India’s push towards a sustainable, circular future is both bold and pragmatic. Backed by decisive political leadership, India has combined an accelerated renewable-energy transition, rapid scale-up of solar and wind, ambitious clean-energy targets and emerging green-hydrogen plans with a strong circular-economy policy stack: Extended Producer Responsibility for plastics, e-waste and tyres, updated hazardous-waste rules, nascent product-level measures such as digital product passports and BIS-led circular standards, and the citizen-facing Mission LiFE to curb wasteful consumption. The result is a uniquely Indian model that aligns large-scale decarbonisation with material efficiency, innovation and equitable livelihoods.
As India prepares to host the World Circular Economy Forum 2026, it is an opportunity to position itself not simply as a rising market but as a working laboratory for sustainable development pathways that the Global North would do well to study. India’s policy architecture offers distinctive advantages: low per-person waste and consumption patterns, a dense network of repair/ reuse markets, and a mature, rapidly evolving recycling and extended producer responsibility (EPR) framework. At the same time, India must partner with international actors to accelerate investments in urban resilience, high-value recycling technologies, circular business models that retain material value, and consumer trust in secondary and second-hand markets. The recommendations below synthesise India’s policy progress, empirical strengths, and a practical agenda India can advance at WCEF2026 so that a sustainable, equitable development model for the Global South becomes replicable.
India’s formal engagement with circularity has rapidly deepened in the last five years. At the policy level the country has built a string of instrument-level regulations, for example the Plastic Waste Management Rules (with EPR provisions), the E-Waste Management Rules (expanded scope in 2022/3), and the Hazardous & Other Wastes rules that have been recently updated while national authorities and sectoral ministries are actively pursuing product-level and materials-specific policies that steer both upstream design and downstream recovery (EPR/traceability/ Digital Product Passports). These policy strides are complemented by programme and institutional work: national circular-economy forums, training modules, and circular-economy labs and incubators to translate policy into pilots and business models.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been decisive in giving circularity a national imprimatur. As the International Council for Circular Economy (ICCE) and other national bodies record, Modi has repeatedly framed the circular economy as a central plank of India’s growth and sustainability strategy urging states and sectors to “make the circular economy a mandatory part of our lives.” That political voice offers a strategic advantage: a long-horizon framing of development that privileges regeneration over linear extraction.
Read the full article by ICCE.
