Remembering The “Green Maharaja”

On 13th April 2020, India suffered a crippling blow with the passing of Rakesh Bakshi, the Green Maharaja. Gifted with an enterprising mind, he single-handedly revolutionized the renewable energy sphere in the country. He encouraged several unique dynamics that made renewable energy a tangible reality in India.

Born in London on 4th June 1958, Rakesh Bakshi chose to complete his graduation in India at National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra. He then pursued academics in Foreign Trade and Computer Science. All these scholarly achievements assumingly pointed towards building a strong and lucrative career in the corporate world, but Mr. Bakshi was different from the rest and so were his plans. At a young age, he realized the adversities that were global warming and climate change. This prompted him to discover alternate sources of energy, ones that didn’t deplete the limited reserves of the non-renewable resources.

After completing his education, Rakesh Bakshi went forward in the direction of exploring renewable mediums of energy at a time when the concept of renewable energy was something unheard of in India. In 1984, his efforts gained a concrete shape with the establishment of Solchrome Private Limited which gave India a Continuous Plating Solar Selective Coating Plant, an unending source of solar energy. Three years later in 1987 came the revolution that India had waited for decades, in the shape of Vestas RRB India Limited (later renamed to RRB Energy Limited in 2008). This meant India now had fine access to wind energy as well. Instead of relying on fossil fuels, we now had both solar and wind power as a source of energy.

For his relentless hard work in the field of renewable sources of energy, Rakesh Bakshi was honoured with Padma Shri in the year 1991 by R. Venkataraman, the then president of India. Soon in 1997, Rakesh Bakshi became the recipient of the Prince Henrik's Medal of Honour in Denmark. Again just two years later, this magnificent personality earned himself the Climate Technology Leadership Award bestowed personally by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In the years that followed, Rakesh Bakshi became the bearer of several accolades that settled him as a well-established figure in the sphere of renewable energy. His compassionate contributions to nature, his tireless work in averting the effects of climate change and global warming and giving not just India, but the entire world a chance at gaining cleaner sources of energy will forever be painted on the walls of history.