Puga Valley's Geothermal Wells: Ladakh's Hot Rocks and India's Renewable Energy Push
India has just commissioned its first demonstration-scale geothermal wells at Puga Valley in Ladakh, turning a year-old national policy into an on-ground pilot project. The development matters right now because it gives UPSC aspirants a concrete, fact-rich hook — specific site, agency and figures — for a resource India has talked about for decades but never actually harnessed for power.
📌 Revision Pointers
- Nodal Ministry — Ministry of New and Renewable Energy notified India's first National Policy on Geothermal Energy in September 2025.
- Puga Valley — Located in Ladakh; part of the Himalayan geothermal province; historically known for sulphur springs and mud pools.
- 2026 Wells — Two wells, about 1,000 metres deep at over 14,000 feet altitude, commissioned July 2026 by the ONGC Energy Centre.
- Recorded Temperature — Sub-surface readings up to 135 degrees Celsius, feeding a proposed 1 MW pilot plant.
- National Potential — About 10,600 MW estimated across roughly ten geothermal provinces; 381 hot springs mapped by the GSI.
- Other Key Sites — Tattapani (Chhattisgarh), Manikaran (Himachal Pradesh), Cambay Basin (Gujarat).
- Historical Precedent — 1970s-80s GSI/ONGC exploration at Puga and Tattapani stalled for lack of policy backing, much like solar power before the 2010 JNNSM.
- Syllabus Links — GS I (plate tectonics and geothermal provinces); GS III (energy security, renewable diversification, Net Zero, PSU diversification); minor GS II (UT administration).
Background
India's renewable energy conversation has largely been a story of solar and wind, but a third resource has waited quietly on the sidelines: heat trapped inside the earth itself. Geothermal energy taps this heat directly for space heating, drying and greenhouse use, or indirectly to drive turbines for electricity, and unlike solar or wind it does not switch off at night or when the wind dies down. India is not short on the resource. The Geological Survey of India has mapped roughly 381 hot springs spread across about ten geothermal provinces, running from the Himalayan belt through the Cambay basin in Gujarat to Tattapani in Chhattisgarh and Manikaran in Himachal Pradesh, adding up to an estimated 10,600 MW of potential.
What India lacked, until last year, was a policy architecture to convert that potential into power. Geothermal exploration is capital intensive and uncertain, since wells are drilled deep without any guarantee of hitting commercially useful temperatures, and no single ministry owned the mandate to absorb that risk. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy filled this gap in September 2025 with India's first National Policy on Geothermal Energy, naming itself the nodal ministry and framing geothermal power as a contributor to both energy security and the Net Zero by 2070 commitment.
Recent Development — and Why It Matters for UPSC
That policy has now produced its first concrete result on the ground. In July 2026, the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh commissioned two geothermal wells at Puga Valley, drilled by the ONGC Energy Centre, each about 1,000 metres deep and sunk at an altitude of over 14,000 feet, making them among the highest-altitude and deepest geothermal wells attempted anywhere in the country. Sub-surface readings of up to 135 degrees Celsius have already been logged, and this data will now feed into evaluating a proposed 1 MW pilot plant at the site, billed as India's first demonstration-scale geothermal power project.
For UPSC purposes, this matters because it converts a policy document into exactly the kind of fact pattern Prelims likes to test: a specific site, a specific implementing agency, and specific figures. The exam rarely asks what geothermal energy is in the abstract; it asks who notified what policy, where the pilot project is located, and which numbers are attached to it. Puga Valley, already familiar to aspirants for its sulphur springs and boiling mud pools, now carries a second identity as the test bed for India's geothermal ambitions. ONGC's involvement adds a public-sector-diversification angle worth remembering alongside other questions on PSU restructuring, since a company built around oil and gas exploration is now extending its expertise into a renewable resource.
Historical Parallel
This is not India's first attempt at Puga. The Geological Survey of India and ONGC had drilled exploratory wells at the same site as far back as the 1970s and 1980s, and a similar early push was attempted at Tattapani in Chhattisgarh around the same period. Both efforts stalled well short of actual power generation, largely because there was no dedicated national policy or financing mechanism to carry them from exploration to a working plant. The pattern echoes India's own solar story before 2010, when an abundant and technically proven resource stayed commercially dormant until the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission gave it a nodal ministry, firm targets, and viability-gap funding. The 2025 Geothermal Policy is attempting the same conversion for geothermal power that the solar mission achieved for solar energy roughly fifteen years earlier.
Links to the GS Syllabus
The topic sits at a genuine intersection of papers. Under GS Paper I, it revisits the physical geography of geothermal provinces and their tectonic origins along plate boundaries, particularly the Himalayan belt formed by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. Under GS Paper III, it feeds directly into energy security, diversification of the renewable energy mix, India's Net Zero commitments, and the role of public sector undertakings in emerging technology deployment. A smaller GS Paper II thread also exists in the Union Territory administration angle, given the Lieutenant Governor's role in commissioning a project of this kind in Ladakh.
💭 Conclusion
Puga Valley is a reminder that policy timing matters as much as resource endowment: the same site that went nowhere in the 1980s is now India's flagship geothermal pilot, simply because a national policy finally exists to carry it forward. That is a pattern worth remembering well beyond this one topic.