EarthJournal

Air pollution is the largest environmental health threat India faces, and the numbers moved again this year. The State of Global Air 2025 report attributes more than 2 million Indian deaths in 2023 to air pollution, up 43% since 2000. The Lancet Countdown 2025 links 1.72 million deaths in 2022 to human-made fine particles alone, and values that loss at US$339.4 billion, 9.5% of GDP.

India’s official e-waste figures describe a system that is improving quickly on paper. Generation is rising, formal processing is rising faster, and the regulatory architecture has expanded to cover a wide product range. Read alone, the numbers suggest a problem being brought under control. Read against what happens at the point of disposal, they describe something more complicated, a formal system that is growing while the material it needs continues to flow somewhere else.

Most plastic that reaches the ocean does not travel there directly. It moves through drains, nullahs and small urban rivers that pass within a few kilometres of the households and businesses that discarded it. This is a structural insight rather than a rhetorical one: it means the leakage point is geographically concentrated, physically accessible, and therefore something a corporate programme can actually be sited against. Interception at the waterway is the last point in the chain where a tonne of escaped plastic can still be captured, which is why river plastic recovery sits where it does in the waste hierarchy.

Since January 2026, CBAM — the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — has put a real, invoiced price on the carbon embedded in Indian steel. For Indian steel exporters, the gap between a punishing bill and a fair one now comes down to one thing: verified carbon data. This is a look at what the rule actually does, the fairness India is owed, and the single lever that lowers the cost today.

Sustainability has become a pricing input. Capital, procurement decisions and regulatory licence increasingly flow toward firms that look responsible on paper. But “looks responsible” and “is responsible” are different goods sold at the same counter, and the buyer cannot reliably tell them apart. When capital cannot distinguish a genuinely low-carbon operation from a well-narrated one, it will not pay a premium it cannot verify. The firm that spends real money on real performance then competes on equal terms with the firm that spends a fraction of it on language.

From FY2026, the top 1,000 listed companies in India are required to report Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data for their value chains, not only for their own operations. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) framework extends Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) to every supplier and customer that accounts for 2% or more of a company’s procurement or sales, scaling up to 75% of the value chain. Third-party assessment or assurance on that data follows in FY2026-27. This is the single largest expansion of BRSR value chain disclosure India has undertaken.

n June 2026, the gold and jewellery company Rajesh Exports became the subject of one of the largest alleged revenue-misstatement matters in Indian capital-market history, putting the Rajesh Exports ESG profile under fresh scrutiny. For ESG and risk professionals, the more useful question is not what the regulator found. It is why the warning signs were sitting in plain sight, in public disclosure, long before anyone looked. This is an analysis of that question, and of what disclosure integrity can tell an investor, a lender, a board, or an advisory team before a problem becomes material.

The Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026, notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, supersede the SWM Rules of 2016 and take effect from April 1, 2026. The previous framework introduced source segregation and extended producer responsibility (EPR) as concepts, but compliance remained inconsistent. Urban local bodies (ULBs) bore near-total responsibility while waste generators faced minimal enforcement. According to peer-reviewed research published in the Royal Society, only about a quarter of India’s 4,000+ waste processing facilities operated at full capacity under the old rules.

Indian banks climate risk readiness is alarmingly low. Last week, Earth5R’s ESG Intelligence team assessed the climate risk readiness of 30+ major Indian banks. The question was simple: if RBI’s climate risk disclosure framework were enforced today, how many banks could comply?

The findings were striking. Only 3 banks had disclosed any information on financed emissions. Only 2 had a formal coal exclusion policy. Only 13 had attempted any form of climate scenario analysis. And 28 remained completely silent on how their loan books contribute to climate change.