The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (Mospi) on Wednesday released its Strategy for Environmental Economic Accounts in India 2026–2030, thus providing a five-year roadmap to measure the country’s natural resources and ecosystem services alongside conventional economic indicators.
The document succeeds the 2022–2026 strategy released in December 2021 and lists around 10 priority areas for the next five years: forests, water, land, soil, minerals, carbon stock, biodiversity, pollination services, environment-related economic activity and an expanded environment statistics publication.
The ministry frames the effort as a correction to growth-first policymaking. “It is undeniable that natural resources form the backbone of our economy, and targeting economic development without environmental considerations can cause serious environmental degradation, impairing the quality of life of present and future generations,” the report said.
A key driver is the UN’s System of National Accounts (SNA) 2025, the latest global standard for compiling national accounts. India compiles its accounts under the UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA).
According to the report, these accounts can be used to evaluate around 40 global indicators across nine Sustainable Development Goals.
Among the newer areas is pollination accounting. Mospi published its first monetary pollination services account earlier this year. “Despite its critical importance, conventional agricultural statistics and national accounts capture the value of crop production but do not explicitly measure the ecosystem services provided by pollinators,” it added.
It noted that such accounts could provide a policy rationale for strengthening beekeeping and pollination-support programmes.
On minerals, the report noted that tracking extraction, depletion and discoveries will help assess long-term resource security. Water accounts, which Mospi last published in 2018, are described as “critical for water-stressed regions” and as a tool to monitor groundwater depletion.
Forest accounts will continue to capture services that, in the ministry’s words, “directly or indirectly benefit the economy and human well-being yet are often excluded from conventional GDP calculations.”
The strategy rests on two pillars. The first is improving the quality, timeliness and coverage of the accounts while bridging data gaps. The second is better communicating their relevance to policymakers, the media and other users.
Referring to decades of state-level pilot studies, the report said that they could not culminate in a full-fledged national account due to a lack of comparability across methods and definitions, which limited their aggregation.
“To initiate the compilation of the Environment Accounts at the sub-national level, all States have been requested to constitute InterDepartmental Groups (IDGs) on Environment Accounting, in line with the Inter-Ministerial Group at the Centre,” it noted. Eighteen states and Union Territories have constituted IDGs so far.
The ministry also flagged a skills gap. “There is a need for well-developed expertise in SEEA in the country, not just within the National Statistical Office, but across the various organisations/Ministries/Departments of the Government of India,” it said.
Sub-national training, it added, would help address some of the state-specific policy questions that would otherwise go unseen.
