Tamil Nadu needs more basic science funding to create green technology Premium

The State currently lacks the mature R&D required to develop homegrown technologies.

As Tamil Nadu approaches its Assembly elections, its ambition to become a $1-trillion economy and its position as one of India’s leading industrial and knowledge hubs means it’s worth examining how the State has invested in science and environmental issues in the last five years.

First, the State’s strategy on environment and climate action has been to integrate climate action across sectors rather than increase a core allocation for the environment and climate change department. Within this framework, it has launched a series of dedicated environmental missions since 2021. In the 2021-22 fiscal, the State allocated ₹500 crore to establish the Tamil Nadu Climate Change Mission — one of the first of its kind among States — and another ₹150 crore for the Wetlands Mission to restore 100 ecologically sensitive water bodies.

The following year the State established the Tamil Nadu Green Climate Fund with a ₹1,000-crore corpus to finance renewable energy, electric mobility, pollution-control technologies, forest conservation, and circular-economy projects, among other climate-related technologies. It committed an initial ₹100 crore as sponsor capital with the fund tasked with mobilising more from development finance institutions and international climate investors.

By 2023-24, it had expanded its conservation efforts by dedicating ₹10 crore to Project Nilgiri Tahr and scaling up the Green Tamil Nadu Mission to increase forest cover. The 2024-25 budget expanded the Sustainably Harnessing Ocean Resources, or SHORE, scheme to strengthen the blue economy and provided subsidies for electric vehicles to promote sustainable transportation.

Spending surged in 2025-26 as the government allocated ₹21,178 crore to the energy department, which includes investments in renewable generation, pumped-storage hydro projects, battery energy storage systems, and other power infrastructure, and ₹100 crore to build new basic science research centres in Chennai and Coimbatore.

The government also said in 2025 that Tamil Nadu had spent around ₹15,270 crore over the previous four years on disaster relief, mitigation, preparedness, and capacity-building programmes.