By: Pietro Zecca
In May 2026, India and Italy elevated their relationship to a Special Strategic Partnership — one with dedicated provisions for energy, a critical minerals framework, and a five-year action plan attached. It formalizes a realignment already underway. For most of the post-Cold War era, India's engagement with Europe rarely rose above the transactional: commerce, diaspora politics, and episodic diplomacy. As countries work to reduce their exposure to China-centered supply chains, India is building strategically motivated partnerships across the continent, each serving a distinct function. Italy's function may prove the most consequential for the energy transition. It may arguably become India's most interesting clean energy partner in Europe.
The momentum behind this partnership runs deeper than any single trigger. The primary driver is structural: both Italy and India have spent recent years diversifying away from China-exposed supply chains, particularly in clean energy and critical minerals. That search for alternatives is made more urgent by the leadership vacuum left by Washington. For India, Italian technology and capital are instruments for de-risking manufacturing dependencies built up over decades. For Italy, India’s scale, cost competitiveness, and favorable policy environment make it the most credible production and sourcing hub in the Global South.
Those converging interests now have institutional form. A Memorandum of Understanding on critical minerals, signed alongside the partnership, establishes a cooperation framework spanning the full mineral-lifecycle, with an annual Joint Working Group overseeing implementation. Separately, both countries have already committed to joint projects and researcher mobility in renewable energy, green hydrogen, and the sustainable blue economy under the 2025-2027 Scientific Cooperation Program. Together, these instruments form the governance structure of a collaborative cleantech agenda, each with its own delivery mechanism.
This governance structure is recent, but the commerce it governs is outpacing it. India has been one of the fastest-growing destinations for Italian goods, growing at 9.4% in 2025, against a near-stagnant 0.1% EU average, roughly three times faster than Italy’s global exports. The conclusion of EU-India Free Trade Agreement negotiations adds further momentum: it cuts tariffs on low-carbon goods, facilitates services tied to the clean energy transition, and creates a framework for joint work on renewables, grid modernization, and green hydrogen. At the same time, the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) continues to impose compliance costs on carbon-intensive Indian exports, a tension the FTA only partially resolves.
These structural drivers explain why this partnership is accelerating. But Italy's value to India in cleantech terms specifically is threefold. First, geography. Italy sits where Mediterranean and Indo-Pacific trade and energy corridors converge; what the two prime ministers have described as an "Indo-Mediterranean" corridor for energy, data, and trade. This is more than a framing. Italy is a signatory to the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), and its Adriatic ports are natural candidates for IMEC's European terminus, offering India's exporters the shortest sea route into central European markets via Suez. Italy is also building the pipelines to move hydrogen north into central Europe — so what lands in its ports doesn't stop there. For a country positioning itself as an exporter of clean molecules, that onward reach is what distinguishes Italy from a mere destination market.
Second, this geographic logic maps directly onto the green hydrogen opportunity. India's National Green Hydrogen Mission targets 5 million metric tons of annual production by 2030 and aims to attract $10 billion in foreign investment to build 10 GW of electrolyzer capacity, positioning the country as a future export hub for Europe. The two countries occupy sequential positions in the same value chain, which is a structural fit that makes the cleantech partnership more durable than one built on political goodwill alone.
Third, Italy brings a third-country dimension that deepens the relationship beyond the bilateral. Its Mattei Plan for Africa aims to move away from traditional donor-recipient dynamics toward a cooperation between equals, and it converges with India’s own development partnerships on the continent around renewable energy, digital public infrastructure, and connectivity. The Blue-Raman submarine cable, co-financed by the EU Commission and supported by Italian telecoms operator Sparkle, is a concrete illustration: a digital connectivity bridge linking the Mediterranean, the Gulf, and India that simultaneously serves as a Mattei Plan deliverable for African digital infrastructure.
Compatible interests are necessary but not sufficient; the question is whether incentives exist to convert commitments into outcomes. Indian firms increasingly view Italy as a gateway to European technology and markets; Italian firms see India as a production and research hub, not just an export destination. Italy's specific expertise in floating offshore wind, smart grid infrastructure, and waste-to-energy applications, combined with the critical minerals cooperation now in place, addresses upstream materials dependencies that are central to India’s cleantech industrial strategy. Institutionally, the shift is from opportunistic engagement to a structured, time-bound roadmap. The 2025–2029 Joint Strategic Action Plan, reinforced by a Foreign Ministers-led review mechanism, introduces accountability. A bilateral trade target of roughly $23 billion by 2029 adds a measurable benchmark. And INNOVIT India — only the second innovation hub of its kind established by the Italian government globally — provides an operational vehicle earlier science programs lacked.
The partnership's credibility will be tested over the next twelve months by whether ministerial meetings produce operational commitments, and whether INNOVIT India attracts real private-sector participation early on. The green hydrogen value chain offers a more specific commercial test: Indian firms have recently begun securing long-term offtake agreements for green ammonia and methanol with Japanese partners, demonstrating commercial viability. A similar agreement between an Indian producer and an Italian importer would be a strong example that the partnership is translating diplomatic engagement into commercial outcomes.
Pietro Zecca was a Summer 2026 Intern for the Energy & Climate program at ORF America.