Mint Primer: Are we spending enough to fight climate change?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. This January, Prime Minister Modi launched Mission Mausam, a project to forecast climate change and extreme weather events. The government has now earmarked ₹1,329 crore in FY26 for this initiative in the Union budget.
Is this enough? Mint looks at the numbers. This is a national project under the ministry of earth sciences, meant to improve our understanding of the impact of climate change on India and track extreme weather events more accurately. It aims to develop better weather forecasting technology, deploy more advanced satellites, and create better weather prediction models using AI.
The project was approved in September last year with an initial outlay of ₹2,000 crore until FY26 and the PM inaugurated it in January. The budget approved ₹671 crore for Mission Mausam in FY25 per its revised estimates, and the remaining ₹1,329 crore in the coming fiscal year. Read more: Once again, the Economic Survey seems to play down the climate crisis: Why? Yes.
The ministry has combined four schemes into one called PRITHVI to study changes in the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Southern Ocean, and the Himalayas among other climate-sensitive areas. It will spend ₹1,300 crore on this until FY26 and another ₹1,200 crore on a Deep Ocean Mission to track climate change and devise ways to generate freshwater and energy. The government is also spending ₹850 crore on setting up computing systems for climate research called Arka and Arunika.
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