India launches carbon portal
India launched a national carbon‑market portal at the Prakriti 2026 Summit to streamline carbon‑credit transactions and incentivize emissions cuts across key sectors — the effort is led by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency under the Ministries of Power and Environment. The move is meant to position India as a regional climate‑finance hub, and comes alongside new climate leadership recruitment (ILACL) and HLPF/UN Summit application drives aimed at building capacity for the transition. (ianslive.in) (opportunitiesforyouth.org)
The digital system backing the new portal is being built as a two-part ecosystem — an Indian Carbon Market (ICM) Portal for transactions and an ICM Registry for issuance and tracking of carbon‑credit certificates — with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency named as developer and administrator. (outlookbusiness.com (outlookbusiness.com)) The legal foundation for the trading framework is the Energy Conservation Amendment Act, 2022 and the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS) notified by the Centre via S.O. 2825(E) on 28 June 2023 and amended by S.O. 5369(E) on 19 December 2023. (pib.gov.in (pib.gov.in)) CCTS establishes two mechanisms: a compliance mechanism for obligated entities and an offset mechanism for voluntary projects, and the government approved a Detailed Procedure for the Offset Mechanism along with eight methodologies in March 2025 to operationalize voluntary credits. (pib.gov.in (pib.gov.in)) The compliance phase initially targets nine energy‑intensive sectors — aluminium, cement, iron & steel, pulp & paper, chlor‑alkali, fertiliser, petroleum refinery, petrochemicals and textiles — with draft rules first covering 282 plants and follow‑up notifications expanding coverage to roughly 740 industrial units. (beeindia.gov.in (beeindia.gov.in)) (sarafpartners.com (sarafpartners.com)) India’s existing Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) programme has yielded energy savings equivalent to more than 106 million tonnes of CO2 between 2015 and June 2024, and the government has detailed plans to transition PAT‑covered facilities into the CCTS compliance mechanism. (beeindia.gov.in (beeindia.gov.in)) (pib.gov.in (pib.gov.in)) Officials and media reports have described the portal rollout as phased — with earlier plans for a soft‑launch/testing window and public reporting that fuller market operations could follow later in 2026, with some outlets projecting broader trading activity by October 2026. (outlookbusiness.com (outlookbusiness.com))
