The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) hosted a seminar titled “Climate Finance Needs of Nine G20 EMEs: Well Within Reach” on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at Silver Oak Hall, India Habitat Centre.

The seminar featured a presentation by Rakesh Mohan, President Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow, CSEP, and Former Deputy Governor, RBI; and Janak Raj, Senior Fellow, CSEP, drawing insights from a recent CSEP Report.

The presentation was followed by a conversation with Jayant Sinha, Former Minister of State for Civil Aviation of India; Franziska Ohnsorge, Chief Economist, South Asia Region, World Bank; and Prodipto Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow, Earth Science and Climate Change, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). The session was chaired and moderated by Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Distinguished Fellow, CSEP and Former Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Government of India.

About the event

The CSEP study Climate Finance Needs of Nine G20 EMEs: Well Within Reach assesses the climate finance requirements of nine G20 economies (Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Russian Federation, South Africa, and Turkiye) for four sectors – power, road transport, cement and steel. The period covered for the study is up to 2030. This study, unlike most other studies, follows a bottom-up approach for assessing climate finance requirements. Furthermore, the study estimates climate finance or additional capital expenditure (capex) requirement purely on account of transition to a low-carbon economy over and above the business-as-usual (BAU) investment. It is estimated that the nine EMEs would need climate finance of $2.2 trillion ($255 billion or 0.6 per cent of combined GDP annually) to decarbonise all four sectors for the period 2022-2030.  The sectoral break-up reveals that the climate finance requirement is driven largely by the steel sector ($1.2 trillion or 51 per cent of total estimated climate finance requirement), followed by road transport ($459 billion or 21 per cent), cement ($453 billion or 21 per cent) and power ($149 billion or 7 per cent). The study also assesses (i) financing from multilateral development banks for climate action for the nine economies; (ii) the macroeconomic consistency of climate finance from external sources.

Chair

Montek Singh Ahluwalia

Montek Singh Ahluwalia is a Distinguished Fellow at CSEP. An economist and civil servant, he was former Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission, Government of India. He joined the Government in 1979 as Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Finance, after which he held a series of positions, including Special Secretary to the Prime Minister; Commerce Secretary; Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs; Finance Secretary in the Ministry of Finance; Member of the Planning Commission and Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. In 2001, he was appointed as the first Director of the newly created Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund. He resigned from that position in 2004 to take up the position of Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, which he held from 2004 to 2014.

Mr Ahluwalia has been a key figure in Indian economic policy. He writes on various aspects of development economics and has been published in prominent Indian and international journals and books. He co-authored Re-distribution with Growth: An Approach to Policy, which, published in 1975, was a path-breaking book on income distribution. In February 2020, he published his book, Backstage: The Story Behind India’s High Growth Years, an insider’s account of policymaking from 1985 to 2014.

For his outstanding contribution to economic policy and public service, he was conferred the prestigious ‘Padma Vibhushan’ in 2011, India’s 2^nd highest civilian award for exceptional and distinguished service.

Mr Ahluwalia graduated from Delhi University and holds an MA and an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University. He is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford.

Presenters

Rakesh Mohan

Rakesh Mohan is President Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP).

He served as President and Distinguished Fellow at CSEP from October 2020 to May 2023. Since October 2021, he has been a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC-PM), and in March 2024, he was appointed to the World Bank Group’s Economic Advisory Panel.

Dr Mohan was part of the team that was instrumental in formulating India’s economic reforms from the late 1980s onwards. His distinguished public service includes positions as Executive Director on the Board of the International Monetary Fund, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Secretary of Economic Affairs, and Chief Economic Adviser at the Ministry of Finance, as well as Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Industry.

He has chaired several government committees that produced landmark reports on infrastructure, including The India Infrastructure Report (1996), The Indian Railways Report (2001), and The India Transport Report (2014). Following the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, he co-chaired the G20 Working Group on Enhancing Sound Regulation and Strengthening Transparency (2009), and the CGFS/BIS Working Group on Capital Flows and Emerging Market Economies (2009).

Before joining CSEP, Dr Mohan was Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (2010-11; 2016-20), Yale University and Professor in the Practice of International Economics and Finance at Yale School of Management (2010–12). He has also been Distinguished Consulting Professor at Stanford University (2009) and Distinguished Fellow at Brookings India.

He is the author of three books on urban economics and development, two on monetary policy—Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy: A Practitioner’s View (2009), and Growth with Financial Stability: Central Banking in an Emerging Market—and the edited volume India Transformed: 25 Years of Economic Reforms.

Dr Mohan holds a BSc (Eng) from Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London (1969); a BA from Yale University (1971); and an MA (1974) and PhD (1977) in Economics from Princeton University.

Janak Raj

Janak Raj is a Senior Fellow and leads the macroeconomic segment in the Growth, Finance and Development vertical at CSEP. He also works specifically on inter-linkages between economic growth and human development, fiscal federalism in the health sector, climate finance and multilateral development banks (MDBs) reforms. He is currently also a member of the JM Financial Centre for Financial Research of IIM Udaipur. He has more than four decades of work experience, including in the Reserve Bank of India, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Ministry of Finance (Department of Financial Services). Janak Raj served as an Executive Director in the Reserve Bank of India and as a member of its statutory Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). He also served as Principal Adviser of the Monetary Policy Department and the International Department of the RBI and headed its Department of Economic Policy and Research. At the IMF, Washington DC, he was Senior Advisor to the Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka. He served as an RBI nominee director on the Governing Board of the BSE (formerly Bombay Stock Exchange) and as a Senior Consultant in the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance. He holds a PhD in Economics from IIT Bombay.

Panellists

Jayant Sinha

Jayant Sinha is the President of Everstone Group and Eversource Capital, and a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics. Based in Delhi, he leads Everstone’s efforts to mobilise large-scale sustainability and infrastructure financing.

Before joining the Everstone Group, Jayant served as a two-term Member of Parliament (2014–2024) and held key roles in the Government of India, including Chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance and Minister of State for Finance and Civil Aviation. He was instrumental in landmark initiatives such as the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the National Investment & Infrastructure Fund, privatisation of Air India, DigiYatra national traveller program, and the UDAN Regional Connectivity Scheme, which received the Prime Minister’s Award for Policy Excellence.

Prior to public service, he was Partner and Managing Director at Omidyar Network India, Managing Director at Courage Capital Management, and a Partner at McKinsey & Company in Boston and Delhi, where he co-led the Global Software & Services Practice. His venture investments at Omidyar produced multiple unicorns in technology and financial inclusion.

Jayant holds an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School, an MS in Energy Management and Policy from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BTech with Distinction from IIT Delhi, which awarded him its Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2015. He has been recognised as the Best Lok Sabha MP (2021), Best Parliamentarian (2019-2024), and received the Cumulative Achievement Award (2025) from the Indian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association. He serves on the Harvard Business School Global Advisory Board.

Franziska Ohnsorge

Franziska Ohnsorge is the World Bank Chief Economist for South Asia. In this role, she is responsible for leading the research program on key economic issues in South Asia to inform the policy debate and World Bank lending. Before starting this position, she was the Manager at the Development Economics Vice Presidency, where she spearheaded the flagship Global Economic Prospects report. Prior to joining the World Bank, Franziska Ohnsorge worked in the Office of the Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and at the International Monetary Fund. Her research has been featured in peer-reviewed journals as well as policy publications and has covered a wide range of topics in international macroeconomics and finance, including debt and financial crises, inflation and monetary policy, as well as growth and informal labour markets. Her work has been widely cited, including in the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Prodipto Ghosh 

Prodipto Ghosh is involved in research and teaching at the interface of science, economics, philosophy, and public policy. Currently, he is Distinguished Fellow at TERI. Earlier, he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Cabinet, Governing Council of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, National Security Advisory Board, PM’s Council on Climate Change, G20 Advisory Group of the Ministry of Finance, and the CAG’s Audit Advisory Committee. He was Adjunct Faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh (where he lectured on Indian macroeconomic policy and public finance), TERI University (where he taught post-graduate courses on Normative Ethics and Microeconomics and regulation), and Visiting Fellow at Smith College, Oxford (with which he engaged in collaborative policy research).

He was a member of the IAS from 1969 to 2007, when he retired as Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. He has also held the positions of Economic Advisor and Additional Secretary to the PM, Additional Secretary at the Department of Economic Affairs, and Senior Environment Specialist at the Asian Development Bank, Manila. He was a member of India’s negotiating team at the UNFCCC climate change negotiations from 2001 to 2012. He is the author of a number of peer-reviewed research papers and several newspaper articles.

He has a PhD and M.Phil. in Economics and Policy Analysis from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi, and has received Alumni Achievement Awards from both institutions. He is also the recipient of the BP Pal Centenary Memorial Award.

All content reflects the individual views of the speakers. The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) does not hold an institutional view on any subject.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.

In the Media

Raising global capital to fund decarbonisation ‘very, very difficult’, says former MoS Jayant Sinha