Nearly 9 in 10 Indians now report that they have personally experienced the effects of global warming. As climate impacts become harder to ignore, younger generations are increasingly looking to businesses and institutions to take responsibility for environmental challenges.
Innovators are responding. India now has more than 6,400 environment-tech companies, and climate-tech investment reached a record USD 9.41 billion in 2024. From cooling and water management to agriculture, biomaterials, mobility, and energy access, entrepreneurs are building solutions for some of the country’s most pressing climate challenges. The gap is what happens next. For climate solutions to reach the people experiencing the crisis, they need to travel from a startup pitch deck to an institutional procurement order, to a state irrigation department, a district administration, a large corporate buyer, a foundation programme, and to the public at large. That journey is where Indian climate solutions are stuck. The technology exists, but are institutions ready for it?
One part of the problem is structural. Public procurement is one of the most important pathways for climate solutions to scale. This is the machinery that builds roads, equips hospitals, sources materials for public housing, and funds district-level programmes. In India, public procurement accounts for at least 20 percent of GDP.
But India has no green public procurement law. A December 2024 report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) found the barriers are exactly what one would expect: incomplete policy frameworks, perception of higher costs, limited market availability of sustainable alternatives, and, listed first among them, low awareness and skills among the officials doing the buying. The General Financial Rules of 2017 technically allow purchasing authorities to include environmental criteria. However, procurement officers lack training, standardised criteria, and a clear way to evaluate whether a climate solution is credible, cost-effective, or even eligible under existing schemes. A national policy push has come close to remedying this and stalled. A draft green public procurement policy would have mandated 25 to 37 percent low-carbon steel content in public projects, but the proposal for a centralised procurement agency to implement it was rejected by the Ministry of Finance in 2024. Until institutional infrastructure of this kind exists, every climate company entering the public procurement market has to explain its offering from scratch to every buyer.
Procurement is only one half of the challenge. Even when pathways for adoption exist, climate companies still need to navigate institutions that are unfamiliar with their technologies. We see this up close in our work with climate and deep-tech companies. The founders can explain their technology to an investor or a research audience fluently. But the moment they are in front of a district programme manager, a procurement committee, or a funder evaluating potential for expansion, the conversation breaks down. This often results from differences in the language, framing, and institutional grammar that both parties understand. The company speaks in terms of technology readiness levels, but the buyer needs to hear about scheme eligibility, implementation economics, and what a rollout actually looks like.
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