In Dubanochi village, Darjeeling, a third-generation farmer named Subhonanda Singha has been doing something counterintuitive for three cropping seasons: spreading grey basalt powder across his rice paddies. The dust disappears once a tractor folds it into the soil. In the field, it looks like soil treatment. On a corporate climate report generated thousands of kilometers away, it’s logged as carbon removal.

Welcome to India’s emerging role as a carbon removal powerhouse.

How Basalt Becomes a Credit

The process is enhanced weathering — spreading crushed silicate rock on agricultural land to accelerate the natural chemical reaction that pulls CO₂ from the atmosphere. The minerals react with carbonic acid in the soil, converting atmospheric carbon into stable bicarbonates that eventually wash into the ocean and stay locked away for thousands of years.

Bengaluru-based startup Alt Carbon, founded by brothers Sparsh and Shrey Agarwal, sources basalt from quarry and mining waste in eastern India and distributes it to farmers free of cost. The material — branded “Hari Mati” — costs Alt Carbon almost nothing to acquire, since it’s effectively upcycled industrial waste.

Each verified tonne of CO₂ removed from a field like Singha’s becomes a carbon credit worth $150–600, depending on durability and verification standards. That price is paid by global corporations — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Unilever — trying to reach net-zero targets between 2030 and 2040.

The Numbers

India’s CDR sector is still small but growing fast:

  • ~50 carbon removal projects now registered in the country
  • 214,000 verified removal credits generated so far
  • For context: India has retired 262 million credits from older carbon avoidance projects (preventing deforestation, funding cleaner energy). Removal credits — physically taking CO₂ out of the atmosphere — are a different, more rigorous category.

Farmers See Results First

For Singha, the climate accounting is abstract. The yield boost is not. Before basalt, his land produced 1,600–1,700 kg of paddy per acre. After three crop cycles with basalt blended with organic manure: 2,600 kg per acre. His family is among nearly 500 households in Dubanochi now participating.

This is what makes enhanced weathering in the Global South compelling. The co-benefits — improved soil pH, better nutrient availability, higher yields — mean farmers have reasons to participate beyond carbon credit revenue. It’s not charity. It’s better farming that happens to remove carbon.

Why India

Large-scale carbon removal needs three things: abundant land, the right minerals, and warm, wet weather that speeds up the chemical reactions. India has all three. Alt Carbon’s CEO puts it simply: “If durable carbon removal is going to scale, it has to work in places where agricultural land and minerals are abundant, with ideal weather conditions.”

India also has something the DAC industry doesn’t: extremely low deployment costs. No concrete pads, no fans, no electricity. A tractor, some basalt dust, and tropical monsoons do the work. The Global South isn’t just a location for carbon removal — it might be where the economics actually work at scale.

The Uncomfortable Bridge

There’s a structural irony here worth naming. The same corporations whose data centers, shipping fleets, and supply chains generate millions of tons of emissions are funding basalt distribution to smallholder farms in Darjeeling. Carbon credits are, by design, a financial bridge between developed-world emissions and developing-world removal capacity.

Whether that bridge is elegant climate finance or a mechanism for rich companies to keep emitting — that debate isn’t going away. But the CO₂ doesn’t care about the politics. Every tonne of basalt that weathers in Singha’s paddy field is a tonne of carbon that’s no longer in the atmosphere.

And India is just getting started.

Source: Mint / LiveMint

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