When National Press Put a Name on Solar — ET, Cover Stories and Live TV

Engineers can ship products for years and still stay invisible. What changed for me — and for Su-Kam’s solar chapter — was when India’s national business press stopped treating solar as a niche brochure and started putting a person on the page: cover, byline, studio chyron. This is not a vanity list. It is the media spine of the years when I was asked, on the record, what India should do with solar — and when The Economic Times, Business Today, CELERITY and NewsX all treated that answer as news.

Below are the pieces I can still put my hand on: live URLs where they still exist, and Facebook-archive images where the company once clipped the page for dealers and customers. Awards and project press live on other posts. This one is about the press that named me.

1. The Economic Times — profile, quote, and energy desk

Long before solar was fashionable, ET ran a founder profile that treated the inverter business as a serious industrial story: “A powerful idea was his calling.” That is the register I care about — not a product launch release, but a newspaper deciding the founder’s journey was the story.

On 3 January 2015, ET went after cheap Chinese solar panels flooding Indian markets. The live headline today is “China's cheap solar panels cause dark spots in Indian market.” Our Facebook clipping of the same week used the print-style line Made-in-China ‘Sun’ Clouds Indian Skies. Either way, the reporter put me on the record as Su-Kam’s MD: fake wattage, e-waste dumping, and the absence of the kind of audit you would expect for something that sits on a roof for years.

Later, ET’s energy desk quoted my Make-in-India remarks from the India International Science Festival — “Change the market before it changes you” on ETEnergyworld. And ET still keeps a topic page under my name — the newspaper’s own index of how often they had to write “Kunwer Sachdev.”

Note: Our Facebook archive also records an April 2018 Economic Times op-ed titled “Be Proactive in Adopting Solar Energy.” I have not yet found a stable live ET URL for that byline; until we do, the archive post is the citation, not a guessed link.

2. CELERITY cover — #MissionSun

November–December 2017. CELERITY — a supply-chain and logistics business magazine, not a solar trade sheet — put me on the cover under a yellow headline: MISSION SUN. The dek: every Indian household powered by solar. That is what “exclusive” looked like when a non-solar title decided the story was still worth the cover.

Interior pages from the same CELERITY issue — Facebook archive album.

3. Business Today — exclusive on the Budget

July 2014. Business Today ran an exclusive: Budget should accord priority-sector lending status to solar. The interviewer was not asking about a SKU. They were asking what the new government’s first Budget should do for the sector — and they put my photograph and name on that ask. We clipped it for the dealer network the next day.

4. NewsX — India Inc’s Budget Wishlist

February 2018. NewsX put me on a pre-Budget round table — India Inc’s Budget Wishlist — as Founder & Managing Director. The graphic we shared called me Solar Man of India on national television’s terms. Policy talk on live TV is a different kind of proof than a printed cover: the chyron has to fit, and someone in the newsroom still chose to put solar in that chair.

What this is — and is not

This is not every clipping Su-Kam ever earned. Project press — petrol pumps, forty thousand UP homes, Assam Rifles — has its own essays. The awards cabinet has its own deck. The book shelf has nine published books. This page is narrower: the moments when mainstream business media treated me as the industry voice worth a cover, a quote, an exclusive, or a studio seat.

If you only remember one line, remember this: solar did not need a hero. It needed someone willing to sit in front of a newspaper and a camera and say what the sector actually required — manufacturing quality, lending status, and the courage to change the market before it changed you.

Verified Sources

• Economic Times — A powerful idea was his calling
• Economic Times — China's cheap solar panels cause dark spots in Indian market (3 Jan 2015)
• ETEnergyworld — Change the market before it changes you: Su-Kam MD Kunwer Sachdev
• Economic Times — Topic: Kunwer Sachdev
• Facebook Archive — CELERITY / NewsX / ET / Business Today posts
• Nine books — published shelf on Kunwer Sachdev

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• Facebook Archive — CELERITY, NewsX, ET, Business Today posts
• Nine books — published shelf
• Su-Kam awards deck
• ISA Technovation — Viswanathan Anand
• Recognition & Awards
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