On: The Guardian view on India’s green growth gamble: it will need more than...

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.