The unbearable uselessness of India’s Environment Minister

He wields exclamation points and emojis with ease! He reposts every video clip featuring Narendra Modi! He marks every festival and made-up holiday in India with an anodyne image, sometimes even a gif! 

No, this isn’t your neighbourhood WhatsApp uncle, passing the time online. This is India’s environment minister, a man who’s held this position the longest ever since India got independence – except you’d be hard-pressed to even remember his name. 

Meanwhile, climate change is currently one of the greatest threats facing the planet. We’re living through one of the warmest years on record. Global emissions are predicted to hit an all-time high, even as India is the fourth highest emitter of greenhouse gases. Coastal cities like Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai are at high risk. Thousands are dying from heat but we’re not really tracking them. 

Delhi isn’t a city right now — it’s a gas chamber. And it’s not just the capital city, credible studies tie millions of deaths annually in India to air pollution. More than 63 percent of Indians live in areas that exceed the country’s own air quality standards.

The man steering us through this crisis is Bhupender Yadav, fighting the good fight, not on the ground but through colourless social media posts tom-toming India’s – and Modi’s – many successes. For the last four years and 128-odd days, he’s been demonstrating a masterclass in uselessness and social media, of course, has noticed.

So, who is India’s climate warrior? And what’s been keeping him busy?

Committed to elections over the environment?

Born in Rajasthan in 1969, Yadav studied at Government College, Ajmer, earning a BA (Hons) and then an LLB. 

Before moving into politics full-time, he practised law and worked as an advocate, including at the Supreme Court. He served as government counsel for commissions such as the Liberhan Commission (which investigated the demolition of the Babri Masjid) and the Wadhwa Commission (looking into the murder of missionary Graham Staines).

Yadav catapulted into the political limelight when he was appointed national secretary of the BJP in 2010. He took charge as national general secretary in 2014. He was also the strategist behind the party’s victories in major assembly polls, including Rajasthan (2013), Gujarat (2017), Jharkhand (2014) and Uttar Pradesh (2017).

In July 2021, Yadav was sworn in as India’s union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, taking over from Prakash Javadekar. He retained this portfolio under the third Modi cabinet in June 2024.

But in the words of environmentalist Vimlendu Jha, Yadav is more “election lieutenant” than environment minister. 

For example, on November 9, when the Delhi police dispersed and detained citizens protesting against pollution at India Gate, Yadav was in West Bengal meeting party workers ahead of the 2026 assembly polls.

A day before, when Delhi’s AQI was a dismal 361, he applauded the fact that a car was “sold every two seconds” thanks to the “festive fever” following GST cuts. We’ll note here that amid sources of Delhi’s pollution, vehicular emissions account for 51.1 percent of emissions from all local pollution sources, as per a study by the Centre for Science and Environment. (Day-wise data on AQI in Delhi is here on Dataful.)

On November 7, when the AQI in Delhi was 367, Yadav jauntily sang Vande Mataram in Kolkata, where he was performing the vital task of participating in a padyatra to celebrate the song’s 150th anniversary. And what was he doing the day before, you might ask? He was busy organising said padyatra. 

On November 6 and November 11, he tweeted about Bihar elections, asking voters to vote in record numbers.

His dance card was full through the end of October and early November. He met Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in Delhi, wrote an article on how India was combining “ancient wisdom” with “modern sustainability goals” to save the environment, hung out with a Jain monk, fed cows at a shelter, watched sports in Alwar, wrote another article on how ‘Climate Justice Has A Fair Price Tag Of Trillions, Not Billions’, and inspected a record room at his ministry for cleanliness. 

Stop it, you’re probably thinking. It’s easy to cherry-pick instances of inanity. Surely the man’s been working hard behind the scenes. 

Perhaps, in the last 60 days and even before, amidst multiple tweets on Modi’s achievements, Modi’s Mann Ki Baat, and Modi’s speeches, Yadav did not post a single tweet about Delhi’s deadly air. 

Keep in mind that the responsibility to protect the air across Delhi-NCR, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan lies with the Commission for Air Quality Management. It has sweeping powers to issue binding directions, override other environmental laws, set emission standards, coordinate state actions, monitor stubble burning mitigation efforts, take punitive action, restrict or shut down industries, and even cut their water or power supply in case of non-compliance. 

And the CAQM operates under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. Yadav is, for all intents and purposes, the man who is responsible for its action and inaction. 

So, what’s he been doing with it?

According to his X handle, Yadav held a meeting in September that recommended action points such as “greening of Delhi and NCR” by planting trees and installing “air pollution control devices”. 

He held a second meeting in October where he said farmers should “receive benefits of all schemes initiated by the Centre and State governments to prevent any parali burning incident”. Okay then.

And on November 11, he chaired a “high-level meeting to review and remedy the air quality situation in Delhi-NCR”. He tweeted a check-list of instructions but, to paraphrase a reply to his tweet, none of this is particularly new or ground-breaking.

As environmentalist Jha told Newslaundry, “Power is not what you possess. Power is what you exercise. The CAQM possesses a lot of power but exercises none.” 

Newslaundry sent a list of questions to Yadav. This copy will be updated if a response is received.

Big words internationally, but what about back home?

At COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021,, Yadav was the one who read out the last-minute change in the text that altered “phase out” of coal to “phase down”. Multiple reports, including Reuters and Economic Times, say India proposed the diluted wording in the plenary, with Yadav presenting it on behalf of India and China. COP26 president Alok Sharma was “deeply frustrated” and later said India and China would “have to explain themselves” to vulnerable nations.

After backlash, government sources alleged that India had not proposed the phrasing of “phase down” and that it was language already used in a US-China declaration. These sources also claimed Alok Sharma had “asked India to introduce the new text on the floor”. 

In public, though, Yadav defended the change as protecting “national circumstances” and the right of developing countries to use their “fair share” of the carbon budget – a line he has repeated in later speeches.

Post-Glasgow, Yadav climate diplomacy has mainly followed three talking points:

(1) Equity & climate justice: At COP28 in Dubai in 2023, his national statement stressed that “equity and climate justice must be the basis of global climate action”, arguing that rich countries with historic emissions must do more.

(2) Mission LiFE: At COP27 in Egypt in 2022, he inaugurated the India Pavilion themed on LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment), telling delegates that simple lifestyles are central to India’s climate story and that climate action “starts from the grassroots”.

(3) Finance and implementation: At COP27 and COP28, Yadav talked about climate finance, technology transfer, and India’s “long-term low emissions growth strategy”, though climate experts called that strategy a rehash of old commitments and lacking clear, sectoral targets.

Yadav skipped COP29 in Baku, where India strongly opposed the $300 billion climate finance goal as inadequate. But he will be visiting Brazil for COP30, a high-level annual meeting where countries that are parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meet to discuss and negotiate a global response to climate change.

But back in India, is there merit in Yadav’s push for schemes like Mission LiFe? 

Environmentalist Jha said schemes like Mission LiFE are “billboard-friendly”. 

“They are high on PR, they make amazing ads, and from these schemes a lot of money is spent in image building for the PM,” he said. “In comparison, the actual spending for taking action on the ground is negligible. Mission LiFE sounds great on paper – talking of a civilisational shift, and could be a great mission for young people because we are talking of a mass shift from consumerism. But apart from being a part of some conferences, we have not seen any concrete plans shape up on the ground.”

Jha also talked about Ek Ped Maa ke Naam, India’s campaign launched by PM Modi in June 2024, encouraging people to plant a tree in honor of their mother.

He said, “The tree campaign is also an eyewash – you look at what is happening in Andaman, or Chhattisgarh, or Odisha, the number of trees and forest land that is being compromised. And so-called developmental projects in the Himalayas.”

“Environmentalism is not PR. It is a largely inter-generational understanding of resources and, through that, understanding, delivering equity and justice. These programs or the government are not able to address that,” Jha added.

Sunil Dahiya, founder of Envirocatalysts, also came down heavily on Delhi’s pollution crisis and Yadav’s ministry’s role. 

“It is a complete failure at all levels,” he said. “None of the actions taken seem to be backed by data and science. While there are enough systems in place to decisively act on pollution sources, both in short term and long term, none of that has been used.”

He continued: “Pollution in Delhi can never be brought down if the private vehicles keep on increasing. We should set a cap on our fossil fuel consumption for the automobile sector. But you can’t just do that without providing a good transport system. Second, despite tackling pollution sources, new sources keep coming up around Delhi-NCR. The Khurja Super Thermal Power Plant in Bulandshahr, UP, was made operational this year itself. The government should not have allowed that to come up, being 70 kms away from Delhi. And third, these 12 power plants within 300 kms radius of Delhi were supposed to retrofit a technology which would have reduced their emissions according to a notification which came in December 2015.”

Multiple independent analyses by CSE and Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), confirm that almost none of these plants complied. Instead, the government repeatedly extended and diluted the deadlines: first to 2017, then 2019, then 2022, and finally to 2024–2026, depending on the plant category.

While the 2015 notification hasn’t been formally withdrawn, its enforcement has been so extensively delayed and softened that the original mandate has effectively been nullified, indicating the government is not prioritising emissions reduction from these plants.

And so, India’s longest-serving environment minister may go down not for what he did – but for what he didn’t.

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