Tracing the Arc of the US–India Energy Cooperation | ft. Richard Rossow

[Podcast intro]

Welcome to the season five of the India Energy Hour podcast. This podcast explores the most pressing hurdles and promising opportunities of India energy transition through an in depth discussion on policies, financial markets, social movements and science. Your hosts for this episode are Shreya Jai, Delhi based energy and climate journalist and Dr. Sandeep Pai, energy transition researcher and author. The show is produced by 101 reporters, a pan India network of grassroots reporters that produces original stories from rural India. If you like our podcast, please rate us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or the platform where you listen to our podcast. Your support will help us reach a larger audience.

As India deepens its energy transition and the United States recalibrate its global partnerships, the US–India energy relationship stands at a pivotal moment. From energy technology collaboration, clean energy supply chains to geopolitical strategy, the partnership is evolving into a key pillar of bilateral engagement shaping both nations’ economic and climate futures.

In this episode, we speak with Richard Rossow, Senior Adviser and Chair in India and Emerging Asia Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). We discuss the evolution of the US–India energy ties — from the 2005 Civil Nuclear Agreement to today’s cooperation on clean energy and LNG. Richard unpacks how energy fits into the broader US–India strategic relationship, the growing role of private capital, and what milestones to watch over the next decade in building a resilient, low-carbon future.

[Podcast interview]

Sandeep Pai: Rick, welcome to the India Energy of Podcast. I am truly, I think I’ve been wanting to have you for almost a year and partly I’ve not been able to manage because things have changed and, you know, I’ve been moving places and you’ve been busy. So, but I’m delighted that you are able to join and join at a very critical time where everybody’s thinking about, you know, U.S. and the world, but especially in the context of this podcast, what happens to U.S.-India relations at large, but specifically our focus is on the energy sector. So welcome to the podcast.

Richard Rossow: No, thanks for that. It really is a treat for me. I mean, you are an actual expert. I try to just try to pretend and play one on TV once in a while. I’m certainly more of a generalist, but I happen to have a couple of opportunities to dig in a lot more deeply on energy, despite my generalist nature. But, you know, having a real specialist that knows this place really well inviting me on, it really is a treat and honor. So I appreciate you, Sandeep, for having me on.

Sandeep Pai: Okay, lovely. So as per our tradition, we start with the person. We spend about like 10 minutes, 15 minutes talking about you and you have such a rich journey. But honestly, I also don’t know what your background is, where you come from, where you grew up. How did you get in the India space? I mean, you know, and then U.S.-India space. And then I, over the years, on subnational India-U.S. space. And then in the energy space. So what’s your story?

Richard Rossow: Yeah, you won’t be surprised to get this question a lot. Mostly because most people that do what I do have Indian heritage, or maybe they at least studied India in college. And for me, neither is true. I just kind of fell into it. I would say I lucked into it. Although I didn’t know that, that it would be quite so lucky when I began this journey. But, you know, Sandeep, I grew up in a very small town in rural Michigan. My family owned a small chain of hardware stores, two hardware stores in Lenawee County, Michigan. Surely you’ve heard of Rosso’s Hardware. It’s pretty famous in that little neck of the woods back in the day. But, you know, an avid reader. We didn’t travel much. But, you know, books and such kind of gave me a vision that there’s a lot more to the world than what I grew up and what I saw, you know, with my own two eyes around me. And when I went to college, I thought getting a degree, something that would allow me to travel and see stuff. And that was the early 90s. And Russia, the Soviet Union, was just collapsing. Russia was friendly. A lot of us thought it was going to be the next big market. So I thought international business. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded pretty cool. So I and Russia was the hardest language they had at the college that I went to, Grand Valley State University in Michigan. So, you know, made a lot of sense. We thought it was going to be a critical market. It was a difficult language. And I thought that would give me a bit of an edge. And so when I graduated, I moved to Washington because there’s not a lot of Russia jobs in rural Michigan and moved to Washington since that was obviously, you know, we all consider going to be a hotbed of places for international. And, you know, by that point, Russia was collapsing. The economy was in chaos. The country was friendly. Boris Yeltsin was drunk. Most places that had Russia work, they were shedding employees rather than hiring. And so I moved to D.C. And frankly, like my strength was language and 19th century Russian literature. It wasn’t really post-Soviet economy anyways. So I just couldn’t find anything. And I started applying for anything that would get my foot in the door on international. So I applied to the United States Chamber of Commerce, the large business organization, to be basically the admin assistant, you know, publications, events, handing out name badges, the normal kind of starting point for a lot of international positions in D.C. And I came in for the interview. I was president of the student body in college. I ran a budget. I ran meetings. I had about a half a million dollar budget. They didn’t care about my degree or my grades. They liked the fact that I did real things and showed responsibility. And so they offered me the job on the spot, which doesn’t happen that often during an interview. But then they said, by the way, Rick, we have another job open. Same same kind of level, same responsibilities. But it’s with our little group called the U.S. India Business Council, which at the time was pretty much the only four people in the United States of America. This is 1998. The only four people in the whole United States whose full time job was working with India. That’s it. Just the four. And nobody applied. India just tested nuclear weapons. There were sanctions. The Vagify government that first year was talking about kicking out foreign companies. Who wants to work with India in 98? You know, it was like the worst beat you could imagine. But they said, if you take this job with India, Rick, we’ll give you a thousand dollars more than the job you applied for. So that was it, Sandeep. A thousand bucks. But I love it. You know, like for me, I didn’t study India. I didn’t live in India. Instead, since 1998, I’ve been on the front lines of everything that’s happened. Traveling to India with, you know, all these great titans like Ambassador Wisner and Ambassador Pickering and, you know, really kind of being their aide to camp for critical meetings with government officials at all levels. So for me, you know, the laboratory and university for learning about India was by going there and negotiating disputes and pushing for reforms and things like that. And I’ll take that path over any other. It really has been enjoyable. I built out a great network of folks. And but also, you know, I mentioned kind of a generalist. But when you work for a group like U.S. India Business Council with a small staff, one week you got to know a lot about insurance because you’re hosting an insurance group. The next week, you got to know a lot about energy. And the next week, it’s going to be about banking. And that’s pretty neat, too. Gives kind of exposure to a lot of different slices of life and and how different industries work. And, you know, certainly many years later, being in the think tank, that’s that’s extremely helpful because you never know. You know this well. You never know what’s coming down the pipe day to day when you’re working at a place like this, the officials that come through, the companies that come in. But but that’s kind of like, you know, the basics on how I luckily stumbled into what’s been an exciting career so far and stuff that I really do enjoy.

Sandeep Pai: Amazing. So from the Business Council, how did you make a transition to CSIS and what was that journey like and what have you done over the years?

Richard Rossow: Yeah, you know, I worked for 10 years at the U.S. India Business Council, which in D.C. is kind of a long time to do anything. But the group was growing so fast. You know, we started with four. By the time I left, we had about 20 employees. We’d open up offices in California, New York and India. And I really led the opening of all those offices. So, you know, I was the I was the admin assistant in a team of four. And by the end, I was the deputy in a team of 20. So, you know, even though I was there for 10 years, no year looked like the year before, you know, it was an organization going through tremendous growth, big issues on removing the sanctions after nuclear tests, nuclear cooperation, the first defense sales. But I still didn’t view myself as an India expert, not like the people that had spent time living there, studying, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, working for a group like that, you get a lot of exposure to companies. And that’s one of the important career things I always tell folks in D.C., you know, you’ve got to make sure you don’t have a job that you’re stuck behind a desk all day long. You’ve got to get out and meet people because you’ve got to get exposure, find other things to move to. You know, part of the joy, you know, a place like CSI, so you bring people in that have had a different set of career experiences. They know what private sector or the Capitol Hill or the White House look like. So I started to get a lot of offers, not not offers from companies because they needed India expertise, but offers because when they would send me an email at 7 p.m. saying, oh, my God, I just learned my CEO needs to get is going to be see the finance minister tomorrow and a briefing note tonight at 7 p.m. Like I’m always the guy they can count on to get that note out by the end of the night. Never off. Didn’t want to be off. I enjoy what I do. So on off like work life doesn’t really mean that much to me. And that’s really what was attractive, I think, to companies that were trying to recruit me. And eventually I got kind of an offer I couldn’t refuse, you know, being in my 30s and being offered to be a vice president at New York Life Insurance Company. You know, in my mid 30s, being vice president of a global 100 company, that seems like the right thing to do. India was certainly part of the portfolio. I was managing international government relations, but it also gave me exposure to Thailand, Mexico, China, a bunch of other geographies. And, you know, being in-house in a company, you know, you’re not pressing your neurons quite as much as you are like a think tank or a trade association. You’re an action officer. You know, a crisis comes up, a regulatory issue hits you in a market. You need to try to react to that, get things moving. Rarely do you get to sit back and think deep thoughts. And, and two, you know, at the end of the day, New York Life is a, is a wonderful company, but very conservative. And they didn’t like, you know, for their staff members to be on stage speaking, things like that. They’re members of everything, but, but didn’t choose to often lead a lot of things and, you know, be kind of edgy that way. And it served them very well. I mean, I joined in 2008 when we were going through a financial crisis and the company had one of its best years on record because they didn’t invest in, you know, they didn’t make bad investments in real estate, things like that. So that conservatism was great for the company, but, you know, also for me, it was not, not exactly the most exciting. But then about halfway through, they decided emerging markets were a little bit too weird and scary for them. And so I got brought on the team that actually began the process of divesting all the investments in emerging markets, including with India. That was a little more exciting for sure. I’m seeing on the inside, all the, the, all the work that goes into making a big decision on selling and moving an operation. As we were getting pretty close to the end of the sales, I got a phone call out of the blue from the guy that ran a consulting firm called McLarty Associates, Nelson Cunningham. He’d heard of me. We’d known each other. He was a member of the U.S. India Business Council and his firm, which advises mostly Fortune 500 companies on international relations. They had an opening to run their India practice. And that was stunning to me, Sandeep. I really did not know that I’d built up as much visibility momentum as an India specialist as what others in town had kind of seen. And when he offered that, you know, which is one of the big India focused jobs in the country, it was rewarding. It was also a bit lifesaving because, you know, my role in New York life was kind of winding its way to an end as we were selling all the businesses that I worked for. So I, so I agreed and, and joined McLarty and I was there for a couple of years full time. but,  then lo and behold, CSIs came knocking, not a job I applied for, but, they had an India chair established a few years before and very focused on India’s commercial environment. And, and for me, you know, having a primary role like that was something that, I’d never actually had before, you know, running a practice area at a consulting firm, being a vice president of government relations, being deputy of trade association, but really being the front person for some significant work with India, still hadn’t really been exactly on the resume. And even though I, at the time I thought think tanks were sort of sleepy retirement homes, for ex-diplomats, I didn’t have a lot of interest and enthusiasm. Somebody once told me if, if somebody offers you a job you didn’t apply for, at least go have a cup of coffee. So I came by and, and met with the leadership at the institution, met with the main funder for the program and felt this could be a fantastic opportunity. and so I agreed to join and they still let me keep an affiliation with McClarty associates. But, but yeah, you know, I, I, at first, even after 10 years on the India lane, I didn’t think that I was, I was good enough, or recognized enough to make a career out of it.  so took a bit of a detour, and learned some different things about management, about things like that. But, you know, as you know, like there’s not a lot of people in the DC establishment that have really committed their careers to India. And so even though I’d, I’d had relatively light experience to that point, it was already enough to kind of set me apart a little bit and, and every door on the India lanes kind of opened up to me since then. And so that’s kind of how I got from there to here, a little bit of, again, dumb luck, maybe a bit of a detour, in the corporate side. but kind of back on track and a career path that I really love and enjoy.

Sandeep Pai: Well, I think first of all, you’re very humble. You know more about India than many, many Indians. So let me just go ahead and say that because you’re also tracking it so closely. Many people stop tracking after a while. number two, I mean, one thing that is very humbling is like you’ve stuck to your lane because for you being a place where CSIS is, it would be easy to do other things. you know, like you could have said, like, I think now you’re looking at other jurisdictions, but for a long time, you just stuck to your lane, which is like really focused on India, which by the way is a continent. So it’s not like a small country where you can just, you know, learn, but it must have been very tempting to look at other countries and India at the same time. But I guess like you stuck to the India, but what was your strategy? How come you like never diversified while you were at CSIS in a big way? You must have done other stuff, but you know.

Richard Rossow: Yeah, there, there have been, I mean, at New York life, I did have, you’d say global responsive. I mean, it was only eight countries. When I say we had a global portfolio, it wasn’t as massive as, you know, some other companies in the world that have operations in every nook and corner of the world. But, but that gave that kind of exposure. you know, there’s times at CSIS where they’ve kind of pulled me a little bit to think about a larger role just because, you know, some of the day job elements, on fundraising and program management, they, they think that I’m pretty good at, and they like me to take on bigger responsibilities. But, you know, you, you, let’s just say you take a look at a beach and you got two things you can do from there, right? You can, you can pan out and look, how did the, how does the beach connect to the water, connect to the, to the forest, connect to the country, connect to the people, or you can, or you can zoom in and look at the grains of sand and look at the stuff that makes up the beach and really get a deep understanding of how the beach was, was created, formed, what’s likely to happen to it in the future. For me, that’s the second path is the one that I’ve chosen to do. you know, learning about India. Certainly, I think I’m, I’m up at one of the, one of the people that’s kind of most up to date on national level policies and U S India relations. There’s a lot of folks in that space, but I think at least on business commercial issues, for sure. And to some extent energy, you know, certainly I’d be viewed as a leader. even, even defense, even though I don’t spend a lot of time there, but, you know, the, the real rigorous tracking of what’s happening below the national level, as you rightly pointed out, India is a continent. I mean, the largest state has 240 million people, which is larger than almost any country on earth. Second largest has 160 and on and down the list. and, and the number of people that, that, that say that they focus on India policy that can look you in the eye and say, you know, here’s when the Maharashtra state assembly meets, here’s the last time, the last three bills that they’ve passed. Here’s the, the 10 regulations that the Maharashtra government has issued the last time the chief minister had a cabinet meeting that doesn’t exist. I mean, there’s a few people in their own lane on energy. They probably know a few things. States have done an energy, a few people on mobility, but to step back and look large. I mean, which are the handful of States? One thing that I like to do Sunday when I’m on stage and, and, you know, some people when, when I show up growing up in rural Michigan and say that I’m like an Indian States expert, you know, some of the audiences I’m in, they kind of scratch their heads and say, this kid can’t be serious.  and so there’s always a few nuggets that I like to drop. Like for instance, you know, a lot of Indians are familiar with, with China’s two child, with, with China’s one child policy. You know, a number of Indian States have two child policies and that is so unknown. Most Indians don’t even know their own States have these kinds of things that they impose. You know, that’s done a little bit more for flash than substance, but you know, if you’re an American energy company, you probably get 20 newsletters a week that tell you about the status of the pipeline bill in Utah and what’s happening with energy, right? That kind of stuff about following and tracking that level is, is something that is, it’s day job. It’s everything that you, you, you can possibly ask for here and India largely non-existent. So, so, you know, the reason that India for me has been fulfilling enough where I haven’t looked outside is, is exactly that. There’s so much more to look at inside and drilling on deep that is novel. Others just don’t do it. I mean, I wake up every day when I write a report about Indian state stuff. I know, unlike a lot of think tank reports, which tend to be rewriting a report, somebody did the year before we’re plunging in and plowing a lot of really new ground. I would say, again, you, you know, the space on the energy lane, it’s actually a little bit more crowded, but other lanes, like who’s doing that same work on Indian state level health systems, India business reforms, you know, that, that kind of stuff. It’s pretty novel. So it’s very fulfilling to work at a think tank and know that we’re working on something that’s really important and pretty novel. So I don’t have a strong appetite. You know, as you and I were talking about before the podcast began, we have a couple of grants to connect Indian policymakers and other leaders in the global South. You know, I’ve taken 10 steps illegally into Bangladesh. That’s a whole other story. I was in Sri Lanka during the civil war, you know, you know, so I’ve had a little bit of experience and exposure to the region, but I would rather, you know, I got a free weekend in India. I’d rather go to Bahar and hang out with, you know, journalists and folks like that. They can give you a lay of the land on what’s happening between the Janata Dal United and the RJD versus BJP and the LJP. Like, I love that stuff, you know, and, and, and, and I’d rather do that when I got time off than go hang out on the beach and go out or go fly down to Sri Lanka and hang out on the beach there or something. It’s a lot of fun and very rewarding, you know, for me career wise to, you know, to build and deepen my area and what we’re doing with States. But then you got another level, Sandeep, which we’re just now starting to pull the thread at, which even if States is fairly novel, the area that’s almost completely untapped is cities. And I think the story of India over the next 25 years is going to be the real emergence of cities as political drivers rather than political afterthoughts. Frankly, I think it’s like we talk about the magnetic poles flipping in the earth one of these days, you know, the biggest change in India since independence is going to be when cities start driving elections rather than being the afterthought. And that’s going to start happening over the next 25 years. So there’s even as much granularity as we’ve done by digging in deep. There’s so much more to be done.

Sandeep Pai: Fascinating. I could, I could talk about you and all these reflective questions for the entire podcast, but I do want to. I heard energy’s got to be woven in there somewhere, right? Yeah. It’s an energy podcast. So, you know, I want to look at US-India energy relations. I mean, broadly, you can reflect on broader relations. Obviously, energy is part of the broader relations, but let’s do it in three parts. First, we will go a little bit in the history of how these relations evolved, and then we’ll talk about current landscape, and then obviously, as somebody who’s tracked India for so long, especially US-India for so long, I cannot leave you without your kind of, I won’t call it predictions, but reflections on what to watch for in the future. So let’s start with history. You know, looking back, kind of US-India relations, how have they evolved? You know, what, how did it even start? My own understanding is like, it was very lukewarm for a long time, and then it really kind of started to pick up. So paint us a picture of what happened in the past.

Richard Rossow: Yeah, yeah. And again, you know, I don’t try to characterize myself as an academic or historian, but I’ve certainly learned a few things on the fly from things that happened before I came on the scene, right? And initially, you’re right. I mean, the first thing that you hear is that whole period during the Cold War was some level of estrangement. And then you dig in a little bit deeper and you find out that really wasn’t the case, that the United States was a vital supporter of India’s independence movement, that the years, really the 15, 20 years after India got independence in 1947, that the United States was a primary provider of assistance, delivering food grains during famines, helping India. You know, we allowed India to pay for those food grains in rupees, which weren’t convertible. So we were building up a massive pile of rupees in India. And, you know, one of those great moments of U.S. foreign policy, we chose to use those rupees to plow back into the Indian economy and help with triggering the Green Revolution so India could be a little closer to feeding and sustaining itself. And, you know, there still is this agriculture scientist, Norman Borlaug, that in some corners of India and agriculture circles is still treated as the most important American that ever lived for U.S.-India relations. It’s one of those names that kind of gets forgotten by the sidelines because his work is generations behind us already. But, you know, Norman and some of the work that he did early on was really kind of vital. So the relationship, it wasn’t wide ranging and terribly robust. But the United States, you know, realized like there’s great development challenges and we had tools that could be brought to bear. And even on security, you know, it’s widely forgotten as well sometimes. But in 1962, when India and China had the border conflict, you know, you look back at that, you read the Wikipedia page and it looks like a relative minor event, border flare up, China crossed over. But if you read, you know, the journals of the U.S. ambassador to India at the time, John Kenneth Galbraith, once they broke through the lines, India had very little visibility on what China was doing. And there were concerns that they’d be shelling Delhi a few days later. You know, they didn’t know what was going to happen with that somewhat surprise attack. And in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy delivered military supplies and advisors to India. So even on the security front, in that first 15 or so years after independence, the United States was an important partner. You know, again, not the breadth and depth of relations that we have now, but overall kind of leaning in in meaningful ways. And then you had the separation. And the separation was driven, you know, less by a dispute between Washington and Delhi, but more because for Cold War purposes, we found more utility in cozying up to Pakistan, which would allow you to overflight the Soviet Union as a channel for aid to the combatants in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. We began building relations with China, which, of course, India just fought a border battle with because we wanted to split China away from the Soviet Union. So the estrangement was really because of American strategic choices, which made sense at the time during the Cold War, but really caused that that rupture of what little relations there were between Washington and Delhi. Things began to rebuild and repair. Surprisingly, I think, with, you know, the business reforms that began in 1991, which triggered some level of interest. And we’ll touch on that a little bit because that, you know, energy was one of the first areas that was put on the table for U.S.-India commercial cooperation. And then the most surprising pivot point, which is when I came on the scene, which was the nuclear test in 1998. You know, I remember, I mean, I joined the U.S.-India Business Council just after the nuclear test. And the vast majority of policymakers in D.C. felt that it was a time to sanction India into oblivion. Force India and Pakistan to give up nuclear weapons. We’ve got to do it now. The genie’s out of the bottle. Can you put it back in? And a select few felt, no, this is a moment. India is not going to roll that back. And either we threaten them, we sanction India, and therefore cut off another generation of relations, or we use this at the moment to start building a relationship that’s more strategic, that we don’t use one of these, you know, potential death knell moments to really kind of put the relationship in the freezer, but instead use it as an opportunity to build. And that’s one of the hardest things to do. When the headwinds are there, do you go with the wind or do you choose to push through it? And big things can happen if you push through. It goes against a lot of our instincts sometimes. But in 1998, really kind of chose to do that. So that was a significant pivot point on the strategic relationship. And I know we’ll talk a bit about, you know, nuclear sanctions and nuclear cooperation. The other big one that happened was just two years later, Y2K. You know, Y2K does not often get listed as one of those main pivot points in U.S.-India relations. But the commercial relationship today, we can talk about energy, we can talk about defense, we can talk about semiconductors or whatever. And all that stuff is garbage second rate compared to the big thing in U.S.-India commercial relations, IT services. That’s the bedrock. Most Indians that wake up every day and think, do I owe some portion of my livelihood to the United States? It’s because they’re directly or indirectly involved in IT services. You’ve got major U.S. companies and oftentimes they’ll have their largest or second largest workforce in the world in India doing, you know, software development, engineering, stuff like that. So it’s not quite as sexy and cool maybe as making semiconductors together. But what China has become to the world of manufacturing, India is to the world in IT services. So never forget to remind ourselves, you know, that India really has captured an important part of America’s outbound commercial relations, primarily in IT-enabled services. You know, there’s been other moments on defense cooperation, things like that. But, you know, really that to me are the main moments when I think Washington kind of woke up both on strategic ties with the nuclear test and business ties with IT-enabled services that the American establishment began to wake up and realize whether we like it or not, India is going to be a massive power. And we’d rather have them as friendly to the United States, even if those are uncomfortable threads that we sometimes try to pull on, than to have India, you know, continued in a bit of a deep freeze to the United States. So those are some of the big ones that I kind of point to. There’s a million others we could probably do, but those are the ones I think that dramatically changed the trajectory of U.S.-India relations.

Sandeep Pai: Right. In terms of the energy sector, so zooming in a bit, looking at the sand in the beach, in terms of the energy sector, what are some key pillars of cooperation that historically has been the case and have they evolved at all? Like, and you talked about nuclear, but what else?

Richard Rossow: Yeah, it really is a ping pong ball. So every five years, if you take a snapshot on what the primary area of energy cooperation and conversation looks like, it changes. It goes back and forth. Now, this links very closely to why I’m so interested in working with state governments. And it is because of some of my initial work with U.S.-India Business Council, and it was on energy. So, you know, again, not a story, and I can’t really tell you too much about whatever nascent threads there were before 1998. But when India began opening up its economy in the 90s, one of the first sectors that they really opened up and were trying to encourage foreign investment was on grid scale power generation. And so they’d offer 100 percent foreign investment. They’d offered fixed contracts with 14, 15 percent profit margins built in the contracts. That’s pretty attractive. Size and scale, state guarantees, different payment security mechanisms. With a few of the larger projects, they’d offer a national government counter guarantee in case the states weren’t paying the bills. Like, it looks like a pretty sweet package. You can own the whole thing, 15 percent profit margin built in, and all these payment security mechanisms. But it doesn’t matter what you’ve got on paper in India. When it takes you 20 years to resolve a legal dispute, paper means nothing. And they were investing in horrific distribution utilities that couldn’t pay the bills, couldn’t possibly pay the bills. And clear eyed, and if they kind of understood that, you know, contract law and such is not really quite as strong as we’d like to believe, it was a pretty bad bet. But nobody knew how bad it would be. So, you know, again, my Russian studies degree in 23 years old, just out of Grand Valley State University. And one of the first things I was tasked with doing was taking groups of U.S. energy companies to India to try to resolve some of the disputes they had. Now, the one that everybody remembers is Enron building the Deboe Power Project, Maharashtra. But actually, there were a dozen projects built across India by different American companies. And it was Kerala, Karnataka, Andra, Tamil Nadu, Annamad, Nicolabar Islands, there was a small project, Odisha. And no matter which state they invested in, these modern projects, you know, built on better standards and were relatively high cost, they had a tough time getting paid the full contract rate. And so I remember, you know, I would take delegations of these companies. We’d show up in Delhi. We’d meet Suresh Prabhu, who was the power minister at that time in the Vajpay government. And they had this really high-powered lateral entrant, Arvi Shahi, that was the power secretary. He came out of a distribution utility, BSES. And we’d meet with Prabhu and Shahi, surrounded by these top executives from big American energy companies. Oh, Minister Prabhu, these wonderful companies rode hundreds of millions of dollars by state utilities across India. And, you know, Suresh, who I’ve remained really close to over the years, is like, I can’t make them do anything. Like, how do I make Jayalitha pay her bills in Tamil Nadu? I have no tools to make her do that. You’ve got to go talk to her directly. So, like, and that links very closely to the work I do at CSS. Like, for me, why do I work so much in Indian states? It’s not because I read an article one time saying, hey, states are important. No. It’s because I learned in the most brutal way possible that national government has got no power and influence on making states do stuff. And the one tool that they had back then, by the way, the Planning Commission, they’ve abolished. You know, I mean, NITI is a, you know, a much less powerful successor to the Planning Commission. Planning Commission had teeth, right? I mean, states aren’t getting their money unless they agree to adopt certain parts of the plan that the national government had written. And even since then, you know, the union government’s kind of given that up. So when people talk about Prime Minister Modi, does he have autocratic tendencies, that kind of stuff? Like, you know, maybe in some instances, but voluntarily giving up the Planning Commission and the muscle that had to force states to take in steps, too? Like, it’s not really a thing an autocrat does. So that was, like, that first big wave. Grid scale power generation, payment disputes, a lot of headaches. The second wave was on civilian nuclear. Kind of the big hope and dream, you know, that huge visit in 2005 when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came, met with President Bush, and a year before, at the end of the Vagipai government, they’d signed the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, NSSP. You know, if your readers have never looked up that document from January 2004, it remains the single most important piece of paper for getting U.S.-India strategic relations unlocked and moving in the right direction. So we signed that at the end of the Vagipai government. And even though you had a changing party in Delhi and a very weak coalition, they chose to maintain that trajectory in U.S.-India relations, and in particular, the announcement in 2005 of trying to move on civilian nuclear cooperation. So that suddenly became the entire driver of no more grid scale power generation. Instead, it was all kind of shifted to this aspirational of having U.S. civilian nuclear technology shared with India. You know, we know how that story ended. Here we are 20 years later, and there’s been exactly zero dollars in trade on civilian nuclear technology. But, you know, the fact that we put something that big and that dear on the table early in the relationship, it still has such positive reverberations through U.S.-India relations. Nothing is impossible if the first thing we put on the table is breaking the nonproliferation regime to let India through the door, right? So, I mean, you know, we haven’t been able to get other things of that level like a U.N. Security Council seat. But that’s on par with anything else we can put on the table. And the fact that we put that on the table and try to do it. And look, we still may. I mean, you know, the Modi government has announced the intention to go back and try to amend the civilian nuclear liability law. Maybe they’ll get that done. Maybe they’ll find a better workaround than the insurance pool. But that was kind of like the second wave, the third wave that we saw a little bit under Obama, but certainly under Biden, which is trying to really facilitate the expansion of renewable energy and clean energy cooperation. And, you know, again, it’s not like showing up in Delhi and trying to get India to talk about the COP summit and have a bigger, right? That stuff, it sounds great and everybody feels good and pats themselves on the back. But you know, well, like these decisions are driven by state governments. They’re driven not by a voter interest in climate change. They want jobs and they’re hoping that economic modernization and new technologies, including an energy will allow India to jump to the front of the line in being a manufacturing powerhouse. You know, going back and competing with stuff that China’s already been doing for 20 years is really hard. But applying money, resources and talent in new technologies maybe will provide like India did an IT services and telecom, that ability to leapfrog. And so when in the Biden administration, when they put real money on the table, for instance, on solar manufacturing in India with two facilities, Tata and First Solar, that to me, you know, probably weighs more heavily than all the dialogues and all the joint statements and all that kind of stuff. Real money, real jobs and helping India make domestically the stuff it needs to meet its own energy commitments. That was a big step in the right direction. The other phase, which we saw a bit last time Trump was in office, certainly now, is pushing hydrocarbons. Now, you don’t see any interest among American companies that I’ve ever seen on domestically developing hydrocarbons. There have been a couple of like Unocal had a couple of gas wells in India. You know, there’s been some nascent work under that. India did some significant reforms of its oil and gas development sector in Modi’s first term. But you don’t really hear a lot of interest. You don’t see America’s big developers looking to do exploration and development of hydrocarbon resources. But they do want to get more hydrocarbon sales and having an administration that is very focused on improving exports. So that’s kind of the phases. Grid scale power generation, a big try, a bit of a collapse. Nuclear, a great idea. A huge benefit in the relationship, the no trade. Renewables, some good stuff happening there, especially when we meet India where it needs, which is job creation manufacturing. And then hydrocarbons, which has mostly been an export story rather than a local development story. So kind of goes back and forth and up and down. You know, hydrocarbons pops up and down depending on the administration. Renewable pops up and down depending on the administration. But that’s kind of like how I look at sort of the main phases and themes that we’ve seen on U.S.-India energy cooperation over the years.

Sandeep Pai: Thank you. This is very elaborate and very helpful. And some of the things even I didn’t know. So there you go.

Richard Rossow: Because I’m making them up, of course, you know, nobody’s going to fact check this, right?

Sandeep pai: You’re very humble. But one thing I’m curious about that both, you know, you’re passionate about subnational governments and working with subnational governments. And I know that CSIS has historically and now possibly done a lot of work connecting U.S. and Indian states and bringing them together. Do you want to spend a minute or two talking about what that work was? talk aboutAnd, you know, have you seen any success? Is there a theory of change around that? And could things work bringing states together?

Richard Rossow: There are a lot of organizations in our lane like WRI and RDC. They can do stuff locally with state governments in a way that we can’t. And they have a lot of depth and complexity and expertise that my team doesn’t in the nuance and detail of a lot of policies on energy transition. Our lane is a couple of things. One, you know, the high level political connectivity that I personally can bring to the table because I’ve been engaging states for almost 30 years. And it’s one, you know, this is one of those few lanes in the world, unlike being an NBA player or something like that or a cricketer. Or as you get older, you get more important because age is an important thing for getting doors open, the time that you’ve known folks, you know. So I can do that in a way that a lot of the groups can’t. And then you’re right. I mean, the second thing that we bring to the table a lot of times is state-to-state collaboration, U.S. states and Indian states. It’s pretty fascinating to kind of see this in practice. I mean, obviously, the development levels tend to be dramatically different when you bring, like, say, California to Karnataka to talk about issues. But the experiences on how you can, like, for instance, like the area we’ve been working on the longest is helping Indian states frame electric mobility policies. And you think about three main buckets that go into that. And one is manufacturing incentives. Two is consumer adoption incentives. And three is the infrastructure build out. Everyone wants to know where the charging station is going to be. And there, you know, at least on the first two, you know, there’s not an infinite number of incentives you can offer, either for manufacturing or consumer adoption. Some work and some don’t. And there’s no perfect compilation about the things that have been tried and attempted and failed or succeeded. And so bringing U.S. states that have had maybe an electric mobility policy for a little bit longer together with an Indian state that’s just drafting or maybe redrafting their policy to talk about shared experiences, it’s fascinating. You can seed ideas that have real practical application. It’s not a think tanker showing up and saying, hey, Gujarat, I thought about it. And here’s what you should do. Right. It’s a U.S. state that has actually done it in practice and said these two things worked and these two didn’t. I’ll give you an example. The Indian states, when they talk about framing electric mobility policy, there’s one thing only they always have in mind. Can you guess what that one thing is, Sandeep? They want a Tesla factory. Everybody wants the damn Tesla factory. They may not say it quite so explicitly, but that’s what they want. They want a big Tesla factory. They think that this is what electric vehicle manufacturing looks like. And I remember we had a great conversation. We brought a number of officials in Colorado to Gandhinagar in Gujarat for a dialogue to help Gujarat frame its electric mobility policy. And Colorado showed up and said things that you or I could not in a way that they would resonate with Gujarat. Colorado said, we have a great jobs plan for electric mobility, but it’s investing in the mining companies to find the metals we need and the smelting. And we invest in startups at colleges and incubators and the small business ecosystem that’s making the software that works on the dashboard and things like that. They laid out this 20-point strategy, and some of those pieces will work and some won’t, but they’re always going to build jobs because of it. And they don’t care. If they get a Tesla factory, great. But they don’t need that. It’s not the only thing that’s going to result in job creation in Colorado with their drive towards electric mobility. And when they talk about things like consumer adoption incentives, I remember one thing that stood out. I don’t know if it’s still in practice now, but range anxiety is the number one challenge that customers have next to price. Price and range anxiety. And Colorado said, we have this program where if you buy an electric car in Colorado, you can borrow a combustion engine vehicle for two weeks of the year for free. So if you think about that road trip, I’m taking the family. I don’t know where charging stations are, but I know that there’s gas stations. You know, a simple, they said like almost nobody used it, but giving people the comfort. It was practically a free policy incentive that helped a lot of people reduce range anxiety, but they didn’t use it. So for Colorado, it cost almost nothing. Like that’s the beauty about these conversations. Real practitioners talking about low dollar ways. You can incentivize manufacturing change, consumer incentives. Love doing it. So, you know, with Gujarat, we certainly helped them frame some of the consumer adoption incentives. We’ve done some work in Karnataka on manufacturing incentives, some things that have worked in other markets. So we’ve had some real successes. Another project we’re working on right now, India’s got a lot of renewable energy, but not that much storage. So about 80% of India’s renewable energy is not actually put into the grid. And we’re pushing a new model on dual tendering of renewable energy and storage. And Madhya Pradesh is really the first state kind of at scale. There’s been a couple of attempts in Bihar and with Seki, the Solar Energy Corporation of India. But now MP has got this Mirena project. They just did the tender for 2.7 rupees per kilowatt hour for dual tender of renewable and storage. And, you know, California and others had been engaged with Madhya Pradesh through our work. So a lot of great ways where you bring practitioners together talking about things that worked and things that failed. It’s an honest conversation among peers. And yeah, sometimes, you know, the development things are so far off, it doesn’t hit and that kind of thing. But by and large, you know, you bring practitioners together and they’re going to jam. They’re going to have a lot to talk about.

Sandeep Pai: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And it’s a fascinating area. I see that we’re getting close to the hour. So I’m going to jump to I mean, like I said, I could talk to you for like two hours on this, these kinds of topics. So let’s kind of talk about what is happening today. I mean, the world has changed. You know, India and the U.S. had great relations even a few months back. But things are a bit different. So in the current moment, like what how do we look at energy, energy trade relationships between U.S. and India, especially focusing on energy for the moment? And just given the time, I just want to focus on energy.

Richard Rossow: Well, at the top line, it’s always helpful to remember that our national governments don’t mean that much. You know, ultimately, like what really happens is is the decisions made by a lot of unconnected players based on their own commercial or strategic interests. Not to say the national governments aren’t aren’t totally unimportant. You know, we do have, again, another push by by the U.S. administration for India to to reduce reliance on Russian hydrocarbons, to increase buys of American hydrocarbons, trying to attract new investments into the United States, including by Indian energy companies and probably a little bit less attention as we had during the Biden administration and things like, you know, investments in India in solar manufacturing. So it’s not to say that there’s not that there’s zero impact. And again, you know, kind of hoping that probably the one area that a Biden and a Trump would agree in collaboration with India, if we can restart nuclear cooperation, civilian nuclear, a lot of talk about nuclear. And if India is able to sort its way through liability, that’s an agenda item that I think is more well balanced between Democrats and Republicans on the U.S. side. So so that I think has more staying power if we can get it right for for nuclear cooperation. But but, you know, luckily, when I’m in I was just in Lucknow, I was just in Bhopal. They don’t care. They don’t care about what’s happening between them. I mean, they care. They read it, whatever. But the decisions that everybody is making at a local level are so utterly unconnected to what’s happening between our governments. You know, they have local voter interest. They want to increase manufacturing. They want to bring energy storage in. They want to make sure the renewables they’ve invested in can be dispatched day and night, wind and not wind, things like that. And so when you get to that level, the whole anger and whatever that you’ve got going on between the capitals, it’s a whole lot less apparent. And you’ve got so many other actors and players that are working at that level. You just had two U.S. governors in the last month, the governor of Iowa, a Republican, the governor of New Jersey, who’s a Democrat. Both went to India. Both engaged a number of states. Both had vibrant conversations on all topics, energy, agriculture, business, technology, a whole range of things. You’ve got U.S. foundations and NGOs that are funding great work that’s being done locally in India. You’ve got American companies that want to win deals. And if it’s a solar panel and if it’s hydrocarbons, and that’s not going to change. You know, India hasn’t jacked up its own tariff rates and retaliation of the United States. So, you know, I think companies that were trying to win business six months ago are still trying to win the same business today. And locally, Indian decision makers are still making the same decisions. As I like to remind my friends, Patna does not care about the Paris Agreement. They’ve got local voters and local interests and local things. And if a company shows up with products and services that help them meet their own needs in an area that voters care about, they’re going to do fine. So the national, it’s meaningful. I don’t want to brush it off entirely. But it’s not the whole picture. And it’s not even the majority of picture. There’s still a lot of other great things that are happening. A lot of players that are really trying to press their interests. And find those areas of complementarity on commercial and strategic. So a lot still happening on the upside.

Sandeep Pai: Amazing. Now, let’s talk about the future. I wish we had more time. But let’s kind of spend a few minutes. So, Rick, you know, we have a moment where we tried out a lot of things. Some things worked. Some things didn’t work. There’s a whole understanding. Especially, like, I mean, you’ve been a leader in this, like, bringing U.S. and U.S. states together. How do we go from there? Like, imagine that this is 2035. I mean, how do we sort of, like, go from this moment? And what milestones or inflection point should we expect? How do we make this relationship stronger between states, between national governments? Especially in the area of energy, but also more broadly.

Richard Rossow: Yeah. Yeah, we’ve got some near-term things that we’ve got to cross to make sure that we’re not going to have a horrific moment right now. I mean, it still feels like we’re in the early mid-stages of a car crash. And the question is, can we save what’s left? And it’s going to be getting this trade agreement across the finish line. And President Trump is not going to get the level of agriculture market access he needs. Because politically, that’s the reddest of red lines. But getting the trade agreement done and having President Trump visit India in the next three or four months for the Quad Leaders Meeting, you know, that will right the ship as well as it can be right at this point. I don’t think we’re in a 20-year deep freeze. But to get out of approaching that deep freeze, we’ve got to get a few things right. And that’s going to take action from Washington more than it is from Delhi. Delhi so far has avoided entering into a larger fight and a larger spillover, which is great. It still leaves some room. So we’ve got to get past the current hurdles and obstacles, which are quite severe, but they’re still fixable. But, yeah, over the next five or ten years, you know, subnational to me still remains the single biggest challenge that the United States has not got its head around. You know, I think when I began this work on states, you know, to one extent, to somebody like you, you talk about, you know, well, energy decisions are made locally. You know, the national level stuff has got very little impact on local decisions. But there’s another reason why we work on states. Half of Indian states are run by regional parties. Most of these regional parties, they don’t have an opinion about U.S.-India relations. They could. We could be in the face every single day of the DMK running Tamil Nadu and the JDU running Bihar, you know, and on down the list. And meeting them where they’re at in building cooperation. When’s the last time a senior American official or a business executive went to Putnam? I think you can say probably never. Just checking my watch. You know, Tom will nod maybe a little bit more. But, you know, part of what we’re trying to do on subnational cooperation, too, is build a stronger rapport with these regional parties. Now, you know, 10 years ago when I started this, everybody’s like, why? Modi’s running the show. You know, a single party majority is writ as mandate across states or whatever. A, like his writ as mandate across states is always way overstated. He doesn’t even have, you know, his directives don’t have a lot of resonance even in most BJP states. I mean, they do, but he’d rather them win elections than follow his orders, you know, on some big national imperative he announces. So those two conflict, winning elections and keeping voters happy is always rule number one. But number two, you know, these regional parties, they’re there to be won. They’re there, I mean, they’re there to be won, and we don’t have a mission to do that. Civilian nuclear cooperation failed because Manwun Singh couldn’t get a clean liability law through parliament. Because regional parties would not rally to his side. They couldn’t encourage him and coax him to be able to do that. And most regional parties, they don’t have a knee-jerk anti-American reaction. They just don’t have a dog in the fight. They don’t have a stake in it. And so I think they can be won. So for our energy dialogue, when we talk about defense cooperation across the entire area of U.S.-India lanes, you don’t have enough subnational built into it by nature. And we’ve got to make sure that that happens. And when American senior government officials go out, when you’ve got U.S. business executives, although that’s a little bit tougher to coax and cajole, we’ve got to make sure that we’re spending time with state governments. Because, again, that’s where push comes to shove. And those are political relations that are going to serve us really well. People thought it was going to be single-party majority forever. And last year’s election showed voters have very different minds. Suddenly, the JDU and the TDP, two parties that, you know, we could always be engaging. TDP is the most friendly of any party across all of India. So I think the reason for engaging states is even doubly important now. And I think that recognition is growing a bit because we got a little laxed by thinking that it was going to be Modi’s single party for the next million years. And a bit of a wake-up call last year that states and regional parties, they’re going to be important players most of the time. That’s been my experience more often than not.

Sandeep Pai: Incredible. Thank you so much, Rick. What a treat talking to you. I wish we had more time. I said that five times on the show, but I really wish we had more time to discuss these issues. So, yeah, thank you so much again.

Richard Rossow:  I appreciate having me on. You are really one of the great experts in this space. And you just invited me, as I said before, is really such a treat. So thanks, Sandeep, for having me on.

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