The Guardian view on India’s green growth gamble: it will need more than private finance | Editorial

The talk of India’s green growth, and the insistence that private finance alone will not suffice, is a familiar refrain. It is presented as a novel challenge, this balancing of industrialisation with decarbonisation, as if the laws of economics bend for every new nation that rises. But the underlying truth is far older than any modern climate concern.

The notion that a nation can industrialise purely on the whims of private capital is a fantasy peddled by those who benefit from a constrained public purse. Private finance, by its very nature, seeks immediate returns and shies from the grand, long-term investments that truly transform an economy. Infrastructure, foundational industries, and indeed, the wholesale re-engineering required for a green transition - these are undertakings that demand a patient, powerful hand. That hand is, and always has been, the state’s.

To suggest that India must avoid China’s “overcapacity trap” by relying solely on private initiative is to misunderstand the very engine of growth. Overcapacity is often the necessary, if sometimes untidy, consequence of ambition. It is a sign of investment, of a belief in future demand. The real trap is underinvestment, the paralysis that comes from waiting for private hands to build what only public will can initiate. The argument for private finance as the sole driver is not an economic necessity; it is a political preference, dressed in the garb of fiscal prudence. It is a choice to limit the possible, rather than to expand it. And it is a choice that will leave millions waiting for a prosperity that never quite arrives.

August 10, 2026

The state must generate demand to industrialise, decarbonise, and avoid overcapacity - this is the language of planners who have learned nothing from the contradictions of accumulation. India, with its 1.4 billion souls, is being asked to perform the impossible: to expand production while shrinking emissions, to fuel growth with capital that must forever seek new outlets, yet to do so without repeating the ecological vandalism of the North. The state steps in as midwife to this contradiction, not its gravedigger. Private finance will not suffice because private capital only flows where profit is certain, and decarbonisation is, by definition, unprofitable under the current calculus. So the state must borrow, subsidise, guarantee - must become the guarantor of surplus realisation in a sector where surplus cannot be extracted through exploitation alone.

This is not green growth. It is the same old accumulation dressed in solar panels and carbon credits. The Niti Aayog’s arithmetic is a sleight of hand: 22 trillion dollars by 2070 is not a plan for justice; it is a demand for time. The coal plants will continue to belch until 2047, long after the last glacier in the Himalayas has bled into dust. The net-zero target is a horizon that recedes as the locomotive accelerates. The state’s intervention does not transcend capital’s logic; it stabilises it by redirecting surplus into new circuits of accumulation - green bonds, carbon markets, renewable energy infrastructure that will be privatised the moment it becomes profitable.

And what of the people? The millions who will be displaced by dams, mines, and solar farms to feed the machine’s hunger for land? The workers who will be retrained not for liberation but for servitude in the new green assembly lines? The reform is not a step toward socialism; it is a step toward the marketisation of the biosphere. The state’s role is not to dismantle capital but to ensure its survival under a new aesthetic.

The trap is already set. The language of “green growth” is the velvet glove over the iron fist of accumulation. The only path forward is not through state-led decarbonisation but through the mass strike of the earth itself - through the refusal of communities to be sacrificed, through the dismantling of the circuits that demand endless expansion. The state will not save us. It will only ensure that we are saved on capital’s terms.

August 10, 2026

It is a source of profound melancholy to observe the immense difficulties facing the Indian subcontinent as it seeks to reconcile the necessity of industrial expansion with the fashionable demands of global decarbonisation. The current reliance upon private finance to achieve these ends is, by all accounts, a precarious gamble. One cannot help but notice that the primary obstacle to this “green growth” is the sheer volume of the human population, which persists in requiring food, transport, and light, thereby complicating the elegant spreadsheets of the Niti Aayog.

To resolve this, I humbly suggest that the most efficient path to a “net-zero” reality is not to be found in the construction of expensive solar arrays, but in the systematic reduction of the demand itself. If the state truly wishes to avoid the “overcapacity trap” seen in China, it ought to consider a policy of Selective De-Animation for those segments of the populace whose carbon footprint exceeds their economic utility. By identifying the three hundred million least productive citizens and incentivising their transition from active consumers to inert carbon sinks, the government would simultaneously lower emissions and solve the housing crisis.

One might object that such a scheme is indifferent to the sanctity of life. However, I maintain that it is far more compassionate to provide a swift, state-administered conclusion to a carbon-heavy existence than to allow millions to perish slowly in the heatwaves produced by their own respiration. the resulting biomass could be processed into a nutrient-rich slurry to sustain the remaining industrial workforce, thereby creating a perfectly circular economy. This would satisfy the international lenders, preserve the climate, and ensure that India’s growth is not merely green, but exceptionally lean. Such a rational application of arithmetic would surely be welcomed by any administrator who values the planet over the messy particulars of its inhabitants.