India needs to cut its pollution levels by roughly 60 per cent just to meet its clean air standards—that is a number that came up more than once through the evening as more than 20 speakers gathered in New Delhi, on July 23, for The Green Shift 2026 hosted by Open and the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, to talk about energy, air, fashion, food, and pretty much everything else caught up in the question whether India’s growth story and its climate deadline could coexist.
Opening the summit, Open Editor S Prasannarajan set the tone. “We are all environmentalists today,” he said, arguing that sustainability had stopped being a fringe concern and become the language everyone speaks now, whether they mean it or not. “What we need is not environmental absolutism,” he said. “What we need is environmental empathy… When a president says, “Drill, baby, drill,” it doesn’t sound funny. It sounds insensitive,” he added. Does India have a plan to grow without wrecking the planet it is growing on, or just a plan to talk about one?
That question found its answer later in the evening when Amitabh Kant took the stage and opened with a number. The former G20 Sherpa and NITI Aayog CEO said that to meet the prime minister’s target of a fully developed India by 2047, GDP needs to grow roughly nine-fold, manufacturing sixteen-fold, and urbanisation twenty-two-fold, with some 500 million people expected to move from villages to cities over the next three-and-a-half decades. That is most of India rebuilding itself in real time, not a line item in a policy document. He was equally blunt about the world’s biggest polluters. A small number of companies, he argued, account for a hugely disproportionate share of global emissions and get away with it because nobody tracks the number the way markets track earnings. Put it on the balance sheet, he said, and let the stock price do the punishing.