‘The Budget Continues To Denude The Fragile Environment’: Sridhar Radhakrishnan

The government has put serious money into areas like carbon capture for heavy industry and renewable energy expansion. Those investments matter, especially for sectors like steel, cement

and power, but a green budget has to be judged by a wider lens. Carbon capture may help industry manage carbon risk, but it doesn’t help a farmer recover from crop loss, or a coastal community deal with erosion, or a city cope with extreme heat. Those require sustained public investment in building adaptation and resilience focusing on water systems, floodplains, coasts, forests, urban tree cover, livelihoods and insurance policies. Climate change in India is no longer just an emissions problem, it’s a real crisis affecting agriculture, fisheries, cities, water systems and livelihoods. A budget that is truly green would place as much emphasis on adaptation, resilience and ecosystem protection as it does on reducing industrial emissions.

Also, this green spending cannot be seen in isolation. One one side is this decarbonisation scheme and on the other, aggressive infrastructure expansion and mining corridors, all without strong ecological safeguards. This makes it a budget that continues to denude the fragile environment in India.

The budget still treats climate change as something to be managed in the future, rather than a crisis people are already living through. It also gives the impression that the State thinks climate action can wait, growth cannot! Across the country, climate impacts are showing up as repeated floods, landslides, heat stress, water scarcity, coastal erosion and health stress, even leading to long term morbidity and loss of lives. These aren’t isolated events anymore. They're patterns. Yet, the budget doesn’t build a strong, visible national framework for climate adaptation. There isn’t any serious, predictable funding for climate action like watershed restoration, floodplain protection, slope stabilisation, coastal resilience, or urban heat management. These are the investments that actually reduce damage and prevent repeated disasters.

Another major gap is fiscal. Disaster costs are quietly being pushed onto states, local governments, communities and households. Climate-vulnerable states are spending more and more on recovery, but the budget doesn’t treat climate damage as a shared national liability. And finally, livelihoods. Employment and resilience are treated as side effects of growth, a sort of trickle-down approach, not as central design goals. There’s no clear green jobs framework that links employment generation with ecological repair. So, the big gap is the absence of a people-centred climate strategy on the ground and in fiscal terms.

Not when you look at the scale of stress farmers are facing today. Agriculture does get around

Rs. 1.63 lakh crore, and there’s a lot of talk about diversification, high-value crops and technology. But agriculture’s share of the Union Budget has fallen to around three per cent, and that’s worrying when climate risk is rising. The budget has a much reduced support to crop insurance, even as climate-related crop losses increase. And in these times of erratic rainfall, allocation for community groundwater programmes has been reduced and the spending on minor irrigation and water-use efficiency weakened.

While new cash crop schemes and digital tools are announced, the core systems that actually protect farmers from climate, water, and market risk are being scaled back or under-funded. The push for AI-based advisories and digital agriculture sounds impressive, but information alone doesn’t protect farmers from loss. What they need is income security, water security and assured recovery after climate shocks. The budget has no Minimum Support Price guarantee, no increase in PM-KISAN and nothing for climate resilience and farm disaster recovery. Right now, the budget seems more obsessed with modernisation than about helping farmers manage climate risk or help improve their income.

Not small-scale and traditional fish-workers. The budget does continue support for fisheries through schemes like PMMSY and talks about value chains and exports. That helps processing and marketing, and possibly larger players in the sector. But climate relief for fish-workers is about something else; it revolves around safe access to the sea, ecological sustainability and livelihood security. The policy direction in the budget allows expanded corporate fishing beyond 12 nautical miles, permitting trans-shipment at sea and facilitating foreign port landings. This will hugely impact the artisanal and small-scale fisher community. Fish-worker unions see this as opening India’s seas to capital-intensive fleets, and dangerous exploitation of sea wealth by the big corporate players. From a climate perspective also, this is very risky. As oceans warm and fish stocks shift closer to shore, large vessels operating offshore inevitably move into near-shore zones. India already has more than three times the fishing vessels than is ecologically sustainable. Adding bigger fleets only accelerates depletion and conflict.

What’s actually missing is investment in coastal resilience, safety at sea, early warning systems, ecosystem restoration and income buffers for fishers facing climate shocks. According to fish-workers them, the policy sees the product, not the people or the ecosystem. In today’s climate-stressed oceans, that is pushing risk onto the most vulnerable.

In the present context, when there is an urgent need to protect fragile ecosystems like coastal areas and floodplains, a budget has to rethink the ‘growth first, ecology second’ paradigm.

Yes. This is where the budget feels most conflicted. On the one hand, it talks about transition: renewables, electric mobility, carbon capture. On the other, it doubles down on a corridor-based extraction model. The ‘Rare Earth Corridors’ announcement is problematic. Strategically, these minerals matter. Ecologically, mining and processing them, especially in coastal and forest areas, can be extremely damaging.

What is missing is balance. The budget says very little about cumulative ecological impacts, water pollution, coastal regulation, consent of communities, or benefit-sharing. That reflects an older development mindset: grow first, fix later. In the climate crisis era, that logic simply doesn’t hold. Damage to ecosystems today often can’t be repaired tomorrow. So, while the budget takes steps toward decarbonising parts of the economy, it hasn’t yet rethought the extraction model itself. Ecosystems are still treated as dispensable inputs, not as ‘natural infrastructure’ that acts as the foundation of economic security.

It really should be a top priority, and the fact that it isn’t is quite worrying. Look at Delhi. Every winter, pollution reaches levels where schools shut, hospitals struggle, workdays are lost and daily life is disrupted. This is no longer just a public health issue; it’s an economic one. In fact, at the World Economic Forum, former IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath explicitly flagged India’s air pollution as a macroeconomic risk, affecting productivity, healthcare costs and long-term growth.

The allocation for pollution control in 2026-27 is lower than last year’s revised estimates, and key institutions such as the Central Pollution Control Board and the Commission for Air Quality Management are essentially flat-funded or marginally reduced. The reason is uncomfortable but clear. Pollution control is about regulation and enforcement. It is about taking on powerful interests—industry clusters, construction, transport systems and irresponsibly growing urban infrastructure. This kind of work is politically difficult and doesn’t sit easily within a capex-driven growth narrative.

Until clean air and clean water are treated as essential life-support systems, with economic consequences, and funded accordingly, we will keep paying the price in lost productivity, rising health costs and avoidable human suffering. When are we even going to talk about Clean Production as an investment?