainder of this story come true.