Essays written from thirty years of environmental and sustainability consulting: governance, regulation, institutional failure, and the everyday gap between what a policy promises and what actually gets built, funded or enforced. Many of these pieces are openly sceptical of the industry they come from, questioning fashionable language, weak accountability, and the distance between sustainability as spoken about and sustainability as practised.
Two Markets under Same Name First is the compliance market. Refinitiv puts its value at roughly $1.5 trillion traded in 2024, chiefly through the EU ETS and China’s national scheme, covering about 15.7 billion tonnes of CO₂e.[1] The voluntary market is a different order of magnitude, and analysts cannot agree by how much: estimates for 2025 range from roughly $2.5 billion to $5.3 billion depending…
Read the full post →My Professor says retirement affects people differently. Some take up gardening. Some learn the piano. Some discover birdwatching. And a few discover that they have finally become qualified to redesign civilization. We encountered three such gentlemen one rainy evening at the Wellington Club. Our usual corner was occupied. Only one table had two vacant chairs. The other three were occupied by gentlemen of approximately the…
Read the full post →The invitation arrived with the reassuring title: National Roundtable on Ethanol: Building Consensus for India's Sustainable Energy Future. Whenever I see national, roundtable, consensus and sustainable in the same sentence, I know the organisers are expecting disagreement. The Professor was delighted. "At last," he said. "A simple subject." "Ethanol?" "Yes. A colourless liquid. How complicated can it be?" I did not answer. I had attended…
Read the full post →The Better Air Quality (BAQ) Conference 2026 was held in Bangkok from 11–13 March 2026 by Clean Air Asia in partnership with organizations such as ADB, UNEP, CCAC, and ESCAP. It brought together policymakers, researchers, development institutions, and practitioners to exchange knowledge, showcase solutions, and accelerate action on air quality management across the Asia-Pacific region. Over 850 air quality experts from more than 50 countries…
Read the full post →(My reflections as a Panelllist at the Mumbai Climate Week) Zone-based instruments are often presented as an elegant blend of top-down policy and local or bottom-up implementation. National frameworks set air quality standards, assign regulatory responsibilities while cities operationalize them through designated zones such as Low Emission Zones (LEZs) or Clean Air Zones (CAZs). During Mumbai Climate Week, concepts such as Healthy Air Zones (HAZ)…
Read the full post →On February 7, 2026 I delivered a keynote address at the South Asia Finale of Global Sustainability Challenge at IIT Bombay. The conversations that followed, suggested a deeper reflection may be timely. Hence this post. Innovation has always been double-edged. The future will not judge us by how fast we innovated… but by how wisely we anticipated consequences. What distinguishes this era is not merely…
Read the full post →(Why governance design, economic framing, and institutional capacity matter more than intent) When Gita Gopinath, former Chief Economist of the IMF, stated that India must address the problem of pollution, the observation was less a revelation than a prompt to examine how the country has chosen to respond. There is little disagreement today that pollution imposes real economic costs, through health impacts, productivity losses, water…
Read the full post →This morning, I opened the Times and read about Venezuela, I felt something had changed. Professor smiled and said, “ The discussion today is happening on the balance sheet of resources you hold while sustainability sits in the annexure.” “You mean geography of resources as asset?” I asked. Professor answered, “Precisely. Mountains are no longer geological features. Ice sheets are no longer climatic buffers. Countries are…
Read the full post →Indian cities do not suffer from a shortage of concern about air pollution. They suffer from an excess of watching. Screens refresh, apps ping, colours change. Masks go on and off depending on thresholds; schools shut when numbers cross a line and reopen when they fall. Rarely does anyone pause to ask what exactly changed, why it changed, or whether lungs noticed at all. Now…
Read the full post →The Choreographed Failure of Environmental Governance A Satirical Tour Through Our Perfectly Dysfunctional System My Professor Friend and I were sipping coffee in our usual café on Sunday morning. As always, our conversation slipped into familiar territory: the people who turn weaknesses in environmental governance into convenient opportunities. “Dr Modak,” the Professor said, stirring his coffee with a biodegradable wooden stirrer coated with multilayered plastic.…
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