A shared comprehensive understanding of the landscape needs to be integrated into the green economy transition to assess and improve ecological functions such as air and water quality, habitat support, and climate regulation.
India stands at a crossroads requiring a leap beyond traditional growth models to adopt a greener, more resilient economic future. India’s bioeconomy grew dramatically from $10 billion in 2014 to $165.7 billion in 2024, expanding 16 times over the 10 years and accounting for 4.25% of the country’s GDP. This growth has been bolstered by over 10,000 bio-economy start-ups.
The industrial bioeconomy — comprising biofuels and bioplastics — accounts for the largest share at approximately 47%, followed by pharmaceuticals at 35%, with emerging areas such as research and IT (including clinical trials and bioinformatics) also expanding rapidly. India has also achieved major milestones, with the government ensuring 20% ethanol blending in petrol and the country being the world’s third-largest pharmaceutical producer by volume.
According to the India Bioeconomy Report, the bioeconomy is expected to create 35 million jobs by 2030. The growth in consumer spending in rural India is surpassing that of urban areas, with 9.2% rural per capita spending growth vs 8.3% urban (August 2023 to July 2024), suggesting improving rural purchasing capacity and evolving consumption patterns.
Hence, the green economy is no longer distant, utopian, or abstract, but inevitable,imminent, and an undercurrent under way. Given India’s climate vulnerabilities and global market shifts — such as carbon border taxes and rising demand for sustainable goods — the transition is a necessity for sustained jobs, environmental returns, competitiveness, and social wellbeing. As it expands, there is a need for recognition that rural communities vulnerable due to poverty and climate risks are no longer just beneficiaries but climate frontline leaders.
Disruptions and disparity
India’s green economy is under pressure from international economic headwinds, but remains a priority for energy security, job creation, and long-term competitiveness. Although the global economy is expected to slow down at 2.5%, India’s GDP is expected to grow at 5.9%. Climate disruptions also directly impact inflation, further worsening the
rural bioeconomy context, especially pressures from losses in agriculture, fluctuations in energy demand, and disrupted supply chains. There is a huge hidden disparity that also needs attention. The BioE3 policy was rolled out in 2024 to promote the bioeconomy, but regulatory frameworks remain fragmented, and it remains a very urban-centric, industrialscale economy.
Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh contribute more than two-thirds of the total bioeconomy value, while the eastern and northeastern regions together account for less than 6%. Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, which are rich in agriculture, forest biomass, mineral-rich and non-timber forest products, have a huge potential for tribal-led bioeconomy models. In Uttar Pradesh, which is the largest sugarcane producer, opportunities in ethanol, biofuels, and biomass power are emerging in the State. Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, and West Bengal have had a low industrial bioeconomy footprint probably due to discouraged investment by the Freight Equalisation Policy, but they are abundant in agri-waste and forest produce, which needs to be tapped.
Despite a projected addition of 35 million green jobs by 2047, women held only 11% of jobs in India’s rooftop solar sector, even as renewable capacity surged 250% between 2015 and 2021. Women’s representation in key roles remains particularly low: 1% in operations and maintenance, and 3% in construction and commissioning. There is a green economic rural-urban divide where the urban areas attract green investments, EV infrastructure, solar rooftops, and green jobs, whereas the rural regions lack access to clean energy, watersaving irrigation, and sustainable livelihoods, with slower, inequitable technology adoption. A huge digital divide furthers the disparity as tech-driven solutions such as smart grids and measurement, reporting, and verification for carbon markets are not inclusive of landscapes and communities with low digital access. Even in the waste management sector, urban areas account for nearly 75% of the country’s total solid waste, due to higher consumption, packaging, and commercial activity, whereas rural waste is now consuming more, seeing penetration of plastics, e-waste, and so on, along with biowaste, but is unsegregated and often burnt or dumped. With 500 million tonnes of crop residues, 3,500-plus medicinal plant species, largely sourced from forest-fringe rural areas, 7,50,000-plus rural haats and agri-mandis, MGNREGA-supported green infrastructure, the rural is still under-represented in the bioeconomy boom.
Green economy trade-offs
As India strives to balance economic growth, social equity and environmental returns, there are many green economy trade-offs. One of the biggest trade-offs is promoting renewable energy, but also subsidising fossil fuels to up to potentially 40%. Also, while promoting renewable energy solutions such as solar pumps, do we check the promotion of groundwater extraction? Massive industrial expansion in hard-to-decarbonise sectors such as steel, cement, power, and utilities — which together account for 23.2% of India’s GHG emissions —puts significant pressure on the upfront investment in green technologies, with unit costs exceeding those of traditional options by more than four times. As much as 85% of global clean energy investment flows to advanced economies, while India and other developing markets receive only 15%.
A rapid green shift — if not carefully managed — can disproportionately affect rural areas, vulnerable groups such as coal sector workers, MSMEs, and small-scale manufacturers reliant on traditional energy. With agriculture supporting 58% of rural livelihoods, seasonal as well as climate variations often impact income stability and over-dependence on public system or markets.
A woman from Belkhedi, Madhya Pradesh, painfully shares how markets do offer economic opportunities, especially during festivals such as Holi, but exploit or even at times disturb local resources by introducing synthetic materials into their ecosystem. A just transition demands targeted skill-building for workforce readiness, reskilling programs, and local bioeconomic diversification to avoid adverse social and environmental impacts.
Road transport dominates the nation’s freight and passenger movement, and food miles now account for nearly 3 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, which is a trade-off between emissions and food security. For instance, Bijapur and Sukma in Chhattisgarh still get food transported from more than 400 km away and have one of the highest percentages of malnourished children under five years of age.
Biodiversity underpins India’s economic sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and tourism, directly supporting over 200 million livelihoods and contributing resources worth billions annually. There are competing agendas of crop diversification versus an ecosystem of policy and market incentives, almost like working for the promotion of monocropping, especially for wheat and paddy. India’s aggressive push for ethanol blending has brought the maize trade-off between ethanol and animal feed. There is a need to adopt a deep dive into sector-wise localised approach that takes into consideration the cross-overs of benefits as well as losses between different strategies, conflicting policies, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and a focus on both local realities and global opportunities.
Landscape approach to green economy
What is required is a commitment to a growth model that puts sustainability, climate action, and social inclusion at the heart of development, with measures to address these regional disparities, integration in less-developed, high-potential states, and the need for the creation of robust green economy ecosystems. To navigate through these trade-offs, disruptions, disparities and the pressure on achieving green growth, an assessment of landscapes is crucial. Landscapes are to be viewed as an integrated, interconnected and interactive system of many parameters such as landforms, land cover, water resources, flora-fauna, energy systems, local markets, local institutions and communities together. A shared comprehensive understanding of the landscape needs to be integrated into the green economy transition. This method allows us to assess and improve ecological functions — such as air and water quality, habitat support, and climate regulation— while also boosting human benefits such as health, food and water security, recreation, and livelihoods. These efforts help us stay within the ecological ceiling, ensuring landscapes can continue to regenerate. A defining feature could be the shift to truly participatory pathways of landscape assessment right from nano (village level) to macro (landscape level).
First, leveraging the 2.5 lakh Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), 12 million women-led institutions, and 0 million local authorities at every stage, from design to monitoring of this transition. Promotion of circularity, green energy and bioeconomy, with gender mainstreaming through targeted policies for leadership and technical roles for women, inclusive governance, stakeholder collaboration, and investments in green infrastructure and nature-based solutions generate multiple returns over time.
For instance, a woman from Kulgaon village in Chhattisgarh aspires to start an enterprise of cold-pressed oil extraction from Tori seeds for supplying to her village for better health, better availability of raw materials, promoting local production and local consumption. A supportive ecosystem for such aspirations can be co-created with shift in the metrics from not just decreased poverty and job creation, but also to improved social and environmental returns. Landscape-driven planning, ownership and clarity, integrating ecosystem valuation into policy and economic strategies, will help in setting the right direction and course. Many low-hanging fruits can be targeted with pivots such as green budgeting, clearer enforcement roles, targeted fiscal incentives, green government procurement, deeper involvement of gram panchayats, local authorities and CBOs, prioritising skills, gender inclusion, and local capacity building in greening all sectors.
Addressing the bottlenecks, such as improved waste management at all levels with SOPs for enforcement, financing cum O&M ecosystem for decentralised renewables, policy coordination between departments for responding to aspirations of communities, and greening the R&D spend, will also ensure a push for many sectors with bio-economy potential. With such models, India can not only achieve its climate and sustainable development goals but also unlock new engines of growth, resilience, and wellbeing for its landscapes and all its citizens.
As originally published in The Hindu.
Article by: Neeraja Kudrimoti, Associate Director, Transform Rural India