Near the Very Bottom of the Table
I’ll just say it plainly: India’s showing in the 2026 Environmental Performance Index isn’t good. Out of 177 countries assessed, India came in at 176th, scoring just 22.46 out of 100. That makes it the second-worst performer in the entire world, ahead of only one country. And within its own region, India actually finished dead last — behind Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Bangladesh. Every other assessed South Asian country scored higher.
At the other end of the table sits Estonia, which held onto the top spot this year. Researchers pointed to the country’s substantial cuts to greenhouse gas emissions from power generation over the past decade, along with growing renewable electricity generation and strong performance on biodiversity and ecosystem protection, as the reasons it stayed on top. European countries swept the top five spots entirely — Luxembourg came in second, followed by the UK, Finland, and the Netherlands.
What’s Actually Dragging India Down
I think it’s worth being specific about what’s driving India’s low score, rather than just citing the number. Researchers point to a combination of factors: persistent air quality problems, heavy reliance on coal for power generation, weak protections for ecosystems and biodiversity, and rising emissions that keep climbing even as the country tries to expand access to modern energy for hundreds of millions of people.
That last part is where things get genuinely complicated, in my view. India is now the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind only China and the United States. Its total emissions have grown by roughly 32 per cent over the past decade, driven by rapid industrialisation, a fast-growing economy, and rising energy demand. Put those numbers next to each other, and it’s easy to read this as a simple, damning story: a country polluting more every year, falling further behind on every measure that matters.
But That’s Not the Whole Story
Here’s where I think the picture actually gets more interesting, and more nuanced than the headline ranking alone suggests. Despite finishing near the bottom of the table this year, India’s ten-year trend score in the EPI was actually positive. That’s a genuinely surprising detail buried inside an otherwise grim set of numbers.
Zachary Wendling, one of the researchers behind the index, explained that applying the EPI’s current methodology to historical data shows India’s environmental performance has actually improved over time, even while its absolute position stays low. His point wasn’t that emissions have stopped rising — they clearly haven’t. It’s that the rate of increase for some pollutants, including sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, has slowed. As he put it, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are still too high and still rising, but they’re not rising as quickly as they used to.
I think that distinction matters a lot, and it’s easy to miss if you only look at the ranking itself. A country can still be near the bottom of a global table while genuinely improving relative to its own past — it’s just starting from such a low base that improvement doesn’t yet translate into a better rank. This is a story about the trajectory being more encouraging than the current position, not a story about India suddenly becoming a model of sustainability.
India Isn’t Alone in Driving the Global Increase
Zooming out a bit, India’s rising emissions aren’t happening in isolation — they’re part of a broader global trend that a separate UN report flagged just months before the EPI came out. According to the UN Environment Programme’s most recent Emissions Gap Report, India recorded the largest absolute increase in total greenhouse gas emissions of any country in the world in 2024. In percentage growth terms, its emissions rose 3.6 per cent that year, behind only Indonesia’s 4.6 per cent growth rate — but because India’s total emissions base is so much larger, that percentage translated into the single biggest volume increase globally.
I think that context is genuinely useful. It’s not that India is uniquely reckless while the rest of the world holds steady — global emissions are still rising overall, and the world remains well behind the targets set under the Paris Agreement. India’s per-capita emissions, worth noting, also remain well below the global average, even as its total national emissions climb.
A Familiar Government Response
None of this criticism is new to India’s government, and neither is its reaction. When India finished dead last in the EPI’s 2022 edition, the Union Environment Ministry rejected the findings outright, calling the assessment based on “surmises and unscientific methods” and raising concerns about how the index’s methodology treats India’s historical emissions. I’d expect a similar response this time around, given how consistent that pattern has been. It’s also worth noting the EPI’s methodology gets revised with each edition — the 2026 report introduced grassland conversion as a new assessment category for the first time — which does complicate clean year-over-year comparisons, even if it doesn’t change the underlying picture of where India currently stands.
My Own Read on This
Pulling all of this together, I don’t think “India is near the bottom of a global environmental ranking” and “India is showing genuine signs of improvement” actually contradict each other. Both things are true at once. The country is dealing with a genuinely difficult tension: hundreds of millions of people still gaining access to electricity and modern energy for the first time, an economy still industrialising rapidly, and a government trying to balance that growth against environmental commitments that, on paper, remain fairly ambitious. What this year’s EPI captures, more than anything, is a country still very much in the middle of that transition — moving in a better direction on a handful of specific measures, while still carrying so much accumulated environmental pressure that the overall picture remains genuinely alarming.
References:
- International News and Views. “Environmental Performance Index 2026 India: Ranking, Challenges, Government Initiatives and What the EPI Measures.”
- National Herald India. “India scrapes the bottom of environment index in 2026 report,” July 12, 2026.
- Mongabay India. “India tops global rise in emissions, finds UNEP,” November 14, 2025.
- Statista. “GHG emissions in India - Statistics & Facts.”
- Our World in Data. “India - CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Country Profile.”