Ahmedabad first urban centre of focus on climate budget

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation becomes India's first local body to include a climate chapter in its budget, allocating ₹5,619.58 crore for climate action.

On February 25, with the approval of the budget for financial year 2025-26, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) became India’s first urban local body to include a separate climate chapter as part of its main budget.

People brave the heat wave in hot summer afternoon at Kartavaya Path ,in New Delhi, in June 13, 2024. (HT Photo)

Titled “sustainable and climate budget”, the chapter has earmarked over a third of AMC’s total budget of ₹15,502 crore — ₹5,619.58 crore — for climate action. This outlay will be used to implement a net-zero climate resilient city action plan in line with India’s net zero target of 2070, officials said.

The development raises the question of whether the country’s other metro cities need to plan similar proposals — the recent ₹17,000 crore budget presented by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) on February 13 does not have a mention of any dedicated climate component or singular projects.

Experts have noted that India’s cities, although severely impacted by the climate crisis, have been slow to institutionalise climate change and sustainability in the urban development budget. Cities such as Mumbai, Coimbatore, and Udaipur initially started climate tagging their city budgets and largely cities took up climate action projects as pilots with non-government funding.

In fact, Mumbai allocated around 33% of its capital expenditure for the 2024-25 fiscal in climate-action related projects such as dumpsite restoration, installation of solar panels. However, unlike in Ahmedabad, the Mumbai civic body unveiled the climate budget on world environment day (June 5), to list out “climate relevant” projects planned in the original budget presented in February.

Lessons from Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad’s plan for 2070, which was prepared in March 2024, estimates a requirement of ₹9,500 crore per year to achieve the net-zero target. AMC is targeting energy savings and renewable energy generation of 310 million units by 2027-28 and mitigating 338,536 tonne carbon dioxide emissions as a result of the actions planned in the budget for the fiscal 2025-26. In addition, AMC will work to attract corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate environmental responsibility (CER) funding, officials said.

AMC’s climate budgeting exercise and the 2070 action plan was supported by the non-profit ICLEI and was funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in line with Ahmedabad’s climate pledge at COP26, held in Glasgow in November 2021.

In 2023, Ahmedabad became the first city in India to achieve eight out of nine badges from Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM, a global alliance of over 12,500 local governments spanning 144 countries). Thirty Indian cities across population sizes and geographical profiles such as Mumbai, Leh and Coimbatore are part of GCoM.

“Ahmedabad’s leadership in sustainability and climate is commendable as it is laying down benchmarks for other cities in the global south,” Emani Kumar, executive director ICLEI South Asia, said.

Experts said the Ahmedabad Climate Resilient City Action Plan (the 2070 plan) maps the existing details of road networks, streetlights, public transport, water supply, sewage network, and solid waste management facilities to identify gaps and augment capacity to cater to future demand. In contrast, most Indian cities — including the million-plus ones — are failing to even institutionalise their master plans and are building large-scale infrastructure projects without thorough planning, leading to the civic mess that is common in Indian cities.

Notably, Delhi’s master plan is due to be notified by the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) for more than three years now. The situation is no different in smaller cities, with the government stating that only 219 out of the 500 cities with more than 100,000 population (as per 2011 census) have their master plans notified, as part of a Rajya Sabha reply in December 2024. A wider study by non-profit Janaargaha in 2023 had found 39% of capital cities in India lack an active master plan.

How local infrastructure pipelines can help

Tathagata Chatterji, professor of urban governance at Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, observed that lack of holistic planning has led some Indian cities to be disproportionately overburdened and deficient in infrastructure. In the absence of planning, he said, infrastructure provisioning in Indian cities is mostly reactive than proactive, leading to poor decisions such as building more flyovers to reduce traffic congestion, instead of improving public transit systems.

He said that civic infrastructure provisioning in Indian cities mostly addresses yesterday’s challenges as a result of infrastructure planning being fragmented under multiple agencies and financed through different programmes without a long-term integrated vision.

To illustrate —Chennai can currently supply 1,040 million litres of per day (mld) of water, but the demand is in the range of 1,720 mld. Hydrologist Sakthivel Beemaraja, working with several city water authorities in India, said this shortfall of around 700 mld is used by tapping into groundwater, which is unsustainable for long-term as groundwater is harder to recharge. Similarly, the city produces around 1,500 mld of sewage, with only 600 mld of it getting treated and the rest polluting groundwater, surface water and the sea.

Similarly, Beemaraja said the shortfall for a smaller city such as Guwahati is also pronounced, where the growth rate is expected to be much higher in the coming decades when compared with mature cities. According to a 2023 North Eastern Regional Institute of Water and Land Management study, the effective water supply is 56.63 mld compared to the demand of 229 mld. Ironically, the city situated on the banks of the Brahmaputra — one of the largest freshwater reserves in the world cannot service 70% of its residents with piped water.

Looking ahead, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) — Mumbai’s civic body — has planned to budget its climate programmes in close coordination with Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport (BEST), Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), railways among others, said Lubaina Rangwala, programme head of urban development and resilience at WRI India. She added that among the larger cities, Bengaluru is likely to have a climate-action budget in subsequent years and the civic body is working on building capacity. The Mumbai climate action plan, the first Indian city-based plan was supported by WRI and C40-a network of 100 international cities that assists six Indian metros in framing their climate action plans.

Jagan Shah, CEO of Infravision Foundation, and former director of National Institute of Urban Affairs, said ideally cities should have their own equivalence of the national infrastructure plan as introduced in 2019. He said cities in Maharashtra and Gujarat are ahead of the curve as a result of the incremental improvements made by the cities and the state governments on urban development over the last 25 years. “The reason for their success is because these cities have better data and information leading to a higher level of planning,” he said, adding that the other important aspect is city-level planning, integrated with regional-level plans.