Working Papers

The Union Budget of 2022-23 promises to take issues of sustainability and climate change seriously. And indeed, its framing on these issues is promising and forward looking. For example, it promises a low-carbon development strategy, tied to job creation, and sees the climate change agenda as an opportunity. The speech uses the term ‘energy transition’ explicitly, and also suggests that we ‘re-imagine’ our cities as centres of sustainable living. Moreover, green energy and clean mobility systems are featured as ‘sunrise opportunities’. This language, which appears throughout the speech rather than, as in the past, being shoehorned into a section on sustainability or climate change, promises an approach that takes seriously the objective of more thoroughly mainstreaming and integrating sustainability into India’s economic and social future.

A look below the hood of the budget, however, presents, in practice, a far more mixed picture.