CITIZEN-LED CLIMATE ACTION: THE GREEN INDIA CHALLENGE MODELHyderabad: Green India Challenge founder Joginapally Santosh Kumar said the India’s most urgent climate policy gap is the continued exclusion of heatwaves from the list of notified disasters under State Disaster Response Force SDRF) and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) calling for a broad citizen led climate action for the country.“Heatwaves have killed more Indians than floods, cyclones, and earthquakes combined in recent years. In April 2026, six Indian cities crossed 46 degrees Celsius. The NHRC has issued warnings. 247 billion labour hours were lost to heat stress in 2024 alone. Yet heatwaves remain the only major climate disaster excluded from SDRF/NDRF funding. This must change,” he urged, calling on the Karnataka govt and all Indian states to lead the demand for reclassification at the next National Disaster Management Authority meeting.At the Climate Innovation Summit 2026 held at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) on Thursday, Santosh Kumar, an ex-MP called for a fundamental rethinking of India’s approach to climate federalism, arguing that the country’s biggest challenge is not the absence of policy but the “missing middle” between national commitments and ground-level deliveryHe presented the Green India Challenge as a living proof of climate federalism in action — a movement that mobilised 196 million geo-tagged trees and 44 million citizens across India without waiting for a government circular or a centrally sponsored scheme.“India has excellent climate policies — the NAPCC, 34 State Action Plans, the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, Mission LiFE. The bottleneck is not design. The bottleneck is the missing middle — the space between a policy document in Delhi and a farmer in Telangana, a student in Karnataka, a fisherwoman in Odisha,” Santosh Kumar said.The ex-MP also introduced the concept of the campus as a micro-unit of climate governance, referencing the Climate Action Campus Talks (CACT) programme run by Igniting Minds Organisation — a Section 8 non-profit with UNFCCC COP29 and UNCCD COP16 Observer status. CACT has been delivered at 20 premier institutions including IIT Mumbai, IIT Delhi, JNU Delhi, and BITS Hyderabad, and is scaling to 200 campuses across Telangana with 5-Year Net-Zero Campus Roadmaps and Mission LiFE integration.“India has over 40 million students in higher education. If every campus becomes a unit of climate governance — with carbon audits, Green Clubs, and data feeding into state climate dashboards — you would have the most granular climate governance system in the world. That is bottom-up climate federalism,” he said.In a first-of-its-kind initiative for an Indian climate conference, the Green India Challenge planted one geo-tagged bamboo tree for every speaker and participant at the Summit and committed to nurturing each tree for 1,000 days. Named “Punarvasu — The Reconstruction Tree” after Lord Sri Rama’s birth nakshatra (meaning “the return of light”), the bamboo initiative made the Climate Innovation Summit 2026 a verified carbon-negative event. Every participant received a personalised Punarvasu Certificate with GPS coordinates and a QR code linking to real-time growth and CO₂ absorption data.Bamboo absorbs up to four times more CO₂ than equivalent tree species, generates 35% more oxygen than hardwood forests, and grows up to 91 cm in a single day — making it the fastest-growing and most carbon-efficient plant on Earth.ends/
