Budgets are moral documents as much as they are account books. In a time of climate crisis, they also reveal whether the state recognises that ecology is the economy or treats it as something to be addressed after securing growth. The old trickle-down logic is simply not how climate crises are managed.
Union Budget 2026-27 does contain green language and even some green spending. Yet read through the lens of climate, ecosystems, primary producers, and livelihoods, it tells a familiar story: India is attempting to build a 21st-century economy with the same archaic relationship to land, water, forests, and coasts.
The budget is clear about its priorities — large infrastructure, strategic manufacturing, supply-chain security. What it avoids is the defining question of our times: how growth will coexist with ecological limits, depleted natural resources, intensifying climate events, and the eroding livelihoods of those who live closest to these realities.
One way to read Budget 2026-27 is to ask: what is carefully counted, and what is quietly pushed out of view?
Capital expenditure is tracked in detail. Assets are listed, measured, and showcased. But the costs of climate damage, ecological degradation, livelihood loss, and repeated disaster recovery are pushed off the balance sheet — absorbed by states, local governments, communities, and households.
When hills collapse after extreme rainfall, rivers flood because floodplains are built over, or coastal villages lose land to erosion, the losses do not appear as budget lines. They surface as debt, migration, unpaid relief work, lost incomes, and fiscal stress at state and local levels. In effect, the budget centralises the gains of growth while decentralising the costs of climate and ecological damage.
These costs, repeatedly absorbed by people and states, are eventually normalised as “resilience”.
If you work with farmers, fishers, or disaster-hit communities, you do not need an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to know that climate change is already here. Floods, cyclones, and landslides are now annual patterns. Heat stress has become an economic constraint. Coastal erosion is already driving displacement and migration. Even pollution, though not climate-induced, now routinely shuts down India’s capital and is discussed globally as a major economic risk.
These are massive economic and social costs. And they are largely absent from the budget’s framing.
Instead, climate change is treated mainly as an industrial emissions problem and a technology opportunity. This is why the flagship climate announcement is a Rs 20,000-crore push for carbon capture and utilisation in heavy industry.
Such technologies may help decarbonise steel or cement. But they do not stabilise slopes, recharge aquifers, restore fish populations, protect coastlines, or keep small farmers afloat after crop failure. They help industry manage carbon risk. They do not help people manage climate risk — which requires sustained investment in adaptation and resilience.
This imbalance shapes the entire budget.
Budget 2026-27 is deeply invested in corridors — logistics, industrial, and now mineral corridors. On maps, corridors appear futuristic: clean lines connecting “resources” to “growth”.
But ecosystems are not empty spaces between two points. They are living systems — watersheds, rivers, coasts, forests, farms, commons — sustaining people, life forms, and livelihoods.
The budget announces support for Rare Earth Corridors in states such as Kerala, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, linking mining, processing, and manufacturing for electric mobility, defence, and renewable energy.
Strategically, this may make sense. Ecologically and socially, it is troubling. The budget speaks eloquently about supply chains and processing capacity, but is strikingly silent on land acquisition, water stress, chemical pollution, coastal vulnerability, community consent, and cumulative ecological impact.
Rare earths in India are often found in ecologically sensitive coastal and forest landscapes, including beach-sand deposits that support long-standing livelihoods. Treating these landscapes primarily as industrial inputs risks localising the costs of national self-reliance.
India will need minerals for a low-carbon transition. The question is whether it will extract them as a climate-vulnerable democracy, or as an extractive economy postponing social and ecological costs.
A climate-era budget should begin with those who produce food and sustain ecosystems — farmers, pastoralists, fishers, and agricultural workers. They are not just a sector. They are the frontline of national survival.
Agriculture receives around Rs 1.63 lakh crore, with emphasis on diversification, high-value crops, allied activities, and technology. Yet agriculture’s share of the Union Budget has fallen to around three per cent, continuing a long-term decline.
More revealing than the headline figure is where stagnation and cuts occur. Crop insurance allocations have fallen even as climate-related crop losses rise. Community groundwater programmes have shrunk. Spending on minor irrigation and water-use efficiency has weakened just as rainfall variability and drought intensify.
As ASHA–Kisan Swaraj notes in their response, this signals a clear shift in priorities. While new missions and digital initiatives are announced, core public systems that buffer farmers against climate, water, and market risk are being scaled back. The budget leans on modernisation narratives while retreating from the state’s role in buffering agricultural risk and building resilience.
The budget also pushes agriculture further into a data-driven future, with AI-based advisory platforms and integrated digital databases presented as solutions.
Information can help farmers. But technology cannot replace price security, water access, or risk protection. Nor does the budget address data ownership, commercial use, or exclusion in an unequal countryside.
The risk is that farmers become digitally visible but socially and economically unprotected, with no income security, price shields or climate recovery mechanisms.
If one sector exposes the budget’s worldview starkly, it is fisheries.
Policies reiterated in the budget allow expanded corporate operations beyond 12 nautical miles, permit trans-shipment, and facilitate overseas port access, integrating marine resources more deeply into global commodity circuits. Fishing unions warn that this treats the sea as a warehouse of extractable value rather than a living ecosystem.
Their concern is ecological and immediate. India already has far more fishing vessels than is sustainable, more than three times says the unions. Industrial fleets will inevitably move closer to shore, undermining small-scale fisheries and coastal livelihoods.
As fish workers succinctly put it, the policy “sees only the product, not the producing community.”
A climate-aware budget cannot pretend all states begin from the same baseline. Kerala illustrates this starkly.
With high social commitments, limited borrowing space, and repeated climate-linked disasters — floods, landslides, coastal erosion — the state operates under acute fiscal stress. Yet the budget offers no special window for climate-vulnerable states: no enhanced untied grants, no adaptation finance, no recognition of accumulated disaster liabilities. Even the most recent landslide in Wayanad alone requires around Rs 2,000 crore for recovery.
At the same time, many of the proposed development corridors pass through such states. The costs of climate damage remain local.
This is not cooperative federalism in any meaningful sense; it is the systematic shifting of climate costs from the Centre to the states.
The budget speaks of livelihoods and skilling, but employment remains an assumption rather than a design goal. The transition away from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act towards a new rural livelihood framework adds uncertainty at precisely the moment when climate shocks demand reliable fallback work.
What is missing is a serious national commitment to green jobs - not as a slogan, but as a strategy.
A climate-era employment programme would prioritise watershed restoration, floodplain protection, mangrove regeneration, slope stabilisation, decentralised renewable-energy maintenance, agroecological extension, and climate-resilient housing. These are not optional environmental activities; they are essential public works that reduce risk while creating dignified employment.
India has the labour, the need, and the ecological urgency. What it lacks is a budget that treats ecological repair as core economic work and an employment mission.
A budget written for the climate era would have looked different in clear ways. It would have backed climate adaptation — watersheds, floodplains, slopes, coasts — with large, predictable public finance. It would have strengthened risk buffers for farmers and fishers instead of weakening insurance, water management, and employment guarantees. And it would have approached mining and infrastructure with firm ecological safeguards, consent processes, and benefit-sharing.
None of this requires new economic thinking — only the willingness to treat ecosystems and livelihoods as foundations, not externalities.
Budget 2026-27 is disciplined and deliberate. It seeks to build infrastructure and manufacturing capacity amid global uncertainty.
But read through an environment, climate, and livelihood lens, it is disturbingly familiar: assets first, people later; extraction now, repair later; emit now, adapt someday; count capital carefully, push climate costs off the books.
In a climate-stressed country, “later” is a dangerous gamble.
And those asked to bear that gamble — farmers, fishers, informal workers, disaster-hit communities, and fiscally strained states — are precisely those with the least room left to absorb another shock.
That is the central contradiction of this budget.
Sridhar Radhakrishnan is an environmental and social justice activist. He writes about democracy, ecology, agriculture, and climate concerns
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth