Green India Challenge founder Santosh Kumar calls for citizen-led climate federalism at IIM Bangalore

Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], May 28 (ANI): Former Rajya Sabha MP and founder of the Green India Challenge, Joginipally Santosh Kumar, on Thursday called for a fundamental activation of climate federalism in India, stressing that the country's key challenge lies not in policy formulation but in bridging the gap between national frameworks and grassroots implementation.

Speaking at the Climate Innovation Summit 2026 held at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), Santosh Kumar said India already has a strong set of climate policies, including the National Action Plan on Climate Change, State Action Plans, carbon trading mechanisms, and Mission LiFE. However, he argued that the "missing middle" is between national commitments and ground-level delivery.
Speaking at Session 2, "Rethinking Climate Federalism: Rewiring Policy, Practice, and Innovation for Local Action", Santosh Kumar shared the stage with Srinivasulu IFS, Principal Secretary, Forest, Ecology and Environment Department, Government of Karnataka; Rejini Simpson, Programme Director, Centre for Environment Education (CEE); and Regina Sanchez, Project Director, GIZ India. The panel was moderated by Judith Weinberger-Singh, Head of Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung India.
The two-day Summit, jointly organised by the IIMB Supply Chain Sustainability Lab and Net Zero Think, brought together over 70 global speakers and industry pioneers across ten thematic tracks to accelerate India's pathways to Net Zero for Viksit Bharat 2047.
In his opening statement, Santosh Kumar presented the Green India Challenge as a living proof of climate federalism in action, a movement that mobilised 196 million geo-tagged trees and 44 million citizens across India without waiting for a government circular or a centrally sponsored scheme.
"India has excellent climate policies, the NAPCC, 34 State Action Plans, the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, and Mission LiFE. The bottleneck is not design. The bottleneck is the missing middle, the space between a policy document in Delhi and a farmer in Telangana, a student in Karnataka, a fisherwoman in Odisha," Santosh Kumar said.
He noted that the Green India Challenge has transcended every boundary of Indian society with participation from the Prime Minister Narendra Modi (who personally appreciated the initiative), spiritual leaders including Pujya Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sadhguru, and Param Pujya Pejavar Swamy, cultural icons including Bharat Ratna Sachin Tendulkar and Padma Vibhushan Amitabh Bachchan, and Chief Ministers across five states demonstrating that climate action, when framed as a people's movement, can unite India's entire social fabric.
"Does cooperative federalism need a fundamental redesign? No it needs a fundamental activation. And that activation must come from three forces working together: government policy from the top, civil society movements from the ground, and corporate capital from the market," he stated.
In a pointed intervention during the moderated discussion, Santosh Kumar highlighted what he called India's most urgent climate policy gap: the continued exclusion of heatwaves from the list of notified disasters under the SDRF or NDRF framework.
"Heatwaves have killed more Indians than floods, cyclones, and earthquakes combined in recent years. In April 2026, six Indian cities crossed 46 degrees Celsius. The NHRC has issued warnings. 247 billion labour hours were lost to heat stress in 2024 alone. Yet heatwaves remain the only major climate disaster excluded from SDRF or NDRF funding. This must change," he urged, calling on the Karnataka government and all Indian states to lead the demand for reclassification at the next National Disaster Management Authority meeting.
Responding to discussions on India's Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS), launching in 2026 with 740 entities across nine sectors, Santosh Kumar advocated for the inclusion of community-level nature-based solutions in the carbon market architecture.
"Our 196 million trees are a verified carbon sink. But the carbon market is designed primarily for industrial emitters, not for community-level nature-based solutions. If we want climate federalism to work, states, districts, and gram panchayats must be able to participate in the carbon market -- not just large corporates. The Article 6.4 mechanism under the Paris Agreement offers this pathway, and we are actively building it," he said.
Santosh Kumar also introduced the concept of the campus as a micro-unit of climate governance, referencing the Climate Action Campus Talks (CACT) programme run by Igniting Minds Organisation a Section 8 non-profit with UNFCCC COP29 and UNCCD COP16 Observer status. CACT has been delivered at 20 premier institutions, including IIT Mumbai, IIT Delhi, JNU Delhi, and BITS Hyderabad, and is scaling to 200 campuses across Telangana with 5-Year Net-Zero Campus Roadmaps and Mission LiFE integration.
"India has over 40 million students in higher education. If every campus becomes a unit of climate governance with carbon audits, Green Clubs, and data feeding into state climate dashboards, you would have the most granular climate governance system in the world. That is bottom-up climate federalism," he observed.
In a first-of-its-kind initiative for an Indian climate conference, the Green India Challenge planted one geo-tagged bamboo tree for every speaker and participant at the Summit and committed to nurturing each tree for 1,000 days. Named "Punarvasu The Reconstruction Tree" after Lord Sri Rama's birth nakshatra (meaning "the return of light"), the bamboo initiative made the Climate Innovation Summit 2026 a verified carbon-negative event. Every participant received a personalised Punarvasu Certificate with GPS coordinates and a QR code linking to real-time growth and CO₂ absorption data.
Bamboo absorbs up to four times more CO₂ than equivalent tree species, generates 35% more oxygen than hardwood forests, and grows up to 91 cm in a single day, making it the fastest-growing and most carbon-efficient plant on Earth. (ANI)