Kumar Bahukhandi
As India prepares to launch its Carbon Credit Trading System (CCTS), IIM Bangalore, through its Centre for Digital Public Goods (CDPG), convened a roundtable on 19 March 2026 to design an Open Network for Carbon Markets (ONCM). The roundtable brought together leaders representing regulators, market exchange makers, technology service providers, policy makers, senior officers from the forest departments, policy makers and corporate buyers to pave the way forward.
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IIM Bangalore
The proposed ONCM, built in partnership with Networks for Humanity (NFH), intends to address fundamental barriers that limit India’s participation in global carbon markets. It is designed to mitigate challenges such as fragmented registries, cross-border trading constraints, pricing opacity, and non-standard monitoring-review-verification (MRV) processes. The ONCM aims to build an open digital infrastructure that facilitates seamless trading of carbon credits across global markets, while simultaneously preserving participants’ agency, autonomy and data sovereignty.
The network is also designed to expand access at the grassroots level. Even the farmer with the smallest holding who intends to monetize farm assets as carbon credits would be able to onboard and transact through simple voice commands on platforms of their choice (such as WhatsApp). At the same time, global buyers would be able to trust these supplies due to interoperable, programmable authentication and audit mechanisms, and transparent pricing.
Opening the roundtable, Prof. R Srinivasan, Chairperson, CDPG, highlighted the need for an interoperable open network that enables the Indian industry as well as farmers and micro-entrepreneurs to leverage the power of global carbon markets. Sujith Nair, Co-founder, Beckn and Networks for Humanity (NFH), drew on examples from early internet and telecom protocols to demonstrate how open protocol thinking has revolutionized mobility, such as Namma Yatri; commerce, such as ONDC; and energy, such as the Digital Energy Grid. He further emphasized that such protocols build digital plumbing networks, while enabling market participants to build diverse applications on top. Ms. Chaitrali Bhoi, the ONCM project lead, highlighted the various challenges faced by current carbon markets and articulated the vision for the ONCM.
The ONCM design was deliberated with experts distributed across four working groups – designing appropriate market mechanisms and regulatory frameworks, technology enablers, supply side actors and demand side actors. Across these working groups, experts debated design requirements and technical feasibility, and agreed on initiating pilot projects.
The roundtable concluded with a synthesis of the design and commitments from participating experts to take forward pilot implementations.
Key participants included Ms. Praveena Rai, CEO, MCX; Dr. K Ravichandran, Director, IIFM Bhopal; Ms. Komal Shah, SML Ltd.; Dr. Ch. Sudhakar Reddy, NRSC/ISRO, and leaders from NFH, IIMB, and NLSIU, as well as organizations such as Tata Consultancy Services, RenewCred, PhonePe and Tata Motors.
