Where India's scenario-modelling capacity actually comes from

India's climate architecture has a longer institutional history than the headline-grabbing 2026 numbers suggest. The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), launched on 30 June 2008, set up eight national missions; two of them — the National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem (NMSHE) and the National Mission on Strategic Knowledge for Climate Change (NMSKCC) — were assigned to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) specifically to build the country's capacity to model its own climate future rather than rely on global averages. NMSKCC's own stated rationale, per DST's own programme page, is that "India is too large a country to adopt strategies based on global averages of climate change," and its objectives explicitly include building "national capacity for modelling the regional impact of climate change on different ecological zones" and forming knowledge networks across India's research institutions. That eighteen-year-old mandate is the direct institutional ancestor of the far larger, more integrated scenario exercise NITI Aayog published in February 2026.

The eleven scenarios, summarised

On 9 and 10 February 2026, NITI Aayog released "Scenarios Towards Viksit Bharat and Net Zero" — eleven volumes built from ten inter-ministerial working groups, described by NITI Aayog itself as India's first government-led, multi-sectoral, integrated study assessing development pathways that deliver Viksit Bharat 2047 while cutting net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2070. Vice Chairperson Suman Bery, CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, and Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran presented the first three volumes on 9 February; the remaining eight followed the next day, with a second panel on social implications moderated by WRI India's Madhav Pai.

Summaries are this piece's own condensation of PIB's release-day coverage of each report; they are not verbatim excerpts from the reports themselves, which this piece did not read in full.

The line every scenario agrees on: coal goes up before it comes down

The single most quoted finding from the entire exercise is also the least comfortable one for a simple decarbonisation narrative: India's coal consumption will continue to rise until 2047, in absolute terms, even inside the scenario that reaches Net Zero by 2070. Subrahmanyam stated this plainly at the release event: "India's coal consumption will go up till 2047 even as energy intensity decreases and efficiency goes up, while meeting Net Zero goals." The reconciliation is that coal's share of the power mix falls sharply (to the 15–20% implied by an 80–85% non-fossil target) while absolute demand growth — driven by the 85% of India's built environment and appliance stock that doesn't exist yet — still pushes total coal-fired output higher for another two decades, with coal retained specifically for grid reliability during periods of low renewable generation.

Where CCUS fits: the technology for the quarter of industry that can't electrify

Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage is the specific technology the scenarios (and DST's own separate programming) point to for the sectors electrification can't fully reach — the roughly one-quarter of industrial energy consumption the sectoral-insights report on industry expects to remain fossil-based even in 2070. DST's own R&D roadmap, launched on 2 December 2025 by Principal Scientific Adviser Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood, frames CCUS as "a core technological pillar essential for decarbonizing sectors where viable alternatives are limited," built on nearly seven years of DST-supported CCUS work and the input of a High-Level Task Force chaired by Dr Ashish Lele (CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory). The roadmap's own framing names Power, Cement, and Steel as DST's primary hard-to-abate focus for translational R&D test-beds.

That R&D work is already running at named sites, not just on paper. On National Technology Day, 11 May 2025, DST handed out grants for five Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) test-beds specifically in the cement sector, each pairing a research institution with a cement manufacturer under a public-private partnership: a National Council for Cement and Building Materials pilot at Ballabhgarh, Haryana with JK Cement (targeting 2 tonnes of CO₂ a day via oxygen-enhanced calcination, converted into lightweight concrete blocks and olefins); IIT Kanpur with JSW Cement on carbon-negative mineralisation; IIT Bombay with Dalmia Cement on catalyst-driven capture installed at an actual working plant; a CSIR-IIP/IIT Tirupati/IISc consortium with JSW Cement on Vacuum Swing Adsorption; and IIT Madras with BITS Pilani Goa and UltraTech Cement on further carbon-lowering interventions. This is a cement-specific cluster, not a one-testbed-per-hard-to-abate-sector programme — a nuance some secondary coverage of DST's CCUS push has blurred.

The financial commitment scaled up considerably in the most recent Union Budget. Budget 2026-27, presented 1 February 2026, proposed ₹20,000 crore over the next five years for CCUS technologies to reach higher end-use readiness across five industrial sectors: Power, Steel, Cement, Refineries, and Chemicals — a considerably larger and more specific commitment than DST's own December 2025 roadmap release described on its own. Separately, academic estimates (an IIT Bombay-led assessment cited in industry literature) put India's total theoretical geological CO₂ storage capacity in the range of 400–600-plus gigatonnes, spread across saline aquifers and basalt formations such as the Deccan and Rajmahal Traps — a figure this piece could not confirm was ever stated by DST or in a PIB release specifically, and treats as an independent academic estimate rather than an official government figure.

Checking the master Budget documents directly confirms the line item's exact wording and gives it a name this piece did not have before. PIB's own "Highlights of Union Budget 2026-27" states, under the theme "Ensuring long term energy security and stability": "An outlay of ₹20,000 crore over the next 5 years, announced for Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) technologies." Separately, Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, summing up the Budget in his own PIB-recorded remarks, referred to it explicitly as the "₹20,000 crore CCUS Mission" — the first primary-sourced confirmation this piece has found that the outlay carries Mission-level branding, in the same institutional family as the National Green Hydrogen Mission or the National Coal Gasification Mission. Beyond the PIB record, trade-press reporting (not independently confirmed by this piece against a further PIB release) describes the scheme as having cleared the Expenditure Finance Committee at a slightly reduced ₹19,700 crore, structured as viability-gap funding intended to catalyse a further ₹17,800 crore in private co-investment, targeting 7 million tonnes a year of capture capacity, with ₹2,500 crore carved out specifically for an R&D Innovation Fund. The Ministry of Power's nodal role is itself independently confirmed: Secretary Pankaj Agarwal told a 16 January 2025 NITI Aayog workshop on CCUS in the cement sector that "the ministry is working on preparing the CCUS Mission"; Cabinet approval was reportedly being targeted for around July 2026. This piece grades all of that secondary-sourced detail moderate, not strong, and flags it as unconfirmed by a PIB release it could locate directly.

The single most useful check this piece ran, though, was against India's own official climate strategy document rather than any news report. India's Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategy (LT-LEDS), submitted to the UNFCCC by MoEFCC in 2022, devotes a full section to exactly this technology — and its assessment reads nothing like the confidence behind a 2026 Mission-branded, ₹20,000 crore budget line. The LT-LEDS states plainly: "The economic and political feasibility of CCUS is highly uncertain," that "the CCUS technology at present is not matured and India can take up only demonstration projects at this stage to assess the viability of the proposed solutions," and that "retrofitting of existing thermal power generating units for CCUS implementation is not a viable option, until the technology is cost effective and less energy intensive." The same section notes that "few countries have mentioned CCUS in their NDC thus far" and that India "requires considerable climate finance and technology transfer with effective international collaboration to enter this arena." That was the government's own assessment four years before the same government named a ₹20,000 crore Mission after the technology. This piece cannot resolve whether CCUS genuinely matured that quickly between 2022 and 2026, or whether policy commitment has run ahead of the technology-readiness assessment India's own strategy document made — it flags the gap rather than picking a side.

For scale, the International Energy Agency's Net Zero by 2050 roadmap puts a number on what CCUS needs to do globally to matter for climate goals: capture capacity scaling to roughly 1 gigatonne of CO₂ a year by 2030 and 5.2 gigatonnes a year by 2050 — a scale-up the IEA itself frames as requiring the equivalent of ten new large CCUS facilities commissioned every month from 2030 onward, and even at that scale, CCUS is projected to contribute a supporting role, with renewables, electrification, and efficiency together accounting for the large majority of emissions reductions in the IEA's own pathway. Against that global benchmark, the secondary-sourced 7 million-tonne-a-year target reportedly attached to India's own scheme is a small fraction (roughly 0.7%) of the IEA's 2030 global figure — not a criticism of India's programme specifically, since no single country's scheme should be expected to match a global total, but a useful sense of scale for a number that otherwise sounds abstract.

The commitments these scenarios sit underneath

Six weeks after the scenario reports, the Union Cabinet approved India's next formal climate commitment to the UNFCCC: the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) for 2031-2035, on 25 March 2026. It raises ambition on every metric India had previously set, each already met ahead of its original schedule — the 2015 NDC's 33-35% emissions-intensity-reduction target and 40% non-fossil-capacity target were both achieved years early (in February 2026, non-fossil capacity had already reached 52.57%). The new targets: a 47% cut in GDP emissions intensity by 2035 (from a 2005 base, up from 36% actually achieved by 2020), 60% non-fossil-fuel-based installed power capacity by 2035 (up from the earlier 40% target), and a carbon sink of 3.5-4.0 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent through forest and tree cover by 2035 (against 2.29 billion tonnes already achieved by 2021). India's own framing, per the Cabinet's release, ties this explicitly to a "consistent track record of delivering on climate action" ahead of schedule — the same confidence NITI Aayog's scenario exercise leans on when it concludes Viksit Bharat 2047 is "achievable in all scenarios."

The financing and adaptation picture underneath the headline numbers

The $6.5 trillion financing gap NITI Aayog's Vol. 9 report identifies sits inside a wider, already-documented shortfall. The Economic Survey 2024-25, tabled 31 January 2025, noted that the New Collective Quantified Goal agreed at COP29 — a $300 billion-a-year climate-finance mobilisation target by 2035 — is "a fraction of the estimated requirement of USD 5.1-6.8 trillion by 2030" for developing countries collectively, a burden the Survey argues falls disproportionately on nations that did not historically cause the crisis. The same Survey flagged India's National Adaptation Plan as still in preparation, and pointed to concrete near-term adaptation measures already under way: coastal mangrove restoration and cyclone early-warning systems, Himalayan glacier monitoring, and incremental building-code updates (the Economic Survey specifically floated adding vertical-garden/living-wall guidelines to the Energy Conservation and Sustainable Building Code to counter urban heat-island effects). Advanced Ultra Super Critical coal technology and nuclear power both appear in the Survey as bridging technologies for a "smoother transition" rather than as contradictions of the Net Zero goal.

Sources and caveats