Bihar presented its first Green Budget for the financial year 2020-21 — option 1.

What a green budget is. It is a statement, presented alongside the main budget, that brings together in one place all the spending across every department that bears on the environment — forestry, pollution control, clean energy, water conservation, sanitation and climate adaptation. Such spending is normally scattered through a dozen departmental heads and is therefore invisible as a whole; the green budget makes the total, and the priorities within it, visible to the legislature and the public. Bihar was among the first Indian states to adopt the practice.

The policy behind it. The green budget came out of Bihar’s Jal-Jeevan-Hariyali mission, a multi-year campaign covering the revival of tanks, ponds and wells, rainwater harvesting, tree planting to raise forest cover, solar energy and organic farming. Bihar faces an unusually sharp combination of environmental pressures — recurrent flooding in the north, drought in the south, a falling water table, and forest cover of under 8 per cent, well below the national figure — so a consolidated view of what is being spent has practical value.

The wider context. Bihar was also the first state to declare a “climate emergency” style resolution through its assembly, and green budgeting has since been taken up by other states and discussed at the Union level as a step towards linking public finance to environmental outcomes.

Hence, the answer is Financial Year 2020-21.