Earth Day 2026 falls twenty-two days into the Sixteenth Finance Commission award period. It is a good time to ask who pays for the planet, and who has been paying all along.

The koel began calling at five this morning, well before the watchman came to the gate. Outside my window, the first of the gulmohar flowers are out in orange-red smears against the white compound wall, the Yamuna flats to the south are cracked and wheat-gold, and the sky has the bleached, metallic quality Delhi acquires in April when the afternoon wind picks up from Rajasthan. At seven today, 22 April 2026, the CPCB monitor at Lodhi Road reported PM2.5 at 74 micrograms per cubic metre. A sensor two kilometres away, placed in an informal settlement off Ring Road, read 142. Both are multiples of the World Health Organisation's annual guideline of 5. Both are legal under India's National Ambient Air Quality Standards, last revised in 2009.

Today is Earth Day, observed since 1970. It is also the twenty-second day of the new Finance Commission cycle. The Sixteenth Finance Commission, chaired by Arvind Panagariya, submitted its report to President Droupadi Murmu on 17 November 2025, and the report was tabled in Parliament on 1 February 2026 alongside the Union Budget. Its award period runs from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2031, the same five years during which India must deliver its updated Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, submit its first Biennial Transparency Report to the UNFCCC, and demonstrate that the 500-gigawatt non-fossil installed capacity pledge announced at Glasgow is achievable. The 16th FC retained the states' share of central taxes at 41 per cent. It made DISCOM privatisation a condition for states to access Special Assistance for Capital Investment. It said nothing of substance about preserving the 15th Finance Commission's air quality grants for million-plus cities, which expired on 31 March 2026 with no successor mechanism announced.

This essay is about what that silence means for the Indian planet. It is about the gap between the three quantitative pledges India made in its updated Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted to the UNFCCC on 26 August 2022, and the fiscal, legal, and measurement systems required to deliver them. It is about a national accounting in which coal cess revenues were formally transferred from climate use to GST compensation, and forest cover grew on paper. In contrast, natural forest cover shrank, and 88 per cent of Delhi's air-monitoring stations were found by the Comptroller and Auditor General to violate their own siting norms. A Union government minister told the Rajya Sabha in July 2024 that there was "no conclusive data" linking air pollution to death.

It is also, at its root, an essay about fiscal federalism. The polluter in India is most often the Centre, directly through coal, or indirectly through the discoms whose debt it has repeatedly refused to restructure. The payer in India is most often the state, which bears the cost of heat waves, floods, landslides, and household air pollution from cooking fuels that the Union subsidises and then fails to refill. The same structural pattern I described last month in "The Unaccountable State" on the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, in which the Union government has progressively concentrated discretionary power without accepting parallel accountability, runs through India's environmental governance with almost exact fidelity. The air is polluted, the forest is logged, the aquifer is drawn down, and the cost is transferred.

The three pledges and the ledger in April 2026

India's updated NDC carries three numbers. Reduce the emission intensity of GDP by 45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. Reach 50 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030. Create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030. These were calibrated downwards from the five-part Panchamrit that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced in his National Statement at Glasgow on 1 November 2021. The 500 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity target and the one-billion-tonne cumulative reduction in projected emissions between 2021 and 2030 were not carried over into the submitted NDC. The Climate Action Tracker observed at the time that India had "replaced its unambitious first mitigation targets with targets close to its current level of climate action," which is a polite way of saying that the country formalised what it was already going to achieve and dropped the parts that would have required new policy.

The ledger in April 2026 is mixed in a manner that the Union government presents as uniform success. The emission intensity figure looks good. India's Fourth Biennial Update Report, submitted to the UNFCCC on 30 December 2024, records a 36 per cent fall in the emission intensity of GDP between 2005 and 2020, putting the 45 per cent target within reach. The non-fossil capacity figure looks better. The Central Electricity Authority reports total installed capacity of 532,740 MW as of 31 March 2026, of which 283,468 MW or 53.21 per cent is non-fossil, and India crossed the 50 per cent line in June 2025, five years ahead of schedule. Yet installed capacity is not generation. Coal still produces roughly three-quarters of the country's electricity, and Coal India's output crossed 1.04 billion tonnes in FY25, the highest in its history. Renewable capacity is built; coal is burnt. The two are not substitutes unless the grid and the distribution companies' balance sheets permit substitution, which they currently do not.

The third pledge, the forest-and-sink commitment, is in more serious difficulty. The India State of Forest Report 2023, released at the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, on 21 December 2024, records total forest and tree cover of 827,357 square kilometres or 25.17 per cent of the country's geographical area, a net gain of 1,445 square kilometres since ISFR 2021. The headline reading is that India has gained forest. The subtext is that it has not.

Inside the Recorded Forest Areas, Moderately Dense Forest fell by 1,234.95 square kilometres, Open Forest by 1,189.27 square kilometres, and Scrub by 1,204.76 square kilometres. The Northeast, which holds the country's densest natural forest, lost 327.30 square kilometres since ISFR 2021, with Arunachal Pradesh losing 1,085 square kilometres, Mizoram 987.7 square kilometres, and Nagaland 794 square kilometres over the past decade. The net addition is concentrated in plantations, including rubber estates, coconut, areca, tea, coffee, and commercial orchards. The Forest Survey of India's counting conventions treat these as forest cover for NDC reporting purposes.

Debadityo Sinha of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy summarised the problem with restraint: "Prime natural forest and eco-sensitive zones are threatened, and the country is moving towards planted forest." Madhav Gadgil has been saying for three decades that monoculture plantations are ecological deserts. The BUR-4 claims that India has added 2.29 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent to its sink since 2005, thus rests on an accounting in which the sink may be meeting the target, while the carbon service, the biodiversity service, and the water-regulation service, which the sink was meant to provide, are eroding.

India's 2035 NDC, due under the Paris Agreement in February 2025, was not submitted by the Belem COP30 in November 2025. Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav told the High-Level Segment at COP30 on 17 November 2025 that the revised pledge and the first Biennial Transparency Report would arrive "by December 2025". As of this morning, neither has been uploaded to the UNFCCC registry. The world's most populous country and the third-largest annual emitter is running late on the central accounting obligation of the Paris system.

Figure 2. NDC ledger: what was promised, what was dropped, what was delivered.

The air that is measured incorrectly, and the deaths that are counted strangely

The measurement problem has a specific address. On a given winter morning in 2025-26, if you stood near the entrance of AIIMS Delhi with a portable monitor, you would most likely see a PM2.5 reading in the 300 to 400 range. The nearest CPCB station at Safdarjung Hospital would typically report a reading below 250. The Newslaundry investigation of March 2026 documented this gap at fifteen locations across Delhi, along with visual evidence of Public Works Department tankers spraying water near monitoring stations. The CAG's April 2025 performance audit found that 88 per cent of Delhi's monitoring stations violated CPCB's own siting criteria, including the now-famous RK Puram station surrounded by a full-grown banyan tree.

Across India, 28 of 130 NCAP cities still lack continuous monitoring, seven years after the programme's launch. In this context, the independent citizen platform JanVayu has become indispensable for analysis. An initiative of the MMSF Air Quality Initiative, JanVayu aggregates live AQI data from WAQI, CPCB, and third-party networks, runs the Global Exposure Mortality Model of Burnett et al. for city-by-city health impact estimation, tracks NCAP and 15th Finance Commission budget utilisation, archives Supreme Court and National Green Tribunal orders, and publishes an environmental justice dashboard that the government's own reporting systematically avoids.

Figure 4. The measurement gap: what CPCB sees vs what the city breathes.

Health accounting is being done outside the Union government because the Union government declines to do so. The State of Global Air 2025, published by the Health Effects Institute in October 2025, attributes 2 million deaths in India to air pollution in 2023, a 43 per cent rise since 2000, with India's age-standardised mortality rate from air pollution at 186 per 100,000, compared with a high-income-country rate of 17 per 100,000. The Lancet Planetary Health study in December 2024, led by Peter Ljungman at Karolinska Institutet, used a difference-in-differences causal design across 10 Indian cities and attributed 7.2 per cent of daily deaths in Delhi to PM2.5 levels exceeding WHO guidelines.

Against this evidence, Minister of State for Environment Ashwini Kumar Choubey told the Rajya Sabha in July 2024 that "there is no conclusive data available in the country to establish direct correlation of death or disease exclusively due to air pollution". That is not a defensible factual claim. It is the oldest manner of Indian administrative denial, putting contested science into question before a parliamentary reply might otherwise compel a budget response.

The National Clean Air Programme is where the denial becomes money. Launched in January 2019 with a 20 to 30 per cent PM reduction target by 2024 and subsequently revised to 40 per cent PM10 reduction by 2026 across 131 non-attainment cities, the programme combined NCAP funds with the 15th Finance Commission air quality grants for 49 million-plus cities, totalling Rs 13,415 crore released through December 2025. CREA's Tracing the Hazy Air 2026, released on 9 January 2026, found that only 23 of 100 NCAP cities met the 40 per cent PM10 target, that 103 of 231 cities with continuous monitoring still exceed national PM2.5 standards, and that none of 238 cities meets the WHO guideline.

Fund utilisation sits at 74 per cent, respectable on the surface. The composition is the scandal. 68 per cent of NCAP spending has gone on road dust control, 14 per cent on transport, and less than one per cent each on industry, domestic fuel, and public outreach. IIT Kanpur and Airshed source apportionment shows vehicles producing 34 per cent of Delhi's PM2.5 from exhaust plus 24 per cent from tyre and brake wear, totalling 58 per cent, and industry contributing 18 per cent. NCAP spends less than two per cent on the sources that produce eighty per cent of the harm. A Right to Information reply to Vimlendu Jha in January 2025 revealed Delhi had used 17 per cent of its Rs 81.36 crore NCAP allocation across five years. Noida used 13 per cent, Ghaziabad 26. The 15th FC's performance grants, worth Rs 16,539 crore and representing 87 per cent of all NCAP city funding, expired twenty-two days ago with no successor mechanism announced.

Forests that are not forests, and the rights that are not rights

The legal and institutional framework for Indian forest protection has been rewritten over the past three years in a manner that exacerbates the accounting problem described above. The Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam 2023, previously the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, narrows the statutory definition of "forest" to land that was formally notified under the Indian Forest Act, 1927, or recorded as forest in government records on or after 25 October 1980. It exempts strategic projects within 100 kilometres of the international border, the Line of Control, and the Line of Actual Control, which is a zone that covers most of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, and Tripura, and substantial parts of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir.

It exempts security-related infrastructure, eco-tourism facilities, zoos and safaris, and a range of linear projects. K.B. Saxena estimated in a Sage journal analysis in 2024 that roughly 197,000 square kilometres of unclassed forest may be effectively removed from the Act's ambit through this combination of definitional narrowing and strategic exemption.

On 19 February 2024, a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud passed an interim order in Ashok Kumar Sharma IFS (Retd) v. Union of India holding that until expert committees identify forests under the 2023 rules, states and Union Territories "must adhere to the definition of forest laid down in the 1996 T.N. Godavarman judgment", which had given "forest" its ordinary dictionary meaning. The interim order has been reaffirmed in February and March 2025. It is, for the present, the only thing preventing the administrative narrowing of the definition from taking full effect.

Jairam Ramesh, who chairs the Rajya Sabha Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change, wrote to the Rajya Sabha Chairman on 29 March 2023 noting that by referring the Bill to a Joint Committee instead of his Standing Committee, "the Union government is deliberately bypassing the Standing Committee, which would have subjected the legislation to detailed examination with the full participation of all stakeholders". This is the same legislative bypass technique I traced in "The Unaccountable State" in the FCRA context.

The bypass is now a pattern across environmental statutes. The Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act 2022, passed in December 2022, restructured the Schedules of the 1972 Act, introduced CITES compliance provisions, reduced the number of protected species in the highest schedule, and empowered the Union to exempt activities from prohibition. The Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act 2023, passed in August 2023 after a Joint Committee bypass identical to the Forest Amendment's, exempted Indian-origin AYUSH manufacturers and codified Ayurveda research from the Access and Benefit Sharing provisions of the original 2002 Act, and decriminalised a range of violations of the National Biodiversity Authority's processes. In each case, the pattern is the same: narrow the definition, empower the Union to exempt, dilute enforcement, and route the Bill to a Joint Committee, where the opposition's voice is structurally weaker than in the Standing Committee system.

Figure 3. The legislative bypass: environmental statutes 2020 to 2023.

Community Forest Resource rights under the Forest Rights Act 2006 have followed the same logic in reverse. The Rights and Resources Initiative and Vasundhara estimate the potential CFR area at roughly 40 million hectares; approximately 6.8 million hectares have been titled through about 102,889 CFR titles, which is 17 per cent of the potential area. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs withdrew the FRA-compatible 2015 CFR Guidelines. It replaced them with the 2023 Guidelines, which, in the reading of forest rights networks, reintroduce Forest Department control over the Gram Sabha's authority. The one instrument India has that simultaneously advances carbon stewardship, biodiversity conservation, and Adivasi livelihood rights, and which represents the country's most decentralised and accountable form of forest governance, has been weakened at the precise moment the NDC demands its expansion.

The Compensatory Afforestation Fund tells the same story in monetary terms. Against Rs 94,844 crore collected by the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), only about Rs 26,276 crore or 52 per cent had been utilised by state forest departments by December 2024. A CAG audit in Uttarakhand documented Rs 13.86 crore of CAMPA funds spent on iPhones, laptops, fridges, coolers, and building renovations during 2019 to 2022, with tree survival at 33.51 percent against a mandated 60 to 65 percent. Madhya Pradesh diverted Rs 167 crore to ineligible activities. A compensatory fund built from the logic that those who clear forests should pay for their replacement has instead been used to subsidise the administrative convenience of the agencies that issue the clearances.

The land that is reviewed less, the soil that is tilled harder

The same legislative bypass pattern runs through the environmental review of projects themselves. The draft Environment Impact Assessment Notification of 2020, issued by the MoEFCC on 23 March 2020 during the first COVID-19 lockdown when public consultation was effectively impossible, proposed to expand the categories of projects exempt from prior environmental clearance, allow post-facto clearance for projects that had begun construction without prior approval, narrow the definition of "public consultation" for entire categories including coal, oil, and mining, and reduce the period for public comment from 30 days to 20.

In June 2020, the Delhi High Court ordered that the notification be translated into all 22 scheduled languages after the translation requirement under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, was challenged, and the Madras High Court and the Karnataka High Court issued similar directions. The final notification has not been formally issued. The draft, however, has been the operational document shaping clearance practice through office memoranda and administrative orders since 2020, and post-facto clearance in particular has been repeatedly challenged before the Supreme Court, most recently in the Vanashakti v. Union of India line of cases.

The Coastal Regulation Zone notification has followed a parallel trajectory. The CRZ Notification 2019 replaced the 2011 notification and substantially relaxed restrictions on construction within coastal zones, reducing the No Development Zone in CRZ-III B areas from 200 metres to 50 metres from the high tide line for rural areas with higher population density, and permitting real estate development and tourism infrastructure within zones that had previously been protected for fisherfolk livelihoods and ecological function.

The consequences are visible from space and from below. ISRO's Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas 2021, produced by the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, records 97.85 million hectares or 29.77 percent of India's geographical area under land degradation in 2018-19, up from 28.76 percent in 2003-05, with the highest rates in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Jharkhand, and Odisha. Vegetation degradation, water erosion, and wind erosion are the three dominant drivers, in that order. India's Bonn Challenge commitment of 26 million hectares of restored land by 2030 has an interim target of 21 million hectares by 2025 which the country is not on track to meet.

The agrarian emissions question is the quietest and most politically radioactive part of the Indian climate file. India's BUR-4 inventory attributes 13.7 per cent of gross emissions to agriculture, dominated by methane from enteric fermentation in cattle and from flooded paddy, and nitrous oxide from urea and other nitrogenous fertilisers. Indian urea is subsidised at a fiscal cost of roughly Rs 1.7 lakh crore in 2024-25, which exceeds the combined Union budget allocations for MoEFCC, MNRE, Jal Shakti, and the National Health Mission.

The subsidy structure, which holds farmgate urea prices at Rs 266.50 per 45-kilogram bag against an import-equivalent cost five to eight times higher, produces overuse, soil acidification, nitrogen run-off into aquifers and rivers, and direct N2O emissions that the atmosphere registers as a greenhouse gas 273 times more potent than CO2 over a century. PM-PRANAM, the scheme approved in June 2023 to incentivise states to reduce chemical fertiliser use by returning 50 per cent of the subsidy savings to state coffers, has not disbursed a single rupee to any state or Union Territory as of March 2026, per Union Minister J.P. Nadda's reply to the Lok Sabha. The Steering Committee has met twice.

The Standard Operating Procedure was approved only in July 2024, 28 months into what was conceived as a three-year programme. The scheme is a case study in the difficulty of reforming an agrarian political economy whose subsidy base is electoral and whose environmental externalities are long-dated and diffuse.

Groundwater reflects the same extractive fiscal federalism in reverse. The Central Ground Water Board's Dynamic Ground Water Resources Assessment 2024, released on 31 December 2024, reports a stage of extraction of 60.47 per cent, with 751 of 6,746 assessed units or 11.13 per cent over-exploited and another 917 critical or semi-critical, concentrated in Punjab, Haryana, western Rajasthan, and parts of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

The extraction is driven primarily by free or near-free agricultural electricity and by minimum support prices that favour water-intensive paddy cultivation in Punjab and Haryana, both of which are policy instruments jointly controlled by the Union and the states. CPCB's 2022 Polluted River Stretches Report identifies 311 polluted stretches on 279 rivers across 30 states, a slight improvement over 351 in 2018. The Yamuna at Delhi remains a dark foam-edged channel whose fate is debated in Niti Aayog reports and Supreme Court orders in roughly equal measure, and which neither level of government appears able or willing to clean.

The cess that became a compensation, and the climate that has no line item

The single most revealing fiscal fact about Indian environmental policy in the past decade is what happened to the Clean Energy Cess on coal. Introduced in Budget 2010-11 at Rs 50 per tonne and raised progressively to Rs 400 per tonne by 2016, the cess was expressly designed to finance the transition away from fossil fuels through the National Clean Energy and Environment Fund. Between 2010-11 and 2017-18, the Clean Energy Cess collected Rs 86,440.21 crore. Only Rs 29,645 crore was transferred to the NCEEF. Only Rs 15,911.49 crore, roughly 18 per cent of collections, financed actual clean-energy projects.

When GST was introduced on 1 July 2017 through the Taxation Laws Amendment Act 2017, the Clean Energy Cess was abolished. The unspent balance of roughly Rs 56,700 crore was transferred to the GST Compensation Fund to compensate state governments for revenue losses in the transition to GST. A tax introduced to decarbonise India became a tax to compensate the states for a federal tax reform. The GST Compensation Cess on coal at Rs 400 per tonne continues to this day, has since collected over Rs 1 lakh crore, and carries no environmental earmark of any kind.

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change received Rs 3,413 crore in Budget 2025-26, which is approximately 0.07 per cent of the Union government's total expenditure and about 0.009 per cent of GDP. The ministry's budget share has been essentially stagnant in nominal terms for a decade, which, in real terms, represents a slow contraction. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy received Rs 26,549.38 crore, a 53.48 per cent nominal increase. Still, MNRE underutilisation was 22 per cent in 2023-24, and the revised estimates for 2024-25 came in at 91 per cent of the Budget Estimate, which is a polite way of saying a real-terms cut.

The PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, approved on 29 February 2024 with an outlay of Rs 75,021 crore and a target of one crore households by March 2027, had achieved 26.21 lakh installations and 9.57 gigawatts of capacity by 20 March 2026, which is roughly 32 per cent of the household target at 64 per cent of the time elapsed. PM-KUSUM has installed 12.16 gigawatts against a 34.8 gigawatt target, with Component A at 6.5 per cent.

The RBI's Report on Currency and Finance 2022-23, released on 3 May 2023, estimated that India's green-transition financing needs at least 2.5 per cent of GDP annually until 2030 and cumulative new investments of USD 7.2 trillion to USD 12.1 trillion by 2050. India's own updated NDC taxonomy, released by the Department of Economic Affairs in May 2025, reiterates the USD 2.5 trillion climate finance requirement from 2015 to 2030 at 2014-15 prices. Actual aggregate climate spending across all Union government schemes in 2025-26 is roughly Rs 15,000 crore, or about 0.5 per cent of the estimated annual economic burden of air pollution alone. For every hundred rupees India loses to air pollution, it spends fifty paise on solutions.

Figure 1. Fiscal federalism of the Indian environment: Union extracts, states and citizens bear.

Heat without a budget line, disasters without a constitution

The Indian climate crisis is most sharply felt not through the UNFCCC numbers but through the household events of the summer and monsoon. The Centre for Science and Environment's Climate India 2024 report, released by Sunita Narain on 8 November 2024, recorded extreme-weather events on 255 of 274 days in January to September 2024, which is 93 per cent of the period under observation.

Those events killed 3,238 people, destroyed 235,862 houses, and affected 3.2 million hectares of cropland. The Wayanad landslides of 30 July 2024 alone killed more than 231 people and caused damages approaching Rs 1,200 crore. Kerala's Left government requested designation of the disaster as one of "severe nature"; Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai's letter of 14 November 2024, sent immediately after the Wayanad Lok Sabha by-election, stated that there is no provision to declare any event a "national disaster" under existing guidelines. The timing and the choice of guidelines were both political statements.

The Sustainable Futures Collaborative review by Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Tamanna Dalal, published in March 2023, examined 37 Heat Action Plans across 18 states and found that only 3 identified dedicated funding, with only 11 discussing funding sources at all. Most plans instructed implementing departments to self-allocate from existing budgets, which, in practice, means that no budget line exists for heat-mortality prevention.

The ILO's 2019 Working on a Warmer Planet projected that India would lose 5.8 per cent of working hours to heat by 2030, equivalent to 34 million full-time jobs. McKinsey's 2020 climate risk work put 2.5 to 4.5 per cent of GDP at risk by 2030 from heat alone, roughly USD 150 to 250 billion. The IMD's Mungeshpur reading of 52.9 degrees Celsius on 29 May 2024 was subsequently withdrawn as a sensor error of roughly 3 degrees, but the actual peaks at Churu at 50.5 and Sirsa and Phalodi near 50 stood, and the 2024 death count ranged from the National Centre for Disease Control's 60 confirmed deaths through NDMA's running totals to peer estimates exceeding 700. The evidence gap, again, is itself a governance failure.

Disaster federalism has begun to look like a live constitutional question. The 15th Finance Commission allocated Rs 1,60,153 crore to the State Disaster Risk Management Fund and Rs 68,463 crore to the National Disaster Risk Management Fund for 2021-26, in an 80-20 split between response and mitigation pillars, with SDRF sharing at 75-25 for general states and 90-10 for Northeast and Himalayan states. In FY 2024-25, Rs 20,264.40 crore was released to 28 states under SDRF and Rs 5,160.76 crore to 19 states under NDRF. But the release is conditional and discretionary, and the conditionality has become partisan. Karnataka sought Rs 18,172 crore for drought relief in September 2023 and received Rs 3,454 crore, only after filing an Article 131 petition in the Supreme Court. Tamil Nadu has filed an Article 131 suit seeking Rs 37,907 crore for Cyclone Michaung against a central release of Rs 276 crore. When states governed by non-BJP coalitions must litigate their way to disaster relief under funds that are constitutionally theirs, the Union is effectively withholding climate finance that it has formally transferred on paper.

Raina's optical illusion, and the finances that are not coming in

There is one passage in the recent diplomatic record that captures the weight India's climate position carries, and the distance that remains between the weight and the result. At the closing plenary of COP29 in Baku on 24 November 2024, Chandni Raina, Adviser in the Department of Economic Affairs and India's lead finance negotiator, was denied the floor before the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance was gavelled through.

When she was eventually allowed to speak, she said: "India does not accept the goal proposal in its present form. The amount proposed to be mobilised is abysmally small. It is a paltry sum. It is not something that will enable conducive climate action that is necessary for the survival of our country." And: "This document is nothing more than an optical illusion. In our opinion, this will not address the magnitude of the challenge we all face. Therefore, we oppose the adoption of this document."

The outcome, USD 300 billion per year by 2035 from developed countries with a layered USD 1.3 trillion ambition, is less than a quarter of what the developing world requested, and less than half of what the UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance's Sixth Biennial Assessment had already documented as existing global climate finance flows in 2021-22, overwhelmingly concentrated in Europe, North America, and East Asia. The Loss and Damage Fund, operationalised at COP28 on 30 November 2023, attracted roughly USD 700 million in initial pledges against developing-country need estimates of USD 100 to 671 billion per year. The Green Climate Fund has approved 11 projects in India totalling USD 782.4 million since India's accession. These are gestures, not financing packages for a climate transition of the scale the signatories acknowledge is required.

India's own estimate of its climate finance needs, USD 2.5 trillion between 2015 and 2030 at 2014-15 prices, implies roughly USD 170 billion per year. The Union government's own climate spending is a small fraction of that, and a substantial part of what it does spend is financed by the same tax bases that the GST transition shifted away from, which were cess-earmarked for climate use.

Who emits what, and who breathes and drinks and loses what

The inequality of the Indian climate story is measurable on both sides of the equation. The World Inequality Lab's Climate Inequality Report 2023, authored by Lucas Chancel, Philipp Bothe, and Tancrede Voituriez, found that the richest 10 per cent of Indians emit roughly 10 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per capita per year, comparable to European middle-class emissions, while the poorest 50 percent of Indians emit approximately 1 tonne or less per capita, which is among the lowest national footprints documented anywhere. The climate crisis is produced unequally within India, at roughly the same ratio as between India and the OECD.

The exposure distribution runs in the opposite direction. The New York Times analysis cited on JanVayu tracked real-time PM2.5 exposure for two Delhi children on the same day. Monu, in trans-Yamuna, peaked at 180 micrograms per cubic metre, with no air purifier and no ability to stay indoors. Aamya, in Greater Kailash, peaked at 80, with filtered air, air conditioning, and the option of limiting outdoor time. They live in the same city, and they do not breathe the same air.

The distributional logic extends beyond air. Approximately 481,700 Indians die annually from household air pollution, 60 per cent of them women, against 49 per cent of households still cooking primarily with biomass per Census 2021, and PMUY's 10.33 crore connections have an average refill rate of 4.47 cylinders per year against the 9 to 12 that would indicate primary-fuel use. Heat mortality falls disproportionately on outdoor workers, who are overwhelmingly Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC; the 2024 heat wave's confirmed deaths were undercounted because many occurred among informal labourers without death certificates.

Land degradation first destroys the livelihoods of smallholder cultivators, and desertification in western Rajasthan and southern Haryana has driven a measured rise in distress migration to Delhi. Groundwater depletion in Punjab and Haryana is the fiscal inverse of the same story: affluent farmers with higher-horsepower pumps extract water deeper, faster, and for longer, while marginal farmers whose borewells are shallower run dry first. The Wayanad landslides of July 2024 killed plantation workers, not landowners.

The informal workers, who make up 93 per cent of the Indian workforce, lack occupational air-quality, heat, or disaster protection, and GRAP Stage IV's construction bans provide no wage compensation to the 1.1 crore construction workers who lose daily earnings during pollution emergencies. This is the same distributional gap I traced in "What Ails India's Health: Insurance Without a System" earlier this month: the women, Dalits, Adivasis, and informal workers who bear the costs of India's environmental failures are the same populations whose illness is undercounted, whose maternal mortality is elevated, and whose political voice is most systematically compressed.

JanVayu's environmental justice dashboard captures the policy blind spot in one observation. "When Delhi shuts schools for pollution, which children go to air-conditioned malls, and which breathe the same air at home?" Sunita Mishra, an auto-rickshaw driver quoted in a CSE field survey, puts the same question in Hindi. "Mask lagane se sawari nahi milti, log darr jaate hain. Na lagaun toh raat ko khansi se neend nahi aati. Kya karein?" The policy design of NCAP, GRAP, PM-PRANAM, and the draft Climate Adaptation Fund guidelines does not address either her income or her lungs.

The solutions that the evidence supports

The corrective agenda is not mysterious. It spans fiscal, legal, institutional, and political reform in roughly equal measure, and it begins with the 16th Finance Commission award, which has a five-year window to preserve what the 15th FC built and extend it. The Commission's performance grants for air quality and solid waste management, the 10 per cent weight for forest and ecology in horizontal devolution, introduced by the 14th Commission and retained by the 15th, and the SDRF-NDRF mitigation window need explicit reaffirmation and scale-up.

Environmental performance grants should be extended from million-plus cities to tier-2 cities on a matching grant basis, conditional on transparent monitoring and independent source apportionment, and should be tied to combustion-source control rather than road dust suppression. The air pollution funding design should be restructured so that the share of non-dust measures exceeds 50 percent of release, with audit by an agency independent of the implementing state pollution control boards.

The cess design needs repair. A fresh Clean Energy and Environment Cess, notified outside the GST compensation system and therefore constitutionally protected from inter-governmental diversion, is overdue. The coal compensation cess presently collects roughly Rs 40,000 to Rs 50,000 crore a year. If even a quarter of that were earmarked for air quality and just-transition financing, NCAP's annual outlay would triple. The IForest working paper on enabling the use of coal cess for a just energy transition, co-authored by Chandra Bhushan in July 2024, provides the technical scaffolding for re-earmarking. The re-earmarking is a political question rather than a legal one.

The forest framework should be restored. The Supreme Court's interim order in Ashok Kumar Sharma, which preserves the 1996 Godavarman dictionary-meaning definition of forest, should be formalised through an amendment to the 2023 Act rather than left to judicial preservation. The 100-kilometre border exemption and the strategic-project exemption should be repealed. The Community Forest Resource rights process should be restored to its 2015 Guidelines and scaled. The ISFR methodology should be reformed to report natural forests and plantations separately, as Debadityo Sinha and others have recommended, so that India's NDC sink claims are computed on an actual ecosystem services basis rather than on a commercial orchard basis.

The measurement infrastructure should be rebuilt. The CAG's finding that 88 per cent of Delhi's monitors violate siting criteria should generate a standardised re-siting audit across the 130 NCAP cities, with JanVayu, Respirer, Urban Sciences, and the other citizen and academic networks integrated as parallel-reporting entities.

The National Ambient Air Quality Standards, unchanged since 2009, should be revised on WHO 2021 lines, first to an interim target of 15 micrograms per cubic metre annual PM2.5 and then progressively downward. The Congress Working Committee's March 2026 demand for standards review is the narrow opening through which the technical reform can be carried.

Above all, the climate transition needs honest federalism. The Union government cannot simultaneously claim international credit for India's 53.21 per cent non-fossil capacity milestone and leave the state DISCOMs to finance the renewable offtake that the capacity depends on. It cannot condition Special Assistance for Capital Investment on DISCOM privatisation without simultaneously addressing the reasons DISCOMs lose money, which include the cross-subsidies the Union itself designed and the agricultural power consumption the Union itself politically protects. It cannot categorise the Wayanad landslides as a non-national disaster because the constituency voted for the opposition while simultaneously demanding a national climate consensus. The transition is either co-created, in Arunabha Ghosh's phrase, or it is abandoned.

The koel, still calling

The koel is still calling in my garden. The sky is still bleached. The sensor in the Ring Road settlement is still reporting levels that are double the legal standard and 15 times the WHO guideline. On a strict reading of India's environmental ledger, this is Earth Day 2026. Power generation from non-fossil sources crossed 50 per cent; coal crossed a billion tonnes a year. Forest cover covered a quarter of the geographical area; natural forest fell. NCAP's budget utilisation reached three-quarters; its source apportionment targeting is inverted. The 16th Finance Commission retained the state revenue share at 41 per cent; it made no fresh provision for air quality. The 2035 NDC is due and has not been submitted.

At the Belem COP30 on 12 November 2025, Arunabha Ghosh of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water put the problem precisely. "Transitions can't be decreed; they must be co-created." India's climate transition is being decreed from Lok Kalyan Marg and Krishi Bhavan while being lived in Loni, in Korba, in Wayanad, in the brick kilns of Uttar Pradesh, and in the Ghazipur landfill. Harjeet Singh, the climate activist quoted widely during Winter 2025-26, described the political mood in one sentence. "A political failure. People are choking on the lip service of leaders who treat their outcries as a seasonal headline, not a public health emergency."

Two million Indians will die of air pollution in 2026, and if the current trajectory continues, more will die in 2027. The constitutional questions that arise from this, the question of Article 21's right to life and its relation to breath, the question of what Article 280 tax devolution owes to Article 48A's directive principle on environmental protection, the question of whether a Union government's unilateral withdrawal of climate finance commitments constitutes a breach of cooperative federalism, are not academic. They are constitutional questions about the air itself, and they are going to be answered, sooner or later, either in the Supreme Court or in the polling booth. Today, on Earth Day, the answer is still pending.

The koel knows none of this. It calls because it is April, and because the gulmohar will bloom again, and because the monsoon will come, and because the cycle of seasons is older than the Constitution, older than the NDC, older than the Finance Commission, older than the republic. What is not older, and what India has not yet built, is the political will to preserve that cycle for the two-thirds of its citizens who cannot afford to flee it.

Further Reading

On India's NDC and climate governance

India's Updated First NDC, submitted August 2022, and its Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy, submitted at COP27 in November 2022, are the primary source documents. The Fourth Biennial Update Report, filed on 30 December 2024, contains the most recent official inventory. Navroz Dubash's edited India in a Warming World (OUP 2019) remains the indispensable policy volume. The Climate Action Tracker country assessment provides the most unsentimental external reading.

On air quality

CREA's Tracing the Hazy Air 2026 is the starting point. The Centre for Science and Environment's NCAP assessments, authored primarily by Anumita Roychowdhury, offer the deepest reform agenda. The State of Global Air 2025 report from the Health Effects Institute and the Lancet Planetary Health causal study of December 2024 provide the mortality accounting. Dr Sarath Guttikunda's UrbanEmissions.info remains the most rigorous source apportionment archive. For live monitoring, health impact calculation, NCAP budget tracking, RTI templates, and the most complete citizen-accountability platform on Indian air, JanVayu, an initiative of the MMSF Air Quality Initiative, is now the single most useful public resource, available in English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali.

On forests and the Forest Conservation Amendment.

The India State of Forest Report 2023, the T.N. Godavarman case archive on Indian Kanoon, and K.B. Saxena's 2024 Sage journal analysis of the Amendment Act are the central documents. Mongabay India's critical coverage of the plantation-as-forest methodology has been consistent.

On fiscal federalism and climate.

The 15th Finance Commission's final report and the 16th Finance Commission's report of November 2025 are the primary sources. PRS Legislative Research's annual Demand for Grants analyses for MoEFCC and MNRE are the clearest parliamentary summaries. The RBI's Report on Currency and Finance 2022-23 provides a framework for green finance needs. The Centre for Financial Accountability, the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, and iforest's coal cess paper, authored by Chandra Bhushan, complete the budgetary picture.

On climate finance and COP negotiations.

Mongabay India's COP29 coverage and Climate Home News's account of India's Baku intervention preserve the record of Chandni Raina's speech. The UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance's Biennial Assessments are the authoritative quantification.

On inequality and climate.

The World Inequality Lab's Climate Inequality Report 2023 by Chancel, Bothe, and Voituriez provides the clearest disaggregation of India's emissions distribution.