New Delhi, Oct 1 (PTI) A new analysis shows that out of more than 2.34 lakh parliamentary questions raised in a decade ending in December 2025, just 8,702 questions — or over 3 per cent — were related to the theme climate.
It has also found that clean energy and decarbonisation, which aligns with “prestige-heavy” international targets, was the most common subject to appear in climate-related questions, accounting for 2,938 (33.81 per cent) of the 8,702 questions categoried under the theme.
Climate finance (0.26 per cent) and global climate governance (1.2 per cent) remained significant blind spots.
The analysis, ‘Climate on the Floor: India’s Parliamentary Discourse on Environment since the Paris Agreement’, was released by the Delhi-based Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) on Thursday and authored by researcher Hajira Puthige.
“This report examines parliamentary discourse on climate change during the first 10 years of the (2015) Paris Agreement… to understand the issues that have received political attention and the ways in which climate change has been framed in relation to economic, social, and developmental concerns,” wrote Joe Athialy, executive director of the CFA, in the preface of the report.
It also revealed that the government had repeatedly taken a careful position when it comes to linking environmental damage, especially air pollution, with rising death rates or specific illnesses.
While the government does acknowledge that pollution can act as a “triggering factor” that worsens health conditions, it stops short of accepting it as a direct cause of premature deaths, according to the report.
Moreover, it was found that legislative attention predominantly seemed to be event-driven and reactionary rather than strategic. For example, the February 2021 Uttarakhand glacier burst led to a rise in questions about glacier melt and cloudbursts, and the record-breaking heat of 2022 marked the first substantial parliamentary focus on heatwaves.
“Ten years after the Paris Agreement, India’s political attention is not keeping pace with its continuous threat status or its rising economic exposure,” the report said.
“While India has institutionalised its climate commitments, Parliamentary oversight has yet to evolve into a comprehensive mechanism for ensuring climate accountability, reacting to shock-value events rather than providing systematic oversight of long-term preparedness,” it added. PTI ALC PRK
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