In India, even trivial matters are raised during elections, yet no party talks about the environment.
Environmental responsibilities are fragmented; this must be viewed as a collective responsibility.
Environment Pulse desk
Every election season in India, the same rituals play out. Rallies fill up with promises about jobs and welfare schemes. TV anchors shout over each other about caste equations and who insulted whom. WhatsApp forwards do their quiet, chaotic work in the background. And somewhere in all of that noise, the environment — arguably one of the biggest threats the country faces — barely gets a mention.
It’s a strange omission when you think about it. This isn’t a country where climate change is some far-off, theoretical problem. Air pollution is estimated to kill around two million people in India every year. Delhi’s tryst with Air pollution over the last decade has been for all to see. From parties introducing Odd Even policy, crackdowns on firecrackers and even the call for reduced stubble burning, life has never looked less hazardous.
Reports of farmers continuing to face a drought scenario, massive floods with damage to livestock and produce, bursting of Glacial lakes in the Himalayas, Groundwater disappearing continue to create a stark piture of the problem in hand. Coastal towns are watching the sea creep closer. Reportedly roughly four out of every five Indians live somewhere exposed to climate-related disaster. Irrespective of all the indicators, environment stays far from the agenda of political parties.
If one were to study the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, India voted during a brutal heatwave, with drought conditions across the length and breadth of the nation. All this at the backdrop of the memory of recent floods still fresh. To their credit, both the BJP and Congress mentioned India’s 2070 net-zero target in their manifestos. There were promises about renewable energy, electric vehicles, critical minerals, energy independence by 2047 — the usual checklist. Civil society groups even put together their own “people’s manifestos” pushing ecological issues into the conversation. But if you actually watched the campaign unfold — the speeches, the debates, the rally footage — climate change was almost nowhere to be found. It was welfare schemes. It was community arithmetic. It was inflation, jobs, nationalism, and a fair amount of mudslinging. The issues that voters said mattered to them — water, farming, migration — are all deeply tangled up with climate change, but almost nobody was framing them that way.
And this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern that’s shown up election after election, at both the state and national level. Every now and then, an environmental issue will flare up locally — a controversial tree-felling drive, a polluted river, bad air in one particular city — but it almost never grows into something that actually swings votes on a wider scale. Parties tend to treat the environment as a technical footnote rather than something worth fighting an election over. In exceptional cases when there is a mention, it’s usually watered down into phrases like “green growth” or announcements about solar parks and river-cleaning projects.
So whst truly triggers this? A few reasons, really.
For one, Indian voters — like voters most places — tend to respond to what’s immediate and tangible. Subsidies, jobs, identity politics, short-term relief: these are the things that move people at the ballot box. Environmental protection, on the other hand, often gets painted as being at odds with industrial growth and infrastructure — the very things politicians promise will create those jobs. Any leader who leans too hard into environmental messaging risks being labeled anti-development, or worse, elitist, in a country still working to pull large numbers of people out of poverty.
Then there’s the media machine itself. Campaign coverage thrives on drama — polarizing arguments, emotional flashpoints, anything that keeps people watching or scrolling. Groundwater depletion doesn’t really lend itself to a punchy nine o’clock debate. Unlike other parts of the world, back home barring few these are topics that are covered as a one-off weather event. Not as a yardstick of something even more dangerous. Despite activists upping the ante against these issues, they’re competing against a system built to reward outrage over nuance.
Institutionally, the incentives are weak too. Responsibility for the environment is scattered — some of it sits with state governments, some with the center, some tangled up in international diplomacy. Opposition parties will occasionally take aim at a specific project or clearance, but there’s rarely a unified, compelling alternative vision on ecology that actually resonates with everyday voters. And there’s no strong green political movement in India applying sustained pressure the way there might be in parts of Europe.
Maybe the deepest issue, though, is one of framing. A lot of people experience the effects of environmental damage every single day — dirty air, water shortages, failed crops — without necessarily connecting those experiences to “climate policy” as a concept. There is wide consensus on point that environment issues when discussed should go beyond talk of conservation or global responsibility. The real impact will begin when it is interlinked with hospital bills, farm losses, or the price of electricity. Political messaging in India just hasn’t made that translation, not at any real scale.
The cost of all this silence adds up. Environmental laws go under-enforced. Projects in ecologically sensitive zones get approved with barely any public pushback, especially during election years when everyone’s attention is elsewhere. Long-term investments — better healthcare systems for heat-related illness, climate-resilient farming, flood-proof urban planning — keep getting pushed down the priority list.
There are small signs of things shifting. Youth climate movements, protests in the Himalayan states, farmer mobilizations — these keep the conversation alive in between elections, even if it fades once campaign season begins. Manifestos are getting greener, at least on paper, which suggests party strategists are at least paying attention. Taking a cue from Global players, India too will have to reduce the gap between incorporating climate language in a manifesto and building a green campaign for the future.
There needs to be greater push on everything environment conservation. It’s going to take political parties treating the environment as central to development, not a side issue. It’s going to take journalists connecting the dots between daily hardship and policy failure. And it’s going to take voters — especially younger ones — actually asking the hard questions and making their choices reflect it. Democracies respond to demand. Until environment becomes something voters consistently demand answers on, it’s going to stay exactly where it’s been: mentioned, but never quite prioritized
Also Read: India’s efforts towards tiger conservation are praiseworthy at the international level
