India Rejected This Ranking in 2022. It's Still True

We love a good rebuttal. Tell India it's failing at something, and somewhere in Delhi, a statement is already being drafted calling the data "unscientific." That's exactly what happened in 2022, when the Environmental Performance Index put us dead last, 180 out of 180 countries. The government's response wasn't to look inward. It was to reject the messenger.

Four years later, the messenger is back. The 2026 Environmental Performance Index, compiled by researchers at Yale and Columbia, has ranked India 176th out of 177 countries. Second-worst on the planet. The only country doing worse is Laos. Estonia, at the very top, scored 74.79. India scored 22.46.
Read those two numbers again. That's not a close race. That's a different sport.

And this isn't even a fresh embarrassment. In the 2024 edition, India also landed at 176th, out of 180 countries at that time. Different denominator, same neighbourhood. Whatever the total sample size, whatever indicators get added or dropped between editions, India keeps settling into roughly the same coordinates near the bottom of the table. That kind of consistency isn't a glitch. It's a signature.

So what happened between "unscientific" in 2022 and "still nearly last" in 2026? Not enough, apparently.

The EPI doesn't just hand out one number and walk away. It breaks a country down into three buckets: environmental health, ecosystem vitality, and climate change mitigation, and scores each on dozens of indicators: air quality, biodiversity protection, emissions trends, marine habitat, tree cover. India ranked 174th in environmental health. 171st in ecosystem vitality. Only in climate policy did the country manage a relatively less embarrassing 130th, credited partly to renewable energy pushes and a 2070 net-zero pledge, a pledge that, worth noting, sits twenty years behind what most developed nations have already committed to.

There's also a regional embarrassment tucked inside the global one. India finished last among the South Asian countries assessed, behind Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Maldives, and Bangladesh. Countries we routinely compare ourselves against on GDP, on defence, on cricket, are quietly outperforming us on something as basic as breathable air and living rivers. That should sting more than it seems to.

Air quality remains the biggest bleeding wound. Coal dependence hasn't loosened its grip either. Add weak marine and biodiversity protections, and you get a country whose natural systems are quietly being run into the ground while the conversation upstairs stays fixated on GDP growth and infrastructure ribbon-cuttings.

Here's the part that should actually unsettle you: this isn't new information. It isn't a surprise. It is the same diagnosis, delivered again and again, years apart, by an index the government has already told us not to trust.

And that's the pattern worth sitting with. When a body of researchers points at a wound, the instinct isn't to treat it — it's to argue about whether the doctor is qualified.

To be fair, there's a genuine methodological debate buried under all this, and it deserves airtime instead of being drowned out. India's government called the EPI's approach "unscientific" back in 2022, arguing some indicators were extrapolated from surmise rather than hard local data. That's not a baseless complaint. Global indices built on satellite proxies and modelled estimates carry real uncertainty, especially for a country as large and unevenly monitored as India. Even the EPI's own research director has acknowledged that indicators like the Regional Marine Trophic Index can have more than one explanation behind the numbers, a fishing fleet catching lower-trophic species could mean overexploited stocks, or it could just mean better profit margins further down the food chain.

But questioning methodology and dismissing the finding are two different things. You can ask for better data collection and still admit the air in Delhi is unbreathable in November. You can disagree with how a number was modelled and still admit that coal isn't going anywhere soon. Somewhere between those two positions, India's official response has consistently landed on the second one: defend the score, not the sky.

There's a genuinely hopeful thread in all this data, and it would be dishonest to leave it out. India's ten-year trend score is positive, plus 7.47, actually better than several countries ranked well above it, including Romania and the Dominican Republic, both of which are sliding backwards while India edges forward. Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions are still rising, but slower than before. Translation: the descent hasn't stopped, but it's decelerating. That's nothing. It's also not something to build a victory lap around, because "declining more slowly" and "improving" are not the same sentence.

It's worth asking who this trend actually helps. A slowing rate of decline shows up nicely in a policy briefing. It does very little for someone standing at a bus stop in Delhi in November, watching the sky turn the colour of wet cement, checking an air quality app that tells them, again, to stay indoors if they can. Statistical improvement and lived improvement are not the same experience, and only one of them shows up in a press release.

So here's the actual question worth asking, the one that doesn't fit into a ministry statement: if the index is flawed enough to reject outright, why does it keep landing India in nearly the same place, report after report, across different years, different sample sizes, and evolving methodology? At what point does a repeated result stop being a data problem and start being, simply, a description of reality?

Nobody is asking India to accept every modelled number as gospel. Nobody expects a country of 1.4 billion people balancing growth and survival to fix air pollution overnight. But there is a difference between defending your development timeline and refusing to even acknowledge the wound while it festers.

We didn't get to 176th out of 177 by an unscientific accident. We got there through decades of coal-fired power, choked cities, and a national conversation that treats the environment as a footnote to the economy instead of the thing the economy actually depends on.

The rankings will come out again in 2028. Maybe by then the response will be different. Maybe the report will include a paragraph acknowledging the problem instead of a paragraph attacking the researchers who found it. Or maybe we'll simply issue the same rebuttal, in the same tone, about a ranking that, once again, will turn out to be true.

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