Council on Energy, Environment and Water Integrated | International | Independent
The challenge
Enterprises can’t scale alone — they need an enabling ecosystem
Every green enterprise, from a startup to an FPO to an industrial player, depends on conditions no single one of them controls.
0.3%
of India’s DPIIT-recognised startups are climate-tech — a rounding error against 2.3 lakh+ startups, 4.8 crore+ MSMEs and 8 lakh+ FPOs.
Enterprises1
Demand to drive growth
Capital to grow business
R&D and innovation
Financial models
Enabling policies
Narratives to drive the sector
Shared infrastructure
Standards and compliances
1. Includes startups, social enterprises, CSOs, SHGs and FPOs
This is where GEA comes in. Enterprise accelerators strengthen individual firms — sourcing ventures, running mentorship, pitching investors — but none of that builds shared infrastructure, aligns standards and policy, or mobilises long-term demand. GEA works one level up: on the conditions themselves, across an entire value chain, so many enterprises — not just the ones in a cohort — can emerge and scale.
How GEA works
Four interconnected layers, run across two phases
The programme works through four interconnected layers — discover, prioritise, mobilise, and build resilience. The same four layers apply to every value chain; only the depth changes, across a shorter phase that surfaces the problem and builds a coalition around it, and a longer phase that carries that coalition through to something durable enough to outlast GEA’s own involvement.
01
Discover
Map what’s actually holding a value chain back — not one firm’s problem, but a constraint shared across every player in it.
02
Prioritise
Not every gap is worth closing first. Find the single intervention that unlocks the most growth across the whole chain.
03
Mobilise
Bring enterprises, government, financiers, researchers and intermediaries to the table — around a coalition, a standard, or an offtake mechanism.
04
Build resilience
Leave behind institutions, policy signals, patient capital and shared infrastructure that don’t depend on GEA staying involved.
GEA follows a two-phase, time-bound model designed for eventual self-exit, once the ecosystem has the institutions, partnerships, and capabilities to sustain progress independently.
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GEA offers catalytic funds to get diagnosis and design moving, secretariat support and consortium building, network access, outreach and visibility, and support to enable fundraising for what comes next.
Activities: surface systemic bottlenecks across the value chain, prioritise the highest-leverage interventions, and convene ecosystem actors to take up specific responsibilities.
Deliverable: fundable action plans for prioritised solutions, and specific initiatives such as prizes, coalitions, cluster-building, or accelerators.
GEA offers policy insights and policy-facing outputs, mentorship, continued network access, and ongoing outreach and visibility.
Activities: depend on what surfaces in the Momentum Building phase — typically steps to unlock finance and innovation, enable policy, or generate market demand.
Deliverable: pilots and interventions designed and iterating based on learnings and evolving needs.
Partner with us
We’re looking for a small number of partners to help define what this becomes
GEA works through whichever archetype suits a value chain — an individual changemaker, an organisation, a consortium, or an enterprise accelerator — at varying depths of engagement.
Enabling PartnerCatalystCore Partner
Have deep expertise in one part of a value chain?
Plug in your strength, as an Enabling Partner
Incubation, knowledge or convening — join where your expertise has the most leverage. A flexible, time-bound engagement suited to organisations with a narrow but deep capability — a research lab, a certification body, a convening network.
Already working inside a value chain and ready to lead from within?
Lead a value chain, as a Catalyst
Embedded and sector-focused — surface barriers, broker connections, build momentum from inside. We co-design your role together.
Ready to co-own outcomes from diagnosis through to systemic shift?
Co-own the journey, as a Core Partner
Co-design value chain acceleration end to end, with shared responsibility throughout the Acceleration phase.
Tell us where your strength fits, and we’ll work out the right role together.Get in touch →
Learn more about our current partnerships
CEEW mapped 36 value chains across energy transition, circular economy, and the bioeconomy and nature-based solutions in Building a Green Economy for Viksit Bharat (Nov 2025). GEA further prioritises these value chains based on their current state, impact potential, and ecosystem-building opportunities.
See all value chains ↓
Current partners
Regenerative agri-entrepreneurship
Building a pipeline of regenerative agriculture entrepreneurs and practices, led from inside the sector.
Venky Ramachandran · Catalyst
Agri-residue to composite materials
Feedstock aggregation is fragmented and seasonal, with no shared standards for agro-residue material performance or recyclability.
Bio-based fibres
New-age fibres like banana and PALF have no BIS quality standards, so industrial buyers can’t yet write procurement specifications at scale.
Bio-packaging
Biomass aggregation for bio-based packaging is fragmented and seasonal, with no shared standards for compostability or end-of-life performance.
Plastic waste recycling
Recycling is entrenched at the low-value end — outside PET, most polymer streams lack the standards and demand to move beyond mechanical recycling.
Value chains in the pipeline
Chemical-free agriculture
Under 5% of chemical-free farmers receive a price premium; most sell at conventional mandi rates, with no aggregator yet moving diverse smallholder produce to FMCG at scale.
Engineered bamboo
88% of high-end raw material is imported, and engineered bamboo composites remain at low technology readiness, capping the furniture and construction opportunity.
Sustainable tourism
A highly fragmented sector with weak certification and no verified booking platform to distinguish genuine sustainable operators from conventional tourism.
Seaweed cultivation
India contributes just 0.02% of global seaweed volume despite strong cultivation potential, held back by broken unit economics and no formal industry platform.
E-waste recycling
Only about a third of India’s e-waste is recycled through formal channels, and weak verification allows fake EPR credits to undermine the compliance system.