Carbon Farming and Carbon Markets in Indian Agriculture: A Critical Narrative Review of Mitigation Potential, Verification Constraints and Smallholder Inclusion

Abstract

Carbon farming has moved rapidly from an agronomic proposition to a market instrument in India, where a domestic carbon credit trading scheme has been established and agriculture has been designated an offset sector alongside a growing population of project-based initiatives. Institutional development has outpaced the evidence required to support it. This critical narrative review examines whether the biophysical, methodological and institutional foundations of carbon farming are strong enough to sustain credit-based climate mitigation in Indian cropping systems. Literature published between 2004 and 2026 was identified through searching of open scholarly indexes, institutional repositories and citation-based retrieval, and was appraised for methodological adequacy, alignment between claims and evidence, and relevance to smallholder-dominated agriculture. Four conclusions emerge. The agronomic evidence for soil organic carbon accrual under conservation agriculture, agroforestry, nutrient management and amendment-based pathways is directionally consistent but modest in magnitude, regionally heterogeneous, and frequently accompanied by yield responses that differ by agro-ecological zone. Measurement, reporting and verification remains the binding constraint, because crediting protocols differ so substantially in their treatment of baseline stocks, modelling assumptions and sampling design that credits issued under different protocols are not equivalent units. The accounting principles on which credit integrity depends, namely additionality, permanence and the avoidance of double claiming, are particularly fragile where holdings are small, tenure is insecure and the practices being credited are partially pre-existing. The distributional record of early Indian projects indicates systematic under-representation of marginal farmers and women, negligible realisation of payments and substantial disadoption. The accessible evidence therefore supports carbon farming as a soil health and resilience strategy with genuine co-benefits, but does not yet support its treatment as a reliable source of fungible mitigation units at smallholder scale. Priorities include long-term regionally stratified field networks, standardised and independently validated verification architectures, systematic ex post evaluation of operating projects, and payment designs calibrated to measured opportunity costs.