Gandhinagar opens South Asia's first World Circular Economy Forum

Gujarat's capital hosts the World Circular Economy Forum from Tuesday, the first time the event has been held in South Asia. Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav and chief minister Bhupendra Patel are due to open the meeting at Mahatma Mandir. The theme is Circular Economy: Transition for People and Prosperity.

The Press Information Bureau said more than 2,000 people from over 65 countries are expected, with more than 125 exhibitors at an international expo. The main programme on 15 and 16 September has four plenaries and 16 parallel sessions in four tracks: people, business, governance and growth. Accelerator sessions on 17 and 18 September, about 80 of them, will run in Gandhinagar, online, and in other cities. Online attendance is free. Working language for the core sessions is English.

What India wants from the chair

India has just become co-chair of the board of the 10 Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production, a UN process with a long name and a short list of tools. That board meets in person in Gandhinagar on 15 September, on the same campus as the forum. The overlap is deliberate. New Delhi wants the circular-economy conversation to sit next to industrial policy, not only next to waste-picker photography.

Session titles released in advance cover AI applications, jobs, energy, finance, product standards, factory methods, start-ups and youth. Those are the files Indian ministries already claim under different headings: plastics, critical minerals, solar panel recycling, vehicle scrap, and municipal waste. A forum does not write a statute. It does put foreign buyers and lenders in the same hall as Gujarati plants that want contracts.

Why Gujarat, and why this week

Mahatma Mandir is a convention machine that has hosted investment summits for years. Gujarat's pitch is that it can show working industrial parks, not only declarations. Whether the expo's 125 stands include methods that survive contact with informal recycling chains is the test visitors will apply. India's circular-economy story has always had two layers. One is policy paper. The other is the scrap yard and the household that already reuses because new goods cost too much. A forum that only speaks to the first layer will look like every other imported summit.

The timing follows the BRICS meeting in Delhi, where Narendra Modi warned against the weaponisation of critical minerals. Recycling those minerals is one of the few domestic answers to an export licence that does not arrive. WCEF is not a minerals conference. It is the nearest large stage this month on which Indian officials can talk about keeping value inside the country after a product dies.

How to read the guest list

Sixty-five countries is a count of badges, not of power. The useful question is which development banks and which manufacturers sent people who can sign. The Sitra-linked WCEF franchise, born in Finland, has always mixed Nordic process talk with host-country industrial display. In Gandhinagar the display will be Indian. The process talk will be global. If the two stay in separate rooms, the week will produce photographs. If a metals recycler leaves with a term sheet, the week will have done what the theme claims.