New Delhi: The Maharashtra government on Wednesday announced a $1 billion climate investment pipeline in partnership with AVPN, an Asia-based social impact platform. The announcement was made at the AVPN Global Conference, held at Bharat Mandapam from 25 to 27 August, in the presence of Meghana Bordikar, Minister of State, Government of Maharashtra, and Aman Mittal, Joint CEO, Maharashtra Institution for Transformation (MITRA).
A climate investment pipeline comprises a list of planned climate projects that have been vetted and only require financial support.
The government claims this is the first and largest state-led climate investment pipeline of its kind in Asia. It will be hosted on MITRA’s Mahaniti platform, giving investors direct access to climate projects in Maharashtra. At the conference, the state government also conducted a live transaction on the portal, in which a large chemicals company collaborated with Intent, a demand aggregator, to deploy electric trucks along the Jawaharlal Nehru Port corridor in Navi Mumbai.
“With this pipeline, we are placing real, investment-ready projects before the world, projects that will power our water systems more cleanly, modernise our transport, and strengthen our industry,” Bordikar said in a statement to the press.
The AVPN Global Conference is an annual event that brings together investors, governments, social impact organisations, philanthropists, and development practitioners to discuss social, climate, and political development across Asia.
According to the Maharashtra government, the pipeline comes under the Maharashtra Climate Investment Programme (MCIP), which was launched with AVPN at Mumbai Climate Action Week in February. The programme and the partnership between the Maharashtra government and AVPN are based on the idea that large-scale climate action requires catalytic capital and investment beyond grants and aid. The two partners subsequently developed a platform to facilitate such investment.
The $1 billion investment pipeline focuses on five kinds of climate and energy-transition projects: electric bus aggregation, zero-emission freight corridors, industrial decarbonisation in MSMEs, rural irrigation solarisation and the biochar economy.
Both commercially viable and pipeline-level projects relating to these sectors have been consolidated and put on the Mahaniti platform, allowing investors to access and fund them as they see fit. This gives Maharashtra’s climate projects greater visibility while opening them up to private investors.
“What Maharashtra is demonstrating is how quickly ambition can move into action when government priorities, investable opportunities, and different forms of capital come together,” said Naina Subberwal Batra, CEO, AVPN, in a press statement.
Batra also said the initiative demonstrates a new kind of social impact, in which projects decided and designed by the state government are aligned with different forms of capital—philanthropic, catalytic, and commercial. She added that this financial and impact model could be replicated across Asia, where development and climate challenges are abundant.
The AVPN Conference in New Delhi is centred on building these relationships and pipelines for Asian governments, investors, and philanthropists to tackle rising challenges such as extreme heat, air pollution, health, and global warming.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)