Preservation and protection of the natural environment has never been a priority in our annual Budgets; all Finance Ministers have taken it for granted and treated it as a resource rather than a living entity to be nurtured and carefully harvested on a sustainable basis.In July 2014, I had written a blog about precisely this: ‘Budget 2014 — Shortchanging the Environment’. Eleven years down the line, this deficiency in planning persists, even though a new, and compelling, dimension has been added with the acceleration of climate change (CC). The need now is not only to provide public funding for measures to counter CC (adaptation, mitigation), but also for rehabilitation of those directly affected by it — poor farmers, landless labourers, fishermen, nomadic tribes.Unfortunately (and predictably), this Budget, like its predecessors, does none of this.We should perhaps have expected this from the tone of the Economic Survey 2026. In it, the Chief Economic Adviser blatantly bats for growth and neoliberalism at the cost of the environment. Defying all science, it states that cutting carbon emissions should not be our top priority, and that “a 3º Celsius world would be a liveable one”!Confounding all evidence and scientific global consensus, it goes on to maintain that “growth and prosperity strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability”. Yes, sir, they do, but only if done in a sustainable and ecologically-friendly manner, which is not how it is happening in India. Maybe, if the Economic Adviser had paid more attention to what a fellow economist (without any political bias), Gita Gopinath, had said in Davos, he would have better understood the problem, and how wrong he is.This government suffers from a severe case of CID (Compulsive Infrastructure Disorder); capex is fine and needed for growth, but so is the environment. There are huge environmental costs to rapid infrastructural expansion — both the World Bank and the IMF estimate this at between 3.5 and 5 per cent of our GDP, which comes to about $200 billion.The 2026-27 Budget proudly mentions the creation of a mineral corridor (for rare earths) in four southern states, three more high-speed rail corridors, zero duties for maritime catches in India’s EEZ or the high seas, but there is no mention of how the environmental consequences of these initiatives shall be addressed or mitigation funded.Are these corridors necessary at all, given the large number of expressways being built? The corridors shall lead to large-scale land acquisition and displacement, adding to the 60 million project refugees created since Independence. Hundreds of thousands of trees (and mangroves, since rare earths are found in coastal areas) shall be felled. The boost to maritime fisheries is welcome, but where are the guardrails to ensure that the livelihoods of fishermen will be protected, or overfishing curbed?The damage to the environment by the various corridors will be enormous. The regulations that could have checked this, or compensated for it, such as the Forest Conservation Act, the Environmental Protection Act, or the Wildlife Protection Act, have been so weakened, if not castrated, by this government over the years that we can expect minimum oversight or safeguards in the execution of these projects.Thousands of crores shall be needed to mitigate, and compensate for, the adverse impacts of these projects, but the Finance Minister has not said a word about this. This silence and ambiguity appear to be a deliberate decentralisation of costs: the political credit and financial gains will accrue to the Centre, but the social and budgetary costs will be borne by the states — an innovative (mis)interpretation of federalism!Finally, it appears that the 16th Finance Commission (FC) is also in lockstep with the Centre, like all so-called autonomous institutions. It has chosen to completely ignore the right of the Himalayan states to fair compensation for the ecological services they provide to the country (water, clean air, carbon sequestration, climate moderation).These states, supported by a large number of advocacy groups, had demanded a Green Bonus of Rs 50,000 crore from 2026-2031. Not only would this have been fair compensation, these funds would have met developmental needs without having to resort to unsustainable exploitation of forests, rivers, minerals and tourism potential.Any idiot can see that excessive and unsustainable “development” of the Himalaya (and other ranges like the Aravallis and Western Ghats) is not in the interest of the country as a whole, and therefore these mountain states should be incentivised not to do so.But the 16th FC failed to see this simple truth. Reports indicate that it has not provided any Green Bonus; nor has it provided any special grants (outside the Centre’s discretion, which has now become totally politicised) for climate mitigation or disaster relief. All it has done is tinker with the definition of forests which, in pure financial terms, is meaningless. Even worse, the 16th FC has now discontinued the RDG (Revenue Deficit Grant) which these states had been receiving since 1974, making a huge dent in their finances. They shall now have no option but to continue to ravage the fragile Himalayan environment to fund development activities.The criminal neglect of the environment continues in our planning and funding. Ms Sitharaman and her co-pilot in the FC have just nudged us a bit closer to environmental collapse, and the financial collapse of some states.— The writer is a retired IAS officer