Just 8,702 of more than 2.34 lakh parliamentary questions raised in the decade to December 2025 were related to climate, accounting for just over 3% of the total, according to a new analysis.
Clean energy and decarbonisation, which aligns with "prestige-heavy" international targets, was the most common subject among climate-related questions, accounting for 2,938, or 33.81%, of the 8,702 questions categorised under the theme.
Climate finance, at 0.26%, and global climate governance, at 1.2%, remained significant blind spots, the analysis found.
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. It was 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.
The report also found that the government had repeatedly taken a cautious position on linking environmental damage, particularly air pollution, with rising death rates or specific illnesses.
While the government acknowledges 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.
Legislative attention also appeared to be predominantly event-driven and reactionary rather than strategic, the report found.
For example, the February 2021 Uttarakhand glacier burst led to an increase in questions about glacier melt and cloudbursts, while 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.
