OPINION | India's climate strategy hides in plain sight

Most of us experience climate change as heat in our cities or floods on our streets.

When global climate conversations talk about adaptation finance, they usually mean multilateral funds, carbon markets and technology transfers.

In India, adaptation finance looks different. It shows up as 39,000 community water councils in Odisha that raised farmer incomes by 27 percent. It appears as parametric heat insurance in Ahmedabad where informal workers’ pay ₹354 annually and receive payouts when temperatures cross thresholds. It takes the form of Telangana expanding cultivated land from 1.31 crore acres to 2.2 crore acres through irrigation projects that revived thousands of village tanks.

In other words, India is turning what the world calls basic development into its most important layer of climate action.

Climate finance by another name

A country where agriculture still employs nearly half the workforce and cities drive most of our economic growth cannot afford to treat resilience as a niche agenda. India is now spending 5.6 percent of GDP on climate adaptation, up from 3.7 percent a decade ago, according to recent government assessments. That quietly puts India ahead of many richer countries on adaptation as a share of GDP. The spending does not arrive labelled as climate finance, but that is exactly what it is.

Agriculture: The climate frontline we do not talk about

Most of us experience climate change as heat in our cities or floods on our streets. For farmers, it shows up as a failed monsoon, a flowering that comes too early, or a harvest that shrinks without warning. The government’s own data makes it clear that this is not an occasional shock but a pattern. In many El Niño years, entire pulses belts have seen production drop sharply because the rains arrived late or stopped early, and these crops are almost entirely dependent on the sky for water.

You can see the strain in the soil itself. The Economic Survey notes that our fields are now overloaded with nitrogen and short of other nutrients, a sign of how heavily we lean on subsidised urea to keep yields up. Farmers will tell you this in simpler words. They say the land is “tired,” that it needs more and more input for less and less output. That is climate vulnerability written into the ground.

Changing patterns in rural India kindle hope

At the same time, there are quiet shifts that give hope. Horticulture now edges past foodgrain in total output, showing how farmers are adjusting to markets and weather by diversifying what they grow. In Telangana, large irrigation and tank revival programmes have turned once uncertain land into reliably cultivated acreage, changing what a farming family can plan for over a decade, not just a season.

What excites me most are the places where communities themselves are in charge. Odisha’s network of Pani Panchayats, local water councils, have helped farmers use water more carefully and earn more from each drop, which the Survey records not as a story but as higher productivity and higher incomes.

For a citizen looking at these numbers, the message is simple. Climate resilience in agriculture is not only about new technologies. It is about giving farmers and villages control over water, soil and information, and backing that control with public investment.

Cities: Where development meets climate exposure

Anyone who has sat through a flooded commute or watched a neighbour collapse in a heatwave does not need a satellite image to know that India's cities are on the frontline of climate risk.

The World Bank estimates that more than half of the urban infrastructure India will need by 2050 is still to be built. For citizens, this is not an abstract statistic. It is a question of whether the next flyover, metro line or housing cluster will be designed for 30 years of heat and rain patterns, or just for the next election cycle. If we get this wave of building wrong, we lock in higher climate risk for an entire generation. If we get it right, we quietly hard‑wire resilience into daily life.​

Mumbai’s example needs emulation

Mumbai offers an early sketch of what “getting it right” could look like. The city’s Climate Action Plan lays out a path to cut emissions over the next decade and reach net zero by mid‑century, but the real shift is institutional. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has created a dedicated Environment and Climate Change Department and begun publishing annual climate budget reports that show, line by line, how much of the city’s money is actually backing resilience. For citizens, this kind of transparency matters. It makes climate action something you can interrogate in a ward committee, not just hear about in a global summit.

Hyperlocal action

Some of the most hopeful stories are hyperlocal. In Ahmedabad, a heat‑insurance scheme now sends small but crucial payouts to informal workers when temperatures cross a preset threshold, turning an invisible risk into a visible safety net. In Jodhpur, net‑zero cooling stations powered by solar offer an eight‑degree respite from peak heat to people who have nowhere else to go. As someone who has watched citizens line up for water tankers and crowd into the only patch of shade on a street, these examples strike me as more than pilots. They are proof that when climate policy starts from the lived experience of residents, it looks like dignity, not jargon.

Energy: Keeping the lights on while we go green

India has added a huge amount of solar and wind in the last decade, enough for the government to say that more than half of our installed capacity now comes from non‑fossil sources. That is an achievement, but it is also where the real risks begin.

The government’s own analysis carries a quiet warning. In parts of Europe, grids have struggled when renewables grew faster than storage and transmission. The Survey points to the Netherlands, where companies now wait for basic grid connections, and to Spain, which has already seen a major blackout during a period of high renewable output. As a citizen, I read that not as a foreign anecdote, but as a reminder that a “green” power cut is still a power cut. If lights go out in a hospital or a metro, no one in that moment cares whether the last megawatt came from sun or coal.

This is why reliability matters so much in our energy choices. India’s per capita emissions are still less than half the global average, which means millions of households are yet to get reliable cooling, heating and mobility. For them, climate action does not mean new trading systems or big global schemes. It means very basic things working better at home: a grid that is stable when the heat index crosses 45 degrees, a feeder that does not trip every time a storm hits, and tariffs that do not punish the poorest when they switch on a fan for an extra hour.

The SHANTI Act, which opens the door for more investment in nuclear, is fundamentally about whether we can add clean, reliable baseload without asking citizens to live with rolling blackouts as the price of ambition. If we want people to back the transition, we have to prove that a low‑carbon system is not just better for the planet. It has to feel more reliable in their homes, on their streets and in their workplaces.

Finance: The constraint that defines everything else

Municipal bonds in places like Indore and Ahmedabad are beginning to fund better water and solar infrastructure, and a new Urban Infrastructure Development Fund is meant to help smaller cities that have ideas but not a strong balance sheet. The real test now is whether these tools back the drains that do not clog, the buses that actually run, and the cool roofs and trees that make heatwaves bearable in poorer neighbourhoods, rather than staying on paper as climate-finance innovations.

What recent government data describes is not a country waiting for global money or technology to arrive. It is a country building resilience through very practical choices: more reliable irrigation, stronger municipal governance, safety nets like heat insurance and investments that keep the grid stable under stress. For cities across the Global South, this is not a perfect model, but it is a realistic one. In a world of tight public budgets and rising climate risk, building resilience through everyday development is the only approach that has a chance of reaching the neighbourhoods that need it most.

(Shishir Joshi, Founder & CEO, Project Mumbai & Mumbai Climate Week.)

Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.