As India accelerates its transition towards a greener and more sustainable economy, the role of higher education institutions in developing future-ready talent has become increasingly important.
Recognising the growing demand for professionals who can navigate the intersections of climate science, engineering, economics, policy, and technology, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore has established the Mehta Family School of Sustainability and launched a BTech programme in Environmental Economics and Sustainable Engineering.
In this interview with Anoop Verma, Prof. Pritee Sharma, Head of the Mehta Family School of Sustainability at IIT Indore, discusses the vision behind the School, the rationale for introducing India’s first interdisciplinary undergraduate programme of its kind, and the emerging opportunities in sustainability, climate technology, renewable energy, water management, ESG, and green finance.
She also explains why systems thinking, industry engagement, and multidisciplinary education will be critical for preparing the next generation of sustainability leaders capable of addressing some of the most complex environmental and developmental challenges of the 21st century.
Edited excerpts:
IIT Indore has launched what is being described as India’s first BTech programme combining Environmental Economics and Sustainable Engineering. What gap in India’s higher education ecosystem does this programme seek to address?
The gap this programme addresses is one that industry has been articulating loudly for several years now. India needs sustainability professionals who can think across disciplines, but most academic pathways still train students within disciplinary silos. Companies do not only need engineers who understand technology or economists who understand markets. They need professionals who can evaluate climate data, energy infrastructure, ESG mandates, regulatory requirements, and business viability together.That kind of undergraduate training has not existed in India so far. The BTech in Environmental Economics and Sustainable Engineering, first of its kind across all IITs offered, is designed to address this gap by combining the analytical depth of engineering with environmental economics, climate science, policy, and law in one rigorous four-year curriculum.
It is not a conventional engineering degree with a few sustainability courses added to it. It is built from the ground up around the real-world demands of the sustainability transition.
The programme draws from global institutions such as Stanford, Purdue and Harvard but it has been deliberately designed for the Indian context. Its three verticals, Energy Systems and Battery Technology, Water and Climate Studies, and Environmental Economics and Environmental Law reflect sectors where India will need deep capability over the next several decades. The curriculum is designed in collaboration with international Academic Advisors and Eminent Professors from Indian Institutions.
One of the distinctive aspects of the programme is the integration of environmental economics, climate science, engineering, and policy studies. Why is interdisciplinary thinking becoming essential for solving sustainability challenges in the 21st century?
Sustainability problems do not arrive in disciplinary categories. A water scarcity problem is at once a hydrological issue, an agricultural issue, an economic issue, a public policy issue, and an engineering issue. The same is true of energy transition, climate adaptation, carbon markets, and resource governance.
Climate change is a multifaceted issue shaped by history, culture, policy, science, and economics, and systems thinking is essential for understanding that complexity.
This is why interdisciplinary thinking has moved from being a desirable academic approach to a professional necessity. A sustainability professional must be able to interpret scientific data, assess technological options, understand economic trade-offs, and navigate legal and policy frameworks. A solution that is technically strong but economically unviable will not scale. A policy that is ambitious but poorly informed by science will not work on the ground. A business model that ignores ecological realities will create new risks.
India’s regulatory and business environment is also becoming more complex. ESG reporting, climate-risk assessment, carbon markets, sustainability-linked finance, and environmental compliance are creating demand for graduates who can work across domains. A professional navigating this landscape cannot be only an engineer, only an economist, or only a policy analyst. They need to bring these perspectives into conversation with one another.
We are building interdisciplinarity into the structure of the BTech itself, so that students spend four years learning to connect engineering decisions with environmental consequences, economic viability, legal frameworks, and public outcomes.
The curriculum places strong emphasis on areas such as energy systems, battery technologies, water sustainability, climate systems, and environmental policy. Which of these domains do you believe will become the most strategically important for India over the next two decades?
Every domain in our curriculum is strategically important for India, and I want to be clear about that because they are deeply interconnected. You cannot solve energy without solving storage. You cannot solve storage without solving water, because battery manufacturing and cooling infrastructure are water-intensive. You cannot solve either without sound environmental policy and economic frameworks that make solutions viable at scale.
That said, if I were to identify the domain that will most sharply define India’s development trajectory over the next two decades, it is water. India holds just 4 percent of the world’s freshwater resources but sustains nearly 18 percent of the global population. Close to 600 million Indians already face high to extreme water stress, and by 2030, total water demand is projected to be twice the available supply, a gap that could translate into a 6 percent loss in GDP. India needs to invest $270 billion in water infrastructure over the next decade and currently falls short by at least $100 billion.
Water is where environmental stress, food security, public health, and economic resilience converge most visibly, and it is the domain where the cost of inaction is most immediate.
The second domain I would watch very closely is energy systems and battery technology, because it is the enabler of everything else. The IEA’s India Energy Outlook anticipates India could achieve 140 to 200 GW of battery energy storage capacity by 2040, the largest globally. India’s battery energy storage market, valued at $31.47 billion in 2023, is projected to expand to between $120 billion and $150 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of over 33 percent. Renewable energy without storage is not energy security, it is intermittency.
For India to truly transition, storage technology must scale at a pace the country has not seen before. Both of these domains, water and energy storage, will require not just engineers but professionals who understand the economics, the policy architecture, and the financing mechanisms simultaneously. That is precisely the kind of graduate this school is designed to produce.
Sustainability is often discussed in theoretical terms, but industry today requires professionals with practical and technological expertise. How is the School ensuring that students gain hands-on exposure to real-world sustainability challenges and emerging green technologies?
The honest answer is that we designed the curriculum backwards from this very concern. When we sat down to build this programme, the first question we asked was not what should students learn in a classroom, but what should they be capable of doing when they leave. That drove us to a structure where theoretical and analytical training is intentionally compressed and intensified so that students have the maximum possible time for applied work.
The programme places strong emphasis on systems modelling, data-driven decision-making, and environmental monitoring, alongside exposure to industry through internships across sectors including renewable energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Students will undertake a structured sequence of micro projects, mini projects, and a major undergraduate project, with the option to pursue these either with a single industry partner in depth or across multiple organizations for broader exposure.
The curriculum was developed in collaboration with the Mehta Family Foundation’s CARE Advisory team, which brings together international academic and industry expertise, ensuring that what is taught in the classroom is calibrated to what is actually needed on the ground.
The three Centres of Excellence within the school, in Energy Systems and Battery Technology, Water and Climate Studies, and Environmental Economics and Environmental Law, are not separate research units sitting apart from the teaching programme. They are the living laboratories through which students engage with real research problems, from extreme weather forecasting to advanced hydrological modelling to microplastics mitigation.
Beyond this, an Industry Advisory Council comprising Chief Sustainability Officers from leading Indian firms will actively shape curriculum development, host internships, and guide capstone projects. The intent is not to produce graduates who understand sustainability in theory. It is to produce graduates who have already worked on it.
India is positioning itself as a major player in renewable energy, green manufacturing, electric mobility, and climate diplomacy. What kind of career pathways do you foresee for graduates of this programme in both the Indian and global context?
The career landscape for graduates of this programme spans both the private sector and public institutions, in India and globally, and it is expanding faster than most people realise. Within India, the most immediate opportunities are in ESG strategy, climate risk advisory, carbon markets, and green finance.
India launched its Carbon Credit Trading Scheme portal in 2026, creating an entirely new category of professionals: carbon credit analysts, verifiers, and market strategists.SEBI’s BRSR framework now covers the top 1,000 listed companies, with mandatory ESG assurance requirements, while the RBI has issued guidelines requiring banks to assess climate-related financial risks in their lending portfolios.
Beyond compliance, graduates will find opportunities in renewable energy project development, battery storage infrastructure, water technology firms, climate-focused funds, and policy think tanks such as CEEW and TERI. What distinguishes a graduate of this programme from others entering these roles is the combination of technical depth and economic fluency. They will not need to be trained on the job to understand what they are advising on.
Globally, the picture is equally compelling. Sustainability salaries across ESG and climate roles have risen consistently through 2025 and 2026, driven by mandatory disclosure requirements, corporate net-zero commitments, and a talent shortage that shows no signs of easing. More than half of Fortune Global 500 companies still do not have a Chief Sustainability Officer, which means the demand for senior sustainability leadership globally is structurally unmet.
Climate tech businesses in clean energy, battery storage, and sustainable mobility attracted $56 billion in investment in the first nine months of 2025 alone, and that capital needs professionals who can deploy it intelligently. India is also chairing and shaping multilateral climate finance conversations this year, which opens pathways into international institutions, multilateral development banks, and climate diplomacy roles for graduates with the right interdisciplinary foundation.
The first batch from this programme will graduate in 2030, and the world they enter will need exactly what we are training them to do.
You have spoken about building the next generation of sustainability leaders. In your view, what qualities, intellectual orientation, and ethical mindset will define future leadership in the sustainability and climate domain?
The sustainability leaders of the future will need intellectual range, practical judgment, and ethical clarity. They will have to understand complex systems and make decisions where environmental, technological, economic, social, and regulatory considerations are all in play.
The first quality is systems thinking. A sustainability leader should be able to look at a river basin and understand not only the hydrology, but also the communities that depend on it, the agricultural economy around it, the policies governing it, and the investments needed to protect it and create solutions using most modern AI and ML based solutions. This ability to see connections will be essential.
The second quality is the ability to work across disagreement. Sustainability sits at the intersection of competing priorities: industry and ecology, development and conservation, present livelihoods and future resilience, national growth and global climate commitments. Leaders in this field must be able to build coalitions across these tensions. A solution that works only in a seminar room is not enough.
The third quality is grounded curiosity. Students must understand sustainability not only through models and frameworks, but through lived realities. They should understand what water scarcity means for a village, what battery storage failure means for a grid operator, or what environmental degradation means for a coastal community. That connection between knowledge and reality is what separates those who speak about sustainability from those who can advance it.
The Mehta Family School of Sustainability has emerged at a time when climate change, resource stress, and environmental degradation are becoming central policy concerns globally. What is the larger vision behind establishing this School at IIT Indore, and how do you see it contributing to India’s sustainability transition?
India’s sustainability transition is already underway, and higher education has to move in step with that ambition. The country has committed to 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2070 at COP26 . At the same time, demand for professionals in ESG analytics, climate data, green technology, water management, and climate finance is growing rapidly with some estimates pegging the need at 35 million green jobs by 2047. The question is whether we are preparing the right human capital for this transition.
The larger vision behind the Mehta Family School of Sustainability is to build that talent pipeline from the undergraduate level itself. Sustainability education in India has largely been concentrated at the master’s or doctoral level. What makes this School distinctive is that it begins at the BTech stage and treats sustainability not as an add-on, but as the core organising principle of the curriculum.
The curriculum, developed through structured dialogue with institutions including Stanford, RICE, Purdue, Columbia, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, and MSE Chennai and IGIDR Mumbai, among others, is organised around three verticals: Energy Systems and Battery Technology, Water and Climate Studies, and Environmental Economics and Environmental Law. These areas reflect the scale and complexity of India’s sustainability challenge.
The School’s target of graduating over 400 students in ten years, along with more than 1,000 additional professionals through executive programmes, is calibrated directly to the opportunity and urgency before us.
Our goal is to prepare industry ready professionals who can work across technology, science, economics, law, and policy. India’s sustainability transition will not be driven by narrow specialists alone. It will require people who can understand a hydrological model, innovate a battery system, assess the economics of a solution, and engage with the regulatory framework around it. That is the kind of graduate this School has been created to produce.
