Quick answer: the Gandhi Project in five figures
- Wind turbines
- 21
- Installed in India
- Green electricity
- 36 GWh
- Produced per year
- CO2 cancelled
- 33,000+
- Tonnes per year
- Selectra credits
- 200,000+
- Cancelled 2019 to 2021
- Schools supported
- 80
- Tidi, Udaipur District
What the Gandhi Project is
The Gandhi Project is a wind power programme based in India, named after Mahatma Gandhi and anchored around his birthplace of Porbandar. At the time the project was certified, about 56% of India's electricity demand was met by coal. The project's purpose is straightforward: build wind farms that feed clean electricity into the Indian grid, displacing the coal-fired generation that would otherwise have been built or run for longer.
It is registered under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), the largest voluntary carbon offsetting standard in the world. The implementing partner is EcoAct, a climate consultancy founded in 2006 with more than 1,000 projects delivered and over 20,000 jobs created in developing countries.
The most visible co-benefit is in Tidi, a village in the Udaipur District of Rajasthan, where a grants system supported 80 schools and helped lift school enrolment by 50%. More than 800 people received food aid, and a more stable and accessible electricity network was put in place for the local communities living near the turbines.
Plain-English definitions used in this article. A carbon credit is one tonne of CO2-equivalent emissions that a project has stopped, removed, or avoided. To cancel (or retire) a credit means marking it permanently used in a public registry, so no one else can claim it. VCS is the Verified Carbon Standard, run by the non-profit Verra. CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) is a unit that lets you add up different greenhouse gases on a single scale.
Why most carbon offset partner stories are vague
Open ten brand pages about their offsetting work and nine read the same way: a stock photo of a forest, a slogan, a number with no source. That style is easy to write and almost impossible to verify, which is precisely the problem.
The 2023 investigations into REDD+ forestry credits made this concrete. Independent analyses of major rainforest-protection schemes found that the number of credits issued was often more than 70% larger than the real CO2 avoided. Buyers thought they were offsetting; the maths said otherwise. The credits were marketed honestly by people who believed in them, but the underlying counterfactual (what would have happened without the project) was overstated.
The lesson is not "offsetting is fake." The lesson is that not all credits are equal. A credible offsetting project answers three questions clearly: would this have happened anyway, will the emission cut last, and can the cut be measured and audited.
The rest of this page applies those three questions to the Gandhi Project. The point is not to praise it, but to show what an honest answer looks like.
A useful analogy. A carbon credit without measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) is like a charity asking for donations but refusing to publish its accounts. The donation may still do good, but you cannot tell, and you cannot compare it to another charity that does publish.
What makes a Gandhi Project credit defensible
There are three standard tests every voluntary carbon credit should pass. The Gandhi Project passes each one in a way that is unusually easy to check.
1. Additionality: would the wind farms have been built without carbon finance?
Additionality means the emission cut would not have happened without the project. It is the test most offsets fail. Planting a tree on land that was already going to be reforested by the local council is not additional. Protecting a forest that no one was going to log is not additional.
For wind power in India in 2019, the additionality argument is concrete. Coal was, and remained, the cheapest source of new generation. Without the revenue from selling VCS credits on the voluntary market, the financial case for building 21 new turbines in remote parts of India did not close. The credits did not pay for everything, but they closed the gap between "uneconomic" and "viable."
VCS auditors test this by building a counterfactual: what would the developer have done with the same money in the absence of carbon revenue? For the Gandhi Project, the counterfactual was no project, or a smaller one, or one that ran on coal. That answer is documented in the registry.
2. Permanence: can the emission cut be reversed?
Permanence means the saved CO2 stays out of the atmosphere. This is where forestry credits structurally struggle. A tree can burn in a wildfire, be cut down by the next landowner, or die from disease, and all the stored carbon is released. The bigger the climate-related fire season, the worse this gets.
A wind turbine has the opposite shape. It is steel and concrete, sited on a fixed foundation, and once the coal-fired alternative was not built, that emission did not happen. There is no "reversal" event for a tonne of coal that was never burned. The turbines themselves can break or be decommissioned at end of life, but the emissions they have already displaced cannot be undisplaced.
That structural permanence is the single biggest reason renewable energy credits are easier to defend than nature-based credits over a 50 to 100-year horizon.
3. MRV: how do you actually measure the emission cut?
MRV stands for measurement, reporting, and verification. It is the audit trail that turns a claim into a credit. For a forestry project, MRV is hard: you have to model how much carbon a particular tree species stores at a particular age in a particular soil, then walk the land and check. The error bars are wide.
For a wind farm, MRV is simple. The turbine has a meter. The meter records kWh of electricity produced. The local grid emission factor (the average tonnes of CO2 emitted per kWh) is published by the regulator. Multiply the two and you have tonnes avoided, in a number that can be re-checked by anyone with the meter data.
Independent VCS-accredited validators audit those meter readings and publish reports on the Verra registry. The number "33,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent cancelled per year" is not a marketing figure. It is metered output multiplied by a published emission factor, signed off by a third party.
Impact in numbers
All figures are taken from the project documentation under EcoAct's management and the VCS registry. Selectra UK's role is buying and cancelling credits on behalf of customers; the underlying physical project is owned by the wind farm operators in India.
| Indicator | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Wind turbines installed | 21 | EcoAct project documentation |
| Green electricity produced per year | 36 GWh | Metered output, audited by VCS |
| CO2-equivalent emissions cancelled per year | 33,000+ tCO2e | Output x grid emission factor (VCS) |
| Selectra credits acquired and cancelled (2019 to 2021) | 200,000+ | Selectra UK partner records |
| Schools supported via grants (Tidi, Udaipur District) | 80 | EcoAct co-benefit report |
| Rise in school enrolment in Tidi | +50% | EcoAct co-benefit report |
| People who received food aid | 800+ | EcoAct co-benefit report |
Figures verified 2026-05-18. The 200,000+ credits Selectra cancelled cover roughly six years of the project's annual output (33,000 tCO2e per year x 3 years of Selectra's involvement, plus carry-over from earlier vintages).
Co-benefits beyond CO2
A serious offsetting project is judged on more than tonnes avoided. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 broad targets agreed by every member state in 2015, provide the common scoring sheet. A high-quality VCS project is expected to deliver against several SDGs at once, not only the climate one.
The Gandhi Project's documented co-benefits map cleanly to four SDGs:
- SDG 4 Quality education. Grants supported 80 schools and lifted enrolment in Tidi by 50%. School building and teacher salaries are funded from credit revenue, not from goodwill alone;
- SDG 2 Zero hunger. More than 800 people received food aid through the same project framework;
- SDG 7 Affordable and clean energy. A more stable and accessible local electricity network for the communities living near the turbines, which is a direct welfare gain on top of the CO2 displaced;
- SDG 13 Climate action. The headline metric: 33,000+ tonnes of CO2-equivalent avoided every year, with credits traceable in a public registry.
For a UK consumer, the co-benefits matter for a simple reason: they make the credit harder to substitute for a cheaper one. A project that ticks four SDGs cannot be replaced by a stack of "tonnes-only" credits without losing value, even if the per-tonne price looks comparable.
Your offset, mapped to the project
Enter the tonnes of CO2 you want to offset. The widget converts that into the slice of the Gandhi Project it represents: how much wind-power output, how much coal-power displaced, and the pro-rata co-benefit share. The ratios use the project's actual figures; the smallest numbers are order-of-magnitude.
Your offset
Reference points
- UK average personal footprint~7 tCO2
- One return London to New York flight~1.5 tCO2
- One year of gas heating, medium home~2.2 tCO2
What it buys in the project
Coal-power displaced
kWh
About UK homes' annual electricity use.
Turbine output funded
~ h
Of one Gandhi Project turbine
School grant share
~
Of one supported school
Offsetting tCO2 through the Gandhi Project is the carbon-equivalent of kWh of coal-fired electricity not generated, the output of one turbine for roughly hours, and a pro-rata share of about of one food-aid recipient supported by the project's co-benefit fund.
EcoAct: who actually delivers this
Selectra UK is not a carbon project developer. The Gandhi Project is run on the ground by wind farm operators in India, with the offset structure managed by EcoAct, Selectra's climate consultancy partner. Knowing who does what matters, because credible offsetting depends on the developer, not the brand selling the credits.
EcoAct was founded in 2006. By the time of the Gandhi Project, it had delivered more than 1,000 climate projects worldwide and helped create over 20,000 jobs in developing countries. The company is responsible for project selection, VCS auditing coordination, credit issuance, and the cancellation certificates that Selectra forwards to its customers.
Each year, Selectra UK buys a volume of credits from EcoAct and asks them to cancel that volume on behalf of Selectra customers. EcoAct cancels the credits in the Verra registry (the public ledger where every VCS credit is tracked), issues an offset certificate to Selectra, and Selectra forwards an individual certificate to each customer by email. The chain is auditable end to end.
Frequently asked questions
Offset what you cannot reduce
The honest order is: reduce first, offset second. Switch your energy at home to a tariff that fits your usage, change the highest-emission habits you can (heating settings, car journeys, flights), then offset whatever is left with credits you can verify.
If you want to check whether a specific tariff already includes voluntary credits, or simply find a greener deal, use our free comparison tools and live market data. No phone call, no email gate: compare the energy deals available today and see how the green options stack up against your current tariff.