Why Climate Entrepreneurship in India Needs a City Sandbox - UofT India
Read Time: 3 Mins
Date: 31-07-2026
India’s cities buy almost nothing new. More than 700 water and waste technology startups sit on the DPIIT register, yet less than 1 percent of municipal contracts go to new technology [1]. At the University of Toronto India Foundation, we read this as a finding about access rather than a finding about talent. Climate entrepreneurship in India is not short of ideas, and it is not short of public money. What it lacks is a legitimate route into the systems it is meant to serve. The city sandbox is the instrument we have designed for that route.
What Exactly Is A City Sandbox?
A sandbox is a bounded zone, system, or dataset that a city formally opens to a cohort of teams. Three elements define it:
- A written problem statement from the city stakeholders
- An access agreement
- A named technical steward
It is neither a competition nor a mock project. It exists because a city cannot otherwise open live infrastructure to an early stage founder without triggering a procurement event. The sandbox makes access lawful, bounded, and owned.
According to public data, the commitment on the government side is already substantial (see Appendix 1):
- The Union Budget 2026-27 provides Rs. 2,16,654 crore for water supply, sanitation and river conservation across its major schemes [2]
- Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0 was approved with an outlay of Rs. 1.41 lakh crore for its 2021-26 mission period [3]
- Rs. 13,415 crore has been released for clean air work across 130 cities since 2019 [4]
The constraint, in our assessment, is not the presence of budgets. It is the absence of a structure through which new technology can meet them.
Who Must Sit Inside The Sandbox For Climate Entrepreneurship To Work?
No single institution holds everything this work requires. Universities hold talent, faculty and a credit framework, but not industry access. Pre-incubation partners hold coaching, mentorship and community, but not a founder pipeline or research depth. Cities and industry hold the problems, the budgets and the operational reality, but not the capacity to run programmes against them. The sandbox activates the pentahelix, bringing university, government, industry, enabling organisations and founders into one coordinated structure, and it is the Foundation’s role to hold that coordination between actors who would not otherwise meet.
A working cluster therefore carries seven roles:
- A university anchor
- An industry partner with a named champion or A municipal body with a live mandate
- An incubation partner
- Early stage founders doing the work
- A follow-on co-funder
- The Foundation as convenor
The University of Toronto works inside this structure rather than beside it. Faculty provide technical support to founders as they build, and the wider network carries the techno commercial work a young venture cannot yet do alone: market analysis, business model evaluation, and the route from a working prototype to a paying buyer. For climate startups building against sandbox problems, that pairing of technical depth and commercial method is the difference between a demonstration and a deployment.
Climate resilience in Indian cities will be procured, not pitched. The University of Toronto India Foundation is assembling the room in which that purchase becomes possible, one sandbox at a time.
Appendix 1: Data Sources
[1] DPIIT startup register; analysis in UTIF strategy research, FY 2026-27
[2] Union Budget 2026-27, budget estimates for water supply, sanitation and river conservation schemes; analysis by Down to Earth, February 2026
[3] Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0, approved outlay, Cabinet approval October 2021
[4] National Clean Air Programme progress data, Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, May 2026