Ms. Neha Chaudhary, IRS*
“Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and it is happening even more quickly than we feared” states the United Nations.
The climate change conference at Glasgow in 2021, COP26, has provided hopes for limiting the devastation caused all over the world by environmental degradation and climate change.
India’s commitments at the Conference included net-zero emissions by the year 2070, to power 50% of her energy needs from renewable resources, increasing the renewable installed capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030 from the present 100 GW, reducing the total emission to 1 billion tonnes from its projected emissions from now till 2030 and pledging net zero by 2070. The targets are ambitious but challenges are many. Though the good thing is that India, as do many other developing nations, realizes the perils of climate change and environment degradation but also has to contend with a bumpy road ahead. Some of the main challenges in my opinion for India to fulfill its commitments are:
- Integrating and upgrading financial and infrastructural commitments to adopt, adapt and fulfill India’s ambitious climate change mitigation targets.
- Huge dependence of a large part of Indian population on traditional fossil fuels.
- Making available and accessible the innovative technology and green-clean energy to India’s vast population at affordable cost.
- Sustained efforts and focus to not only overcome the institutional problems but also to foster an environment of political and economic will to tackle the challenge of climate change and environmental degradation.
India as many other developing nations, has been deeply and adversely affected by rising poverty and unemployment. Majority of funds and governmental expenditure is routed to social impact programmes leaving almost nil or little financial resources to spend and allocate to environmental policies. There is little support from private sector as well in this regard, since it is a capital -intensive enterprise.
Primarily due to the devastating effect of COVID 19 India has had to recently respond to this crisis by introducing large economic and social stimulus packages which commanded a sizeable proportion of the country’s GDP, thus putting pressure on India’s commitment to tackle the climate change. The total budgetary allocation for India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has been reduced to INR 28.7 billion (USD 400 million) compared to INR 31 billion (USD 420 million) in 2020-2021. This drop in funding has impacted spending for the National Mission for Green India, Climate change action plan and other such related mitigation projects.
Further, the Indian government allocated INR 44 billion (USD 600 million) in the 2020-2021 budget to ensure clean air in cities with a population of more than 1 million, but has reduced the allocation by 50% to INR 22.2 billion (USD 300 million) in the 2021-2022 budget.
In a nutshell as per the figures released by the Government in its annual Economic Survey and budget document, India has, over the years, only spent $ 19 Billion on average as against the required $ 170 Billion per annum, i.e only around 10 % of the needed amounts to fund its climate change mitigation agenda. The infra- related activities like setting up of a robust public transportation system, Rural infrastructure development system for clean and green agri-tech, unified energy grid, renewable energy generation infrastructure and power sector upgradation have taken a cut and have been set back by some couple of years.
In India’s $2.7 trillion economy, agriculture and its related activities pay a huge role employing more that half of its 1.3 billion people and contributing an estimated $405 Billion to the GDP. Agricultural activities and its auxiliary activities of animal rearing and livestock usage emit greenhouse gases including methane. The agri -activities also are largely dependent on fossil fuels thereby contributing further to anthropogenic methane emissions.
The Indian government sources also report that the share of non- renewables and fossil fuels in the total installed power generation capacity (including hydropower) is almost 60% as of September 2021.
Additionally, India continues to support coal and its usage by providing cash subsidies and loans to coal-mining companies and thermal power projects.
All these factors only compound the climate change disaster, making the Indian population extremely vulnerable to its ill-effects, putting a further burden on the State’s resources.
Adopting clean and green energy technology is a costly business and for Indians more so since majority of its population is below poverty line. The inertia to adopt new and innovative technology is deepened more so because of the prohibitive cost of the technology. Just to cite an example, an EV car is likely to be twice as costly in India as compared to most other countries, thanks to high custom and export duties. Due to the prohibitive costs involved, most of the cutting-edge technology is discarded in favor of the more affordable and easily accessible ones.
However, in my view the most significant challenge that a country with diverse cultures, religions and beliefs such as India faces is lack of political will to introduce changes that may not find acceptance across the population. India has to contend with issues of populism and pressure groups that make most of the environment-related policies to be chucked on the back-burner. We have tribes and settlements living right inside national parks and jungles and any and every effort to rehabilitate them elsewhere has been largely unsuccessful and met with strong backlash and opposition. Consequently, many such policies and efforts are withdrawn. These settlements have caused poaching, wildlife-human confrontations and deforestation that only contribute further to climate disaster.
In order for India to fulfill its climate related mitigation commitments it has to first commit to the following:
- Allocate enough funds to invest in the Research and Development of clean and sustainable energy resources.
- Reduce its dependence on traditional fossil fuels and promote alternate and renewable sources of energy like solar and wind.
- Invest in a robust public transportation system reducing the dependence of public on private transportation.
- Encourage Private Equity investment and private companies’ participation to provide to the people affordable and sustainable alternate sources of energy. Private equity investments can tackle the infrastructural and technological deficiencies in generation of clean- green and affordable technology and R and D. This can be done by providing production-linked incentives to private partners for aiding the government in generation of sustainable energy resources.
- Free and easy exchange of green and clean technology between nations without any bureaucratic bottlenecks.
- The government should ensure that India’s electricity distribution companies (DISCOMS) shift to renewable energy procurement and adopt smart metering. Such initiatives would also underscore India’s commitment to accelerate clean energy adoption. To be aligned with the Paris Agreement and COP26 targets, India must phase out coal use in power sector soon.
- Increased budgetary allocation to Agriculture and related activities. These agriculture and agro-based funding initiatives could be used to promote sustainable agriculture and eco-friendly farming practices. The solution lies in adopting farmer-friendly technologies which also aid in reducing emissions.
- To strengthen regulatory machinery so that green-violators could not only be caught but also be deterred from committing activities that harm the environment.
In a country like India, it is extremely important to adopt a collaborative approach so to involve all the stake-holders concerned, in finding a solution to the climate disaster. A unified policy to engage all the stake holders including the civil society will boost the efforts of the government in climate change mitigation.
Refrences:
- https://www.un.org/en/un75/climate-crisis-race-we-can-win.
- https://www.scroll.in/article/974098/is-india-spending-enough-to-tackle-the- inevitable-effects-of-climate-change, dated 07-10-2020.
- Article “Climate: The Global Commons” in Economic & Political Weekly, edition dated November 6-13, 2021.
- Article “Climate Change: Raag Bhairavi at Glasgow COP26” in Economic & Political Weekly, edition dated November 20, 2021.
- Landscape of Green Finance in India Report dated September 2020 available @ climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/landscape-of-green- finance-in-india-1-2.pdf.
- Budget and Economic Survey reports released by the Government of India.
About Author –
*Neha Chaudhary is an IRS officer of 2004 batch and is presently posted as Additional Director of Income Tax in Delhi. She has been associated on voluntary basis with the India Water Foundation for years and has participated with them in creating awareness in public about the dangers of climate change, environmental degradation and the havoc they create in our lives.
