Carbon Credit Trading: Blockchain Hype Can’t Mask Policy Blind
photo credit twitter aader foundation
While India’s CCTS 2023 marks a milestone in regulated carbon trading, experts warn that its exclusion of individual participants, unclear global linkages, and untested blockchain integration could undermine its promise of democratized climate action.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, November 6, 2025 — The article by Bajpai and Tiwari in The Mint is an ambitious attempt to blend climate action, financial inclusion, and technology into a single transformative idea- the “Jan Van” initiative, a citizen-driven green revolution modelled on the ‘success’ of the Government’s Jan Dhan programme. It situates this vision within the context of India’s greenhouse-gas intensity reduction targets and the larger Paris Agreement commitments. The argument is elegant and idealistic: democratize carbon credits through blockchain-enabled fintech and reward individuals for their carbon-reducing actions.
Yet, what the piece gains in aspiration, it loses in architecture. Its conceptual clarity outpaces its operational detailing. The “how” remains sketchy, the institutional scaffolding undefined, and the roadmap to policy integration absent. What emerges, therefore, is not a comprehensive plan of action but a stirring prelude—half a roadmap waiting for its contours. Probably, the authors might address these in part two of their article.
The Promise: A Vision of People-Powered Decarbonization
The authors’ central proposition- that India can achieve its 2070 carbon—neutrality goal by transforming citizens from passive observers into active carbon traders—is refreshingly original. They envision a “Jan Van” (People-Forest) mission intertwined with the “Jan Dhan” infrastructure: a system where every household earns digital carbon credits for planting trees, avoiding stubble burning, or adopting renewable energy. The beauty of the idea lies in its simplicity and resonance with Indian civilizational values—Yajur Veda’s hymns to universal peace, Krishna’s acceptance of the leaf and flower, and the moral economy of reciprocity between nature and livelihood.
Equally persuasive is the authors’ insistence on using fintech and blockchain to make carbon credits tradable and transparent. The logic is sound: decentralized ledgers could eliminate middlemen, reduce corruption, and globalize access, allowing even a farmer in rural Uttar Pradesh to sell credits to a polluter in Brazil. The authors nod to global precedents-China’s Hubei and Shanghai exchanges, the EU’s pilot programs, and platforms like KlimaDAO and CarbonPlace—adds intellectual weight to the argument.
At its best moments, the article evokes the creative audacity of Nandan Nilekani’s Aadhaar blueprint-a fusion of technology, trust, and governance. If Jan Dhan gave every Indian a bank account, Jan Van could give every Indian a stake in the planet’s future.
The Pitfalls: From Vision to Vagueness
However, the piece stumbles precisely where it most needs to run- in defining execution. The article repeatedly invokes fintech, blockchain, and AI, but it glosses over the practical and regulatory hurdles. There is no discussion of which institutions would verify carbon-reducing actions, how quantification would occur, or which agency would authorize digital assets. In the absence of measurement, monitoring, and verification (MMV) systems, “people’s carbon markets” risk degenerating into the same opacity that haunts existing corporate offset schemes.
Similarly, while invoking the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS 2023), the article does not address its current limitations- the scheme’s focus on obligated entities, absence of individual participation protocols, and the still-unclear interface with global voluntary carbon markets. Without specifying how “individual inclusion” could be legislatively or technically integrated into CCTS, the call for democratization remains rhetorical rather than reformist.
Moreover, the optimism about blockchain as a ‘silver bullet’ ignores real-world complications: high transaction energy costs, the volatility of tokenized carbon assets, and the spectre of “green-washing 2.0.” Studies from the European Commission and Oxford’s Blockchain & Society Lab have shown that tokenized credits, when detached from robust verification, often inflate carbon reduction claims rather than substantiate them.
The Missing Middle: Policy, Institutions, and Safeguards
A true roadmap would have translated vision into verifiable steps. The article could have addressed:
Institutional anchoring—Which ministry or agency would host the Jan Van-Fintech platform? Would it be under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), NITI Aayog, or a new Carbon Authority akin to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)?
Verification protocols—How would the carbon reduction from an individual’s activity be measured? Would it rely on satellite imagery, IoT sensors, or community certification?
Legal and fiscal implications—How would blockchain-based carbon assets be taxed, traded, and protected against speculative abuse?
Data ethics and inclusion—Would the use of Aadhaar and JAM identifiers raise privacy concerns? How will the digital divide be bridged for non-smartphone users?
Absent these details, the proposal risks appearing as a manifesto, not a manual. It reads like the first draft of an idea that needs an institutional mind-map and phased implementation plan- pilot districts, grievance redress mechanisms, fintech partnerships, and global interoperability standards aligned with the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM) and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
What the Article Achieves-and What It Misses
The strength of the essay lies in reframing climate action as an economic and social empowerment story rather than an environmental compliance burden. It positions decarbonization as a bottom-up enterprise- a rare lens in India’s climate discourse that is usually dominated by state or corporate players.
Yet, the piece ends abruptly, as though content to plant an intellectual seed without nurturing it into policy fruit. There is little about the financing ecosystem, carbon-credit pricing models, the role of public-sector banks or insurance companies, or how rural cooperatives and SHGs might serve as intermediaries. It also omits the lessons of India’s earlier participatory schemes-such as MNREGA’s green-jobs component or NABARD’s agro-forestry initiatives- that could serve as prototypes.
How It Could Have Been the Full Roadmap
To graduate from an evocative critique to a comprehensive blueprint, the article could have:
- Proposed a phased roadmap—pilot (5 states), scale-up (10 years), and global linkages (2050 goal).
- Outlined a multi-stakeholder governance model, assigning roles to MoEFCC, RBI (for fintech regulation), SEBI (for carbon markets), and SIDBI or NABARD (for rural integration).
- Suggested fiscal and legal reforms, including carbon-credit taxation and integration with the Green Credit Programme notified in 2023.
- Incorporated a comparative analysis of countries where citizen-level carbon credits have succeeded -e.g., Japan’s J-Credit system and Korea’s K-ETS community offsets.
- Discussed the auditability and transparency imperative—perhaps under CAG’s environmental audit mandate—to ensure credibility and public trust.
The Half-Built Bridge
Bajpai and Tiwari’s Mint article is a spark, not a fire. It opens the right questions- how can fintech power climate action, how can citizens profitably own their carbon responsibility, how can India marry tradition with technology—but leaves them suspended mid-air. The “Jan Van” idea deserves to move from poetic conception to pragmatic construction. For that, it must marry fintech enthusiasm with governance realism, and visionary rhetoric with verifiable roadmaps.
India stands at a moment when it can transform climate action from a bureaucratic compliance exercise into a citizen-led economic revolution. But to do that, the vision must leave the editorial page and walk into the policy room. Only then will Jan Van stop being a metaphor and start being a movement. Wish the authors come up with the missing details in the second part of what could be a practical forward-looking road map.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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