EPI: An imperfect index, an uncomfortable truth

India ranks 176th in the 2026 Environment Performance Index. Is the index unfair, or is the country failing to confront its environmental crisis?

India has once again landed near the bottom of the global Environment Performance Index (EPI), ranking 176th out of 177 countries in the 2026 edition, ahead only of Laos. With a score of 22.46, against table-topper Estonia’s 74.79, the headline is stark. But is it fair to call India one of the world’s most pollution-hit nations, or is this simply an artefact of a flawed ranking system, as New Delhi has argued before?

The honest answer is that both things can be true at once. The EPI’s methodology has genuine limitations — it shifts across editions, making year-on-year comparisons tricky, and it measures current-state performance rather than historical responsibility, a point India raised sharply when it was ranked last in 2022. Those are legitimate scientific and diplomatic objections, not mere excuses.

Yet dismissing the index as “unscientific surmise”, as the Government did in 2022, does not survive contact with the underlying data. India’s own indicators — not just its rank — tell a grim story: rising deaths and disease linked to fine particulate matter, worsening carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide exposure over a decade, and a collapse in the effectiveness of marine protected areas. These are not abstractions produced by a Yale-Columbia formula; they are lived realities in Delhi’s winter smog and along an overfished coastline pushed towards catching species lower on the food chain.

The deeper story is one of tension, not villainy. India’s per capita emissions remain low by global standards, and hundreds of millions of citizens are only now gaining reliable access to electricity, which is still overwhelmingly coal-fired. That is the crux of the “development versus pollution” dilemma that the report itself acknowledges. Encouragingly, the 10-year trend shows India’s score improving, and the pace at which emissions are rising has slowed. Progress exists; it is simply outpaced by scale. So, what would doing “enough” actually look like? Four things stand out. First, air quality enforcement needs teeth - real-time monitoring, industrial accountability and a faster transition from coal to renewables, an area where India has made pledges but where implementation lags behind ambition. Second, marine and coastal governance needs an overhaul; protected areas that exist on paper but not in practice explain the index’s harshest assessments. Third, this year’s new grassland-conversion indicator is a reminder that ecosystem protection cannot stop at forests — India’s grasslands, vital carbon sinks, remain a policy afterthought. Fourth, India needs its own credible and transparent environmental data infrastructure, both to hold itself accountable and to contest international rankings from a position of evidence rather than denial. Rejecting an imperfect index outright, as happened in 2022, forfeits the opportunity to use it constructively. A more useful approach - engaging with the EPI’s authors, who have publicly said they welcome collaboration, while building stronger domestic metrics — would serve India better than defensiveness. No ranking is perfect. It is indicative. Whether India treats it as a warning worth heeding, or one worth arguing away, will determine the future of the country’s air quality.