Chennai, Aug 24: Tamil Nadu is confident of achieving carbon neutrality well ahead of India’s 2070 net-zero target as the State had established a 2019 greenhouse-gas emissions baseline in line with IPCC guidelines and was now translating it into a transition pathway towards net zero said Mr Bakan Jagdish Sudhakar, IFS, CEO, Tamil Nadu Green Climate Company, delivering the Keynote Address at the CII Tamil Nadu Sustainable Manufacturing Summit 2026 themed “Driving Industrial Excellence through Sustainability” in Chennai.
Highlighting concrete measures underway, he said, “Tamil Nadu was working on decarbonisation plans for four districts and had initiated a ₹1,000-crore Green Climate Fund, with an initial ₹100-crore commitment from the State Government and the remaining corpus proposed to be raised from the market, to support businesses in areas including energy transition, circular economy and recycling,”.
Mr Sudhakar also highlighted the State’s recently launched passive-cooling guidelines for buildings, which could reduce energy demand by around 30% over the lifetime of a building, with an incremental investment of about ₹300 per square metre during construction and a return on investment of less than three years.
Mr Muthu C, Chairman, CII Tamil Nadu Sustainable Manufacturing Summit Taskforce & President and Chief of Operations, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles Pvt Ltd, pointed out the Summit was designed to move sustainability from a conversation around commitments to one of implementation and measurable business value and sustainability should no longer be viewed as a separate ESG or compliance activity, but integrated into manufacturing operations to identify waste across energy, water, materials and other resources, optimise costs and improve efficiency.
Mr Ravichandran Purushothaman, Chairman, CII Southern Region & President, Danfoss India, highlighted the extensive work undertaken by CII through its Centres of Excellence in areas including green buildings, energy efficiency, water management and sustainability with businesses increasingly needed to understand and measure both their direct and indirect carbon emissions and use available technologies, skills and funding mechanisms to progressively reduce their carbon footprint.
Mr J Murugavel, Vice Chairman, CII Tamil Nadu State Council & Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Matrimony.com, said Tamil Nadu’s diverse industrial ecosystem spanning automobiles, engineering, electronics, textiles, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy and emerging technologies provided a strong base for its next phase of growth stressing that economic growth could not be pursued independently of ecological sustainability and that the quality of growth would increasingly be determined by how sustainably and competitively industries expanded.
Speaking at the session “The Next Industrial Revolution: Manufacturing in a Carbon-Constrained World,” Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Institute Professor, IIT Madras & Chairman, Immersive Technology and Entrepreneurship Labs, said Indian industry must make climate-change technology a core area of innovation and build leadership in developing solutions rather than wait for technologies to emerge elsewhere. Stressing that green technologies would achieve scale only when they were commercially viable, he called for stronger collaboration among startups, scientists, academia and industry to develop and scale climate technologies.
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