Majnu, 40, started labouring at the brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar district this year, when the previous one he worked at shut down after the government rolled out new rules – including a coal ban – to reduce heavy air pollution from the sector.

The green switch has been unaffordable for many kiln owners and has had a domino effect, with kilns closing one after the other in districts around the Indian capital.

“The kiln we were working at shut down and the owner sold his land to a builder,’’ said Majnu, adding that a house will be constructed there instead.

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Majnu had originally found work in the now closed kiln in the Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh through a network of thekedars (contractors) back home, which helped him get his current job too.

“We did not lose a season of work when the kiln shut,” Majnu said. But there are concerns that things may become harder, with many labourers lacking access to social welfare.

Brick-making stops during the monsoon rains – when workers head home to their villages to work on the land, either on their own plots or as farmhands – and restarts at the end of the year.

Measures to ease air pollution

Brick kilns account for 6-7% of Delhi’s emissions of particulate matter, which contains black carbon (soot), according to government officials and researchers with India’s Centre for Science and Environment.

Since 2016, measures have been imposed on the kilns in stages, to cut pollution and help combat the capital’s toxic air. They include shifting the location of some kilns, mandating new, more energy-efficient technology, and last year banning the use of coal to fire the kilns.

Farm fields now line roads that cut through Ghaziabad district, in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, where brick kilns stood even until a few years ago, before many shut down due to new measures to cut air pollution. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)

The effort is showing results alongside a range of other measures, with the air quality in Delhi having improved considerably. According to government data, the daily average air quality index in the capital fell from 225 in 2018 to 204 in 2023, showing lower levels of pollution.

But with no proper plans to help brick kiln owners and workers adjust to the changes in how they operate, the sector – which is among the country’s biggest employers, covering some 10 million workers – is floundering, labour rights experts and bosses said.

Unregistered workers

Saniya Anwar of non-profit The Climate Agenda, which advocates for a socially fair shift to clean energy, said most of the brick workers are unskilled, landless and change their phone numbers regularly, making it hard to register them.

“This in turn, means that they often fall outside the safety net of welfare schemes provided by the government for migrant workers,’’ Anwar added.

Like Majnu, Salam Hak, 29, also moved to Gautam Buddha Nagar when the kiln where he worked in Ghaziabad closed.

“We don’t have job cards (for work under the national rural employment guarantee scheme), so while we do daily wage (work) back home, it is not often easy to find,” Hak said.

“It’s the income from the kilns that sustains us through the year. There have been many kilns shutting, and we don’t know what will happen in the future – but we feel that there is no point worrying about it for now,’’ he said.

Hari Chand, 27 (first from left) and Shivam Rai 18 (second from left), hail from Chattarpur in Madhya Pradesh and work at a kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat. While kiln owners in Baghpat said the sector is struggling with the new green norms, in this region, kilns have not shut down yet nor has labour been laid off. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)

The 22 districts of the Delhi-National Capital Region are home to more than 3,800 brick kilns. Among these, Uttar Pradesh (UP) has the highest concentration of kilns at 2,062.

A state official working on pollution control said Ghaziabad is among the areas most affected by the green transition, with the number of kilns halving in the past six years, but there is no count of, or plan to support the workers who lose their jobs.

Another UP official in the labour department noted that brick kiln workers are seasonal rather than permanent and as such are not entitled to alternative government employment schemes that kick in when a factory shuts down, for example.

Excluded from state benefits

Living off agriculture alone would be tough for workers like Majnu and his family, who cultivate fields belonging to landlords and keep a portion of the crop, mostly rice paddy, as income.

“We are bhag chashis (landless farmers) back home, and we never make enough,’’ said Majnu, stacking the last lot of bricks next to mountains of agricultural waste being used to fire the Dankaur kilns.

“The earnings here (at kilns) are more than what we make back home, where we only get part of the crop to either consume or sell – whereas here, we make 600 rupees (around $7) per 1,000 bricks made and can make up to 1,200 rupees a day,’’ he said.

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The Building and Other Construction Workers (BoCW) Act of 1996 does include social security and welfare benefits for brick kiln workers, including scholarships, maternity benefits, marriage assistance, pensions, financial help for funeral services and food rations.

But labour experts say most brick kiln workers are not registered and therefore cannot access the benefits – neither have they been part of the energy transition conversation so far.

“The isolated nature of seasonal migrant workers at brick kilns is a major factor in preventing access to services, and makes them entirely dependent on the kiln owners,” said Ravi Srivastava, director of the Centre for Employment Studies at the Institute for Human Development.

The cost of going green

In Ghaziabad, a congested, booming industrial township 36 km from the capital, Ravinder Kumar Tewatia, former general secretary of the All India Bricks and Tile Manufacturers Federation, said 200 of 430 brick kilns have shut since 2018.

He closed the last of the four kilns he owned two years ago as norms got stricter and the business less profitable.

In 2016, the Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority gave all kilns in Ghaziabad a two-year period to switch to “zig zag” technology – an energy-efficient kiln design allowing chimneys to retain heat for longer.

Then, between 2022-2023, the Supreme Court ordered the annual period for manufacturing bricks to be cut from seven to four months and imposed the mandatory use of agricultural waste instead of coal to heat the kilns.

“Now you can’t get coal even if you want to,” Tewatia said, explaining that the main issue with farm waste – mainly wheat and mustard husks – is lower temperatures in the kilns where the clay bricks are hardened.

“As a result of this, the bricks that are being produced are of lower quality and more fragile,” he said.

Workers stack bricks at a kiln in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, as their shift comes to an end. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)

Kiln owners said the shortened brick-baking season has impacted production volumes, hitting overall earnings. At the same time, falling brick quality has led to prices plunging by around half.

“We have been demanding that the government allow us to use a mix of coal and agricultural waste,’’ said Tewatia.

Pollution control board officials said the central government did provide alternatives, including biomass briquettes and compressed natural gas, but these also suffer from lower heat generation and gas is not suitable for use in most traditional kilns.

Farming fails to pay

The kilns have been a second home for Nidesh Kuma, 27, since he was a toddler, accompanying his parents to mould and shape bricks near Delhi, as frequent floods on the Ganges River prevents farming in their village.

For the past five years, Kumar has been “supplying” migrant workers from his Sambhal area of Uttar Pradesh to the Delhi region. This year, he placed 40 families in three kilns there, noting that his network is strong and extensive.

But with more brick kilns closing, the seasonal migration pattern has started to lose its appeal – and could be a sign of things to come, say labour rights campaigners.

“What can we do?” asked 55-year-old Laturi Singh, a brick-maker and labour contractor also from Sambhal.

“When the kilns shut down, most (workers) were absorbed at other kilns, but some have gone back to the villages and are working as daily wage workers earning 300 rupees a day, which is much less.”

(Reporting by Esha Roy; editing by Megan Rowling)

This article was first published by The Migration Story, India’s first newsroom to focus on the country’s vast internal migrant population.

Esha Roy is an independent journalist writing on issues of climate change, social development and government policy. Reporting for this story was supported by Buniyaad, a movement for a just transition in the brick kiln sector.

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Debt-laden growers want an existing government procurement system to be made legally binding and to raise the minimum price for a wider range of crops – which could help them move away from thirsty rice and wheat farming.

But some agricultural analysts argue that bolstering the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for produce would not resolve the wider climate problems farmers face, nor ease demand for scarce water resources.

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Deedar Singh, a 50-year-old farmer from Patiala, joined a march towards Delhi in mid-February and spoke to Climate Home at a camp on the Punjab-Haryana border, 200 km from Delhi. He participated in a similar mobilisation back in 2020 that lasted for just over a year.

With a family of nine to support, he complained that his five-acre landholding and meagre income of 200,000 rupees per year ($2,400) cannot provide a decent quality of life, especially as weather extremes worsen.

“If untimely rain destroys our rice or hot temperatures shrink the wheat grain, our crops are ruined, leaving us unable to even cover the costs of the next cropping season,” said Singh. Most people in his village rely on financial support sent by their children who have migrated abroad, he added.

Farmers gather at the Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, to burn effigies of political leaders and shout slogans in support of the protest, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Globally, India accounts for 10% of agricultural output and is the second-largest producer of rice and wheat. It is also the biggest consumer of groundwater. Its 260 million farmers depend heavily on depleting water reserves to irrigate their crops.

That means they are also struggling with climate change, as about 65% of the country’s cropped area depends on rainwater. Erratic rainfall and shorter winters are harming yields, with heavy downpours causing flooding and a sudden spike in temperatures a year ago causing wheat grain to shrink.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) reports that for every 1C increase in temperature, wheat production suffers a significant decline of 4-5 million tonnes.

Debt drives suicides

Water resources are running low and farmers’ input costs have soared – yet the government-administered minimum support price (MSP) has not risen accordingly, said Ramandeep Singh Mann, an agriculturist and member of Kisan Mazdoor Morcha, an umbrella body spearheading the current protest.

That has left farmers with no money to pay for contingencies and has forced many to take on high levels of debt, he said.

“At some point your back breaks. When that happens, there is no other solution but to take extreme steps,” he added, referring to suicides among indebted farmers.

To boost falling yields, farmers are using more inputs like water and fertilisers, leaving them with higher production costs and lower profit margins.

Some states have provided free or subsidised electricity, as well as loan forgiveness for debt-strapped farmers, but since 2014, only half of the intended waiver recipients have benefited, according to a study by the State Bank of India.

These woes have fuelled a growing wave of protest, as farmers feel they have no other recourse.

Nonetheless, Sardara Singh Johl, a 97-year-old agricultural economist from Ludhiana and former vice-chancellor at Punjab Agricultural University, said the latest mobilisation was unlikely to result in the dialogue required to address the broader problems facing farmers.

“They already have MSP for wheat and rice, and these are high-paying crops. Even if you reduce the price risk with MSP, what can you do about the other uncertainties?” he asked.

In mid-February, at the last round of talks with the government, ministers proposed to purchase five additional crops – moong dal, urad dal, tur dal, maize and cotton – from farmers at an MSP for five years through central agencies, but farmers rejected the offer.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, leader of the non-political Samyukta Kisan Morcha group, which is also involved in organising the farmers’ protest, said the proposal would mainly benefit farmers willing to switch from paddy or wheat to other crops and would not ensure a stable income.

Farmer leaders give a press conference at Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, on February 27 2024. Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Water reserves shrink amid over-use

Economist Johl argued that, irrespective of its profitability, rice is no longer a suitable crop for Punjab as its water table recedes to a dangerously low level.

A study by Punjab Agricultural University found that between 1998 and 2018, groundwater levels in the region had dropped drastically, from 10 metres below ground to 30 metres, largely due to a shift from traditional canal irrigation to widespread adoption of tube wells for water extraction.

Farmers are aware of Punjab’s dwindling water resources, said Mann, but they need guaranteed price support for more crops in order to shift away from water-intensive rice cultivation.

“They know that if they are able to earn as much as they do from paddy, they will grow other crops. But without fair support of MSP, it is hard to make that switch,” he said.

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Uday Chandra, a professor of government at the Georgetown University in Qatar, said key food-supplying states like Punjab have struggled to get their problems heard and dealt with by the national government.

“The problem is that what the Punjab farmer wants isn’t sustainable,” he said, referring to the state’s shrinking water supplies. “The best way would be to bring them into discussion and find a solution that is specific to them.”

Trucks lined up at the Shambhu border, 200 km from Delhi, after being stopped by the central government from advancing to the Indian capital, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Thousands of farmers who were initially stopped by heavy police control outside Delhi have now made it to the capital after receiving permission to protest at the Ramlila Maidan ground. They are determined to maintain their mobilisation during the general elections – which will take place over several weeks from late April until the start of June – if their MSP demands go unmet.

In 2021, angry farmers backed down after the government rowed back on laws that had sparked huge protests. But they have now returned to direct action, calling on the government to fulfill its promises, including demands for pensions, debt waivers, penalties for selling counterfeit agricultural inputs, and withdrawal from the World Trade Organization.

Call for high-tech solutions

Mann said climate change is compounding their woes – yet while the government acknowledges the problem, it is doing little to help the sector deal with it.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

However, at the ICAR’s Annual General Meeting last month, Arjun Munda, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, said the Modi government is committed to bolstering the agricultural sector and supporting farmers, including with high-yielding, resilient seed varieties released by ICAR in the past decade.

It also issues Agromet weather-based crop advisories with the India Meteorological Department to about 60 million farmers twice a week and promotes practices for more efficient use of water and nutrients.

But protesting farmers said the government’s measures are failing to help them adapt adequately to a changing climate and water shortages.

Bhupinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Mohali district, discusses his transition to organic farming methods as a means to prevent the burning of stubble remaining after rice cultivation, November 26 2023. (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Haranjeet Singh, 53, of Ludhiana in Punjab, said the rice variety farmers are now planting gives smaller harvests, after the government suspended use of a more productive but thirstier variety which also took longer to mature and produced more stubble – a major cause of air pollution when burned.

“Unfortunately, these new seeds don’t give us as much yield,” he said. “We are spending the same amount of money and getting less in return.”

Madhura Swaminathan, daughter of the late MS Swaminathan – the architect of India’s Green Revolution which boosted crop yields and tackled the nation’s food scarcity issues in the 1970s – believes greater use of technology could help.

The professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore pointed to an example she encountered in Amritsar a few years ago, where groundwater sensors were connected to mobile apps, enabling users to remotely control water pumps and conserve water.

“We must embrace new technologies, farming practices, and techniques to tackle the challenges brought by climate change,” she said.

The post What will it take to protect India’s angry farmers from climate threats? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world’s most populous nation already manufactures some solar PV. But the process is largely that of an assembly line, where imported components are fitted together into modules.

Further up the supply chain, solar components are made from a high-grade silicon known as polysilicon. Today, polysilicon production – like every other stage of solar manufacturing – is dominated by China. 

But buoyed by energy security concerns and US-China trade tensions, a handful of Indian solar manufacturers are benefiting from government support to produce polysilicon components in India. 

Among them is Adani Solar – the greener side of the Indian multinational conglomerate which was built on a bedrock of coal.

In this second story in our Clean Energy Frontier series, Monika Mondal reports from the city of Mundra, Gujarat, where Adani intends to build a polysilicon-to-module manufacturing hub. 

Read the story here

Think-tank Ieefa foresees that India could become the world’s second-largest solar PV manufacturer by 2026 – producing enough solar panels to be self-sufficient and export the surplus. 

But India’s dependence on China for solar components and technology runs deep and its attempt to rival its neighbour’s colossal solar production capacity will require a lot more government support. 

You can read the full story on a specially designed mini-site here. Learn more about our Clean Energy Frontier, our series exploring the supply chains of clean energy technologies, here.

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The post India wants its own solar industry but has to break reliance with China first appeared first on Climate Home News.

That is after Saudi Arabia, India and China opposed attempts to ensure the scientific body would provide its assessment in time for the next global stocktake, the UN’s scorecard of collective climate action, due in 2028, according to sources present at the IPCC talks in Istanbul, Turkiye, last week.

Following “fraught” discussions that ran all night Friday, governments postponed a final decision on the timeline until the next meeting scheduled in the summer.

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Swiss climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne, who is the vice chair of an IPCC working group, said she “was not totally surprised” to see opposition to the proposal.

“We know that some countries do not necessarily want climate policy to advance very fast and IPCC information will be critical for informing the global stocktake”, she added. “But I was surprised by the lack of willingness to even negotiate on these points”.

The findings of previous IPCC reports played a prominent role in informing the first global stocktake, which resulted in governments agreeing for the first time to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels” at Cop28 last December.

Timeline disagreement

The IPCC met last week to decide the work programme for its seventh assessment cycle, which officially started in July 2023 with the election of its new chair Jim Skea.

Ahead of the talks, the UNFCCC officially requested that the scientific body align its activities with the timeline of the next global stocktake. The IPCC input would be “invaluable” for the scoring exercise, Simon Stiell, chief of the UN climate body, said.

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But sticking to a 2028 deadline would mean either fast-tracking its work or shortening the IPCC’s entire cycle from seven years down to five years. Small island nations, least developed countries and some rich countries favoured this option, sources told Climate Home.

But a group of governments, led by Saudi Arabia, India and China, argued the accelerated programme would force to complete the scientific process “in a hurry” and would not leave enough time for developing countries to review the output, according to sources.

Speed and quality

Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s chief climate negotiator, told Climate Home that he was not opposed to the principle of IPCC producing reports in time for the global stocktake but only if “we are not rushing science to deliver in a short timeline”.

“The question is ‘can you provide the same level of quality in 2028 or not?’”, he added. “Otherwise, the credibility of the IPCC would come under question”.

The IPCC normally publishes its reports every five to seven years and three scientists involved in its activities told Climate Home it is entirely possible to conclude its next round of assessments by 2028.

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“Linking the assessment cycle to the global stocktake makes a lot of sense to me”, said Richard Klein, a senior researcher at SEI and a lead author of previous IPCC reports. “It is the gold standard of everything to do with climate science and the IPCC was explicitly set up to inform climate policy, including the UNFCCC’s processes”.

Eleventh-hour compromise

The issue caused major divisions between governments throughout the meeting, which “teetered on the brink of failure on Saturday morning”, according to a summary of discussions by the IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin. The lack of consensus led to “IPCC Chair Jim Skea half-jokingly warning that the time to leave the venue was near and further consultations would shortly have to be held on the street”, the report added.

Negotiators huddle looking for an agreement on the final day of the IPCC meeting. Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

Most critical discussions took place when many delegates, especially from vulnerable countries, had already left because of their inability to change complicated travel arrangements. Seneviratne said that was morally “questionable”.

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Negotiators eventually struck a last minute compromise. The final agreement puts the IPCC’s bureau – an advisory group – in charge of proposing a timeline for the assessment reports that could be decided at the next meeting.

Seneviratne said that, while she would have wanted a “more explicit response” on this point, “the decision does not prevent the IPCC from delivering information in time for the global stocktake”.

But Klein argued the lack of a firm commitment leaves the process stuck in limbo. “There’s no guarantee that there will be agreement on the next meeting and, meanwhile, the working groups need to get started now. They don’t have the luxury of waiting until the next meeting”, he added.

No extra special reports

Egypt’s Nasr said he was satisfied with the meeting’s outcome: “It confirmed that reports will have the same level of comprehensiveness, will consider all literature and will allow for full engagement for developing countries”.

But he expressed disappointment over the absence of a special report on adaptation, which some African countries had asked for. Governments have instead only agreed to update technical guidelines first devised in 1994 to help countries measure climate impacts and adjust to them.

The IPCC will also produce a special report on climate change and cities, which had already been agreed on, and a methodology report on carbon removal, including carbon capture and storage (CCS).

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The proposal is expected to be tabled at a G20 meeting this week at Nandi Hills summer retreat near India’s tech hub Bengaluru, where financial chiefs from the bloc have gathered for the first major event of India’s G20 presidency.

The development comes as World Bank President David Malpass held a discussion with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday on addressing debt vulnerabilities, India’s finance ministry said.

“India is writing a proposal to form a group for reforms to World Bank,” one of the sources said, requesting anonymity as they are not authorised to speak to media.

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India’s finance and foreign ministries and the World Bank did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment.

“Democratisation of World Bank has been a long term line pursued by India and other countries. Differential financing terms for least developed and developing countries is desirable,” a second source said.

India’s chief economic adviser on Tuesday said reforms at multilateral development banks would be at the top of the agenda for discussion during the G20 financial chiefs meeting.

Sitharaman told Malpass on Wednesday that climate finance was a focus area during India’s G20 presidency and multilateral development banks “can play a major role in incentivising private capital, de-risking instruments, and providing greater concessional finance”.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is also expected to press for consensus on reforming multilateral development banks to vastly expand their lending to tackle pressing global challenges such as climate change and conflict.

The World Bank Group’s climate change action plan for 2021-2025 has set a target to deploy an average of 35% of the institution’s financing in support of climate action.

The Group said in September that it delivered a record $31.7 billion financing in fiscal year 2022 to help countries address climate change, a 19% increase from the $26.6 billion all-time high in the previous fiscal year.

The World Bank has proposed lowering the loan to equity ratio of its main bank from 20% to 19%, freeing up about $4 billion a year to lend.

Refromers from the governments of Barbados and Germany told Climate Home that this was a good start but did not go far enough.

Last week, Malpass announced he would quit by June, following criticism of his climate scepticism.

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In the announcement, Indian authorities included a focus on solar power from the Himalayan region of Ladakh and green hydrogen production.

Announcing her government’s annual budget today, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman told parliament: “We are implementing many programmes for green fuel, green energy, green farming, green mobility, green buildings, and green equipment, and policies for efficient use of energy”.

“These green growth efforts help in reducing carbon intensity of the economy and provides for largescale green job opportunities,” she added.

The announcement comes after the US has approved a $500 billion green spending package to curb climate emissions and Japan layed out a plan to issue $150 billion in “green transition” bonds. The EU unveiled this month its own $270 billion plan to subsidize Europe’s green industry.

Despite its low per-person emissions, India’s huge population makes it the third-biggest emitter in the world. The country has pledged to reach net zero by 2070.

 Green electricity

The government promised to invest 350 billion rupees ($4.3 bn) in investments towards the country’s energy transition and its net zero target.

The petroleum and natural gas ministry will oversee investments, Sitharaman told a press conference, adding they would include investments in gas.

The government will subsidise private-sector projects for battery energy storage. This technology can store electricity from intermittent power sources like renewables so that it can be used when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

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The government said it will also look into pumped storage, a way to store energy using hydropower. When electricity is abundant, it is used to pump water up into a dam. When demand surges, the water can be released, producing hydro-electricity.

Sitharaman pledged to invest 83 bn rupees ($1 bn) of central government money in electricity transmission lines which can take 13 gigawatts (GW) of renewable electricity from the sunny, sparsely-populated Himalayan mountain state of Ladakh to population centres in the rest of the country. India aims to develop 500 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.

This echoes similar projects in neighbouring China, where renewable electricity is produced in the Gobi desert and transported to big cities in the east. In the US, construction has just started on a transmission line linking Arizona’s desert to California’s metropolises.

Green hydrogen

The budget touted the recently-launched national green hydrogen mission. The government will spend 197bn rupees ($2.4 bn) developing the carbon-free-fuel, which can replace fossil fuels in the manufacture of steel and in shipping and aviation.

Most of the money will be spent on incentives to produce hydrogen with renewable electricity and to build Indian electrolysers, the machines which turn water into hydrogen.

Sitharaman called green hydrogen a “sunrise sector” and said she wants India to “assume technology and market leadership” and reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports.

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India aims to produce five million metric tons by 2030. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that, for the world to limit global warming to 1.5C, it should produce about 100m metric tons of green hydrogen by 2030.

“The green hydrogen target is encouraging since it sends the right signals to the industry. We need to build the domestic capacity and supply chain on [renewable energy],” the IEA’s lead India analyst Swati D’Souza told Climate Home.

Adapting to climate change

Sitharaman announced money to adapt to the effects of climate change too. She promised 53bn rupees ($646m) to build irrigation systems for farming and  drinking water in the drought-prone region of Karnataka.

She promised to plant mangrove trees along India’s shorelines and to restore wetlands. These can suck in and lock up greenhouse gases and help reduce flooding.

But Climate Action Network campaigner Harjeet Singh said that while there were good emissions-cutting projects, adapting to climate change had been mostly left out.

In particular, he criticised the lack of a new allocation to the National Adaptation Fund. This was set up in 2015 and “has been starved of funds”, he said.

Mixed messages on transport

The government promised money to both clean and polluting transport forms. The railway budget was the highest it has ever been and Sitharaman said she would promote coastal shipping as an “energy efficient” way of moving people and goods.

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But she also promised to revive 50 airports, helipads or other types of landing grounds “to improve regional air connectivity”.

The Indian government is trying to build a domestic electric vehicle (EVs) industry. Sitharaman increased the custom duty on fully imported EVs from 60% to 70%.

At the same time, she increased spending on incentivising the manufacture of EVs in India and promised “adequate funds” to scrap old polluting government vehicles like ambulances.

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“That’s how the new year began for more than 25,000 residents of the locality and me,” Parmar told Climate Home.

The Chamoli District Administration has declared 723 houses have cracks in them.

Fearing the sudden collapse of residential buildings and hotels, the government has declared the area a landslide subsidence zone. Families are being shifted to hotels, guest houses and government facilities.

Hydropower in the Himalayas

Joshimath was a disaster waiting to happen, says Anjal Prakash, a research director at the Indian School of Business who worked on a Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the earth’s water and ice .

He said there are a number of reasons for the sinking, including the building of the Tapovan Vishnugad Hydropower Plant and the location of Joshimath on unstable glacier debris.

“The hydropower project’s tunnelling process that involved blasts punctured one of the underground reservoirs of water, known as aquifers, and gushing water destabilised houses,” said Prakash.

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He said locals had complained over the last few months about water sources, especially spring water sources, drying up whenever hydropower construction began in the area.

“Since tunnelling work disturbed aquifers, it also affected the water sources connected to it above the ground. It’s a simple logic,” Prakash said.

Going by residents’ complaints, aquifers must have started getting damaged three to four months before the houses started developing cracks, he estimated.

Building work on the same hydropower plant punctured an aquifer in 2009, leading to groundwater loss.

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The government has stopped the construction work of the hydropower project. But the state-owned National Thermal Power Corporation, which is constructing the plant, denied that its project is sinking houses in Joshimath.

“No tunnels pass underneath Joshimath, and no blasts were carried out recently,” the power company said in a brief press statement released on January 5.

The company has so far ignored calls for an independent probe or a study to ascertain the possibility of its hydropower tunnelling work causing cracks.

Warnings ignored

Scientists and engineers have long warned against development in this region.

In 1976, the Mishra Committee set up to probe the sinking of Joshimath town recommended a ban on heavy construction work in the area.

In 2010, two academics wrote an article headlined “disaster looms large over Joshimath”. They warned that “sudden outpouring of water from an aquifer will have multifarious impacts”.

In 2021, the hydropower plant itself was damaged when a glacier broke off, sending a wall of water and rocks down a mountain and  killing more than 200 people.

The Tapovan Visnugad hydroelectric power plant after it was damaged in 2021 (Photo: Irfan Rashid, Department of Geoinformatics, University of Kashmir)

In April 2022, a multi-agency report on this disaster recommended that there should be mandatory disaster impact assesments for hydropower projects, which are checked periodically.

Prakash said the government should develop other zero-carbon electricity sources like solar power or small-scale hydropower.

Hydropower plants (blue) are common in the Indian Himalayan states of Uttarkhand and Himachal Pradesh and in the neighbouring nation of Nepal. Coal is in black. (Photo: ResourceWatch)

Unrest and anger

Facing bitter cold and fearing the collapse of their homes, residents continuously protest against the government’s failure to announce short-term and long-term plans for the sinking town.

“[The government] have shifted us to a tiny hotel room, which is inadequate for my family of four, which includes two teenagers,” laments Parmar, a farmer by profession. “My two-floor home measures around 6,000 sq ft.”

Activists in Joshimath are urging the local administration to formulate a compensation package for people whose houses would be demolished.

People are getting restless as the district administration has failed to come up with a detailed plan to relocate affected families, says Atul Sati, a local activist.

“They are disrupting traffic, protesting and not letting disaster management teams demolish infrastructures that can collapse anytime,” he said. The government should provide monetary compensation and a plan for settlement before the situation becomes explosive.”

He added: “There should be an investigation into the role of NTPC’s project in the Joshimath tragedy. And policy makers and engineers who have put people’s lives in danger should be held accountable for their actions.”

The post Sinking town exposes perils of Himalayan hydropower appeared first on Climate Home News.

Inderpal Singh, 66, grows sugarcane over 2.5 acres in Bhatipura village, Uttar Pradesh. He supplies it to the local sugar mill, Nanglamal Sugar Complex.

Nanglamal Sugar Complex is owned by Mawana Sugars, one of India’s largest manufacturers. It supplies sugar to multinational companies including Nestlé, Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Singh used to almost harvest 90,000kg of cane in a typical season. This year it will be closer to 70,000kg. He told Climate Home droughts, floods and heatwaves in Uttar Pradesh make his livelihood increasingly precarious.

“No one comes to our help. Neither the mills nor the government,” Singh said.

Some farmers take out insurance against pest damage and weather extremes, but can only claim when a majority of the crop is damaged. Government-promised compensation for climate-related losses, Singh said, is “largely not effective”.

Climate Home News travelled to Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to investigate the plight of workers in the industry. These two states account for 71% of the country’s sugar exports, which could end up in cans of Diet Coke, KitKat chocolate bars and Häagen-Dazs ice cream tubs sold around the world.

Smallholders like Singh told Climate Home that they felt abandoned and exploited. While the government sets a minimum price per quintal (100kg) of raw sugarcane, erratic yields, changing quality demands and late payments strain their finances.

Climate Home News invited Nestlé, Coca Cola, Pepsi and Mawana Sugars to comment on these concerns and explain how they looked after the welfare of suppliers. At time of publication, they had not responded.

A sugarcane field in Lakhimpur, Uttar Pradesh

Sugar boom

India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar, and second largest exporter after Brazil.  The Indian government described last year as a “watershed season” for sugar production. The country produced a record 35.9 million tonnes of sugar and exported a record 11 million tonnes to more than two dozen countries. The major importers of Indian sugar were Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sudan, and the UAE. Indian sugar also went to the EU, US, Singapore, and Australia.

Consumer goods firms are doing good business. Nestlé India reported post-tax profits of over 2,000 crore rupees ($250 million) in 2021. Coca Cola and Pepsi are not publically listed companies in India but, according to business intelligence platform Tofler, each reaped operating revenue of more than $60m.

Climate Home traced the supply chain of sugarcane grown at farms in Nanglamal village in Uttar Pradesh to mills owned by Mawana Sugars, one of Nestlé’s main sugar suppliers in India.

Mawana Sugars is India’s sixth largest sugar manufacturer, operating two mills in Uttar Pradesh. Mills are critical to the sugar supply chain. They procure and process the harvest from the fields, then send the resulting sweeteners to buyers including the government.

‘Responsible sourcing’

Nestlé, a Swiss multinational that owns brands including KitKat, Smarties and Häagen-Dazs, procured sugar in 2019 from two Indian mills in Uttar Pradesh, including Nanglamal mill which is owned by Mawana Sugars, according to its sugar supply chain disclosure, published in April 2020.

Nestlé claims to follow responsible sourcing principles, which include the provision of safe and healthy workplaces and a ban on forced or child labour. The company states on its website that it only works with farms that “meet at least legal or mandatory industry standards” for workers’ pay and conditions.

Coca Cola says it follows the principles for sustainable agriculture, with an emphasis on prohibiting child labour and abuse of labour and ensuring a healthy and safe working environment. Pepsi says it follows a positive agriculture agenda under which it is trying to source crops and ingredients in a way that accelerates regenerative agriculture and strengthens farming communities.

Climate Home did not find any child or forced labour in farms linked to Mawana Sugars and its customers. The investigation did identify poor working conditions and low pay, however, which made suppliers vulnerable to climate-related losses.

Smallholders told Climate Home that Nanglamal Sugar Complex delays payment, makes unreasonable demands and offers no protection from extreme weather impacts. This traps them a vicious cycle of loss and debt, they said.

Unaffordable seeds

The dominant variety of sugarcane has become prone to pests that thrive under rising temperatures. Mills such as Nanglamal are encouraging farmers to grow new varieties, said Nawab Singh Ahlawat, district president of Bharatiya Kisan Union Arajnaitik, which represents many sugarcane farmers in Uttar Pradesh. But seeds for better varieties cost 3-5 times more, around 2-3,000 rupees ($24) for 100kg. “Only a few farmers can afford it,” said Ahlawat.

“They do not give good prices for [the] old varieties,” said Singh. “They want farmers to sow early and to sow new varieties but they do not give us (sufficient) seeds.”

“Mills don’t help the farmers,” said Omvir Singh Tomar, 65, a Nanglamal resident who supplies to Mawana. He lost 15-20% of his harvest to heavy rainfall in September and October. “No one will pay for this damage,” he said.

Then the Naglamal Sugar Complex was slow to procure Tomar’s surviving crop, he said. “So far, only 10,000-12,500 kg of my sugarcane has gone to the mill… I shudder at the thought that the remaining 70,000-80,000kg of sugarcane may stretch to April or May 2023.”

Unlike some milling companies, Mawana had not invested in healthcare or education facilities for sugarcane workers and their families, Tomar said.

Climate impacts are creating dangerous working conditions for India’s sugar workers and pushing them further into debt

Late payments

A common complaint among farmers supplying sugarcane to Nanglamal is that they are not paid on time, which pushes them into debt.

Tomar said Nanglamal Sugar Complex once paid him nearly a year late. He resorted to selling land to pay for his daughter’s marriage. Smallholders like him are investing more and more in fertilisers, pesticides, better seed varieties and diesel for their irrigation pumps “but the rate of sugarcane and our income are not increasing in the same proportion,” said Tomar.

Ahlawat said several sugar mills in the Meerut area owe farmers money. “Until last year Mawana Sugars also used to delay the payment,” he said, sometimes by months. The delays have not been as long this year, but farmers are still not being paid within 14 days, which according to the Uttar Pradesh Sugarcane Supply Act is mandatory, he added. If mills do not meet this deadline, they are liable for interest of 15% a year on the overdue sum.

VM Singh, the national convener of the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, has been fighting for 25 years to get sugarcane farmers paid on time. Many mills in Uttar Pradesh owe several hundred crores of rupees (millions of dollars) to farmers, he told Climate Home. “The money that had to be paid to farmers is pending. Some owe money from last year too.”

‘Exploitation breeds exploitation’

Uttar Pradesh officials are trying to tighten the rules so farmers get paid for sugarcane within 10 days of supplying it. Under its Panchamrut scheme, the state government aims to double farmers’ incomes with initiatives to diversify into other crops, introduce drip irrigation and efficient sowing methods.

Kulveer Singh, a 62-year-old farmer from Seohara village in Uttar Pradesh Bijnor’s district, told Climate Home these were empty promises. “To my knowledge no farmer has benefitted from these schemes,” he said.

The Indian government claims that “timely payment and low carrying cost of stocks for sugar mills resulted in early clearance of cane arrears of farmers” last season. Observers told Climate Home that this is not the reality on the ground.

“Farmers are not paid on time. This sometimes translates into farmers not being able to clear their dues to others, including labourers. All this together leads to issues in the whole supply chain. It is like a vicious cycle. To put it briefly exploitation breeds exploitation,” said Abhishek Jani, chief executive of Fairtrade India.

On the way forward, Jani said, “brands need to take action in their entire supply chain. For instance, in the case of cocoa from the African region, a programme has been created and consumers in Europe are willing to pay extra for sustainable and ethically sourced cocoa. On sugar, we are far from that right now but there is a huge need for it,”  he said.

Deepak Guptara of the Uttar Pradesh Sugar Mill Association said no labour or human rights were violated during the production of sugar in the state.

Welfare board

So what is being done to improve the welfare of sugar farmers, in the face of climate threats?

In Uttar Pradesh, there is no specific scheme in place to protect the welfare of workers in sugarcane fields.

In 2019, the Maharashtra government established a welfare board for sugarcane workers to provide them with social security benefits and insurance and improve their overall standard of living.

Shekhar Gaikwad, Maharashtra’s sugar commissioner, told Climate Home that a corporation was initiated in November “for the welfare of farmers under which sugar mill owners and Maharashtra government will put money.” To date the government has paid in 40 crore rupees ($4.8m). The target is $30m.

Maharashtra is the first state to set up such a scheme for migrant workers, said Gaikwad. “Registration of labourers under the corporation has started. As of now, 200,000 farmers from the Beed district of Maharashtra have been registered,” he said.

‘Not functional yet’

But farmers told Climate Home they did not know anyone who had been registered under the programme.

The government scheme was meant to provide sugar workers with insurance, financial assistance and medical aid. Registration would be the first step to access these benefits, according to Raju Shetti, a former member of India’s parliament and president of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, a group that works for the rights of farmers.

But, Shetti said, “all these plans have just been in the air.”

Sunil Munde a small labour contractor from Ambajogai in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that the scheme “is not functional yet”. He manages 16 labourers and none of them are registered. “There are no funds in it,” he said. “The scheme has not yet been implemented on the ground.”

18-year-old Dhanvir Kumar, of Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh, labours on his family farm alongside studying at school. His family income cannot keep up with rising costs of living, he said. “We grow sugar but can’t afford to buy sugar. Drinking tea with sugar is like a crime.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal, Arvind Shukla and Isabelle Gerretsen. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post Cost of a KitKat: Big brands leave sugar farmers at the mercy of climate extremes appeared first on Climate Home News.

15-year-old Meera Gaikwad*, who is six months pregnant, knows her life will change forever when she moves 100km to cut sugarcane in Karnataka this season. There is no work at her drought-prone home of Paargaon, a small village in western India’s Maharashtra state.

Gaikwad told Climate Home News that she is afraid she will have to deliver her baby in a hut next to the fields, without access to medical care.

Thousands of girls like Gaikwad migrate from their villages every year to join in the sugarcane harvest from October until April. In total, more than 1.5 million workers leave their homes for the sugarcane fields.

Climate impacts, in particular heatwaves, droughts and floods, are worsening their plight. Women, some of whom are pregnant, cut and package sugarcane in temperatures of up to 46C.

In August and September, Climate Home travelled to the states of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, where most of India’s sugarcane is grown and manufactured. Reporters found women and girls working in in dangerous conditions for up to 18 hours a day, without access to health or sanitation facilities.

Climate Home spoke to dozens of women who have had their wombs surgically removed, in the misguided belief it would help them to cope with the intensive workload.

Thousands of young girls and women migrate from Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district each year to harvest sugarcane

Double shift

Climate change is aggravating an already dire situation for women in Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district, where farming grinds to a halt for almost eight months due to a lack of rainfall. The region suffered from droughts in four separate years between 2010-2019, according to a government report.

Sugarcane cutting is physically demanding. Women work the fields in all weathers, they told Climate Home – and are also expected to do the heavy lifting at home.

Typically, they wake up at around 3am, two hours before the men, to fetch water and carry out domestic work before heading to the fields at 6-7am. After returning home in the evening or late at night, the women cook dinner for the family and finish off other tasks, such as cleaning and washing clothes.

“The men get some rest, but the women don’t,” said Arundhati Patil, executive member of Marathwada Navnirman Lokayat, an organisation working on socio-economic issues in Beed.

A 2020 study by researchers of Pune-based Symbiosis International University concluded that the working and living conditions of these women “violate basic human rights”. They have to bend for hours, pick up very heavy cane bundles and mount them at risky heights, sometimes in complete darkness at night.

Inadequate healthcare

Many women, like Gaikwad, carry out this backbreaking work while pregnant. They work in all weathers right up until their delivery.

20-year-old Anisha Sharad Bhavale, from Koyal village in Maharashtra, gave birth in a hut near a sugarcane field in 2020. Her baby boy died two weeks later. The nearest hospital was 30km away.

She had borrowed 70,000 rupees ($840) from a labour contractor for her son’s medical care. A week after the birth, she was back at work to start paying it off.

A teenage girl sits on a suitcase in her family’s hut near the sugar fields in Beed, Maharashtra

The unsafe working conditions in the sugar fields also sometimes result in miscarriages. One of Bhavale’s relatives was six weeks pregnant when she tripped and fell into a hole, which led to a miscarriage. Her husband, Sharad Bhavale, said there was no vehicle available to take her to the hospital or a nearby healthcare facility where she could have treatment.

The lack of healthcare and sanitation facilities is a major concern, Patil said. “There is no provision of medicines or doctors that can address their issues.”

A 2020 report by Oxfam India said “public health facilities at the villages are inadequate to address [women’s] ailments”, making medical treatments “impossible”, and prolonging any illnesses they suffer from.

Constant harassment

Gaikwad was married two years ago, when she was just 13. She became pregnant earlier this year. “Until we have a baby, we are considered young and poachable, even after we are married. That is why, we try to become mothers as soon as we are married — to avoid any disgrace to our family,” she said.

Thousands of girls are forced to marry by their parents soon after they start having their period – between 12-15 years of age. According to social activists, parents insist on this to ensure their daughters’ safety and because couples are hired more easily and earn more money in the sugarcane fields.

Thousands of young Indian girls like Meera Gaikwad* migrate from their villages every year, to work as labourers harvesting sugarcane

During their early teenage years, many girls also start working in the fields, said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Wardha, Maharashtra. This is partly to avoid them staying behind at labour tent camps, where parents fear they will be abused and harassed by men, he said.

“If a girl is good at cutting sugarcane, she starts getting a lot of marriage proposals. Single men are on the lookout for life partners as couples get a better advance for working in the fields,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Marriage [eligibility] is mostly dependent on a girl’s skill in the field rather than her education or how she looks.”

A married couple receives a higher amount as an advance for cutting sugarcane – in the range of 150,000 to 300,000 rupees ($1,800-3,600), whereas a single woman is paid 50,000 to 150,00 rupees ($600-$1,800).

Abuse goes unreported

Sexual harassment and abuse are rife in the sugar fields, the investigation revealed. More than a dozen women and girls told Climate Home, on the condition of anonymity, that they had suffered or witnessed abuse.

“When I stay back in the tent and my parents go to the sugarcane fields, sometimes men come to the hut and say bad things… and harass us. They come when they see I’m alone at home… I feel scared,” a 20-year-old widow, who has one child, told Climate Home.

According to a study by Symbiosis International University in Pune, India, “physical abuse and rapes [by male contractors at the worksite] happen quite often though they are not formally reported”.

Chunche spoke to more than 400 women in Maharashtra for his PhD on India’s sugar labourers, seen by Climate Home News. He said that almost 80% of them told him they faced sexual harassment, were molested or raped by male sugar labourers, drivers and middlemen.

“Usually no one says anything or files a complaint,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Sometimes the pressure is from the labour contractors not to speak but the main reason is their poverty. They fear that if they report [the abuse], it will bring disrepute, they will get no more work and there will be no one to marry them.”

Whenever such an incident happens, parents view it as a disgrace to the family and choose to marry their daughter off at a very young age, said Gaikwad.

In many cases, teenage girls don’t complain about sexual harassment as they are scared that they will lose their chance of going to school and be forced to sit at home, she said.

The working and living conditions of women working in India’s sugar fields “violate basic human rights,” researchers say.

Choosing hysterectomy

Women working in the sugar industry endure daily pain, as they lift 20-40 kg sugarcane bundles on their heads, including while pregnant or suffering from menstrual cramps.

“When women work long (15-18) hours or they squat in agriculture fields or when they lift heavy weights, they can develop abdominal pain,” said Himani Negi, a Delhi-based gynaecologist who runs a women’s care clinic.

To escape this constant pain, many women choose to have their womb removed. The practice has been prevalent among sugar workers for years. Women in Maharashtra’s Beed district were twice as likely as the state average to have had a hysterectomy, according to analysis of official data by Climate Home News.

In many villages in Ambajogai, a division of Beed district, at least 50-60 hysterectomy cases have been recorded over the past two decades, according to Patil.

Ishmala Raghu Patwade, who is in her mid-40s and has several children, told Climate Home News that she had a hysterectomy three months ago.

“My stomach was hurting. I was going through a lot of pain. My uterus had developed knots because of working in the fields. It had to be removed,” she said. Other women recommended the surgery to relieve her pain.

But the operation didn’t help her. Since having it, she can no longer work or lift any heavy items. As a result, the sole earner of the family now has to sit at home. Her husband Raghu used to also work in the sugarcane fields but stopped five years ago after he got severely injured working in the field.

Misinformation and complications

In 2019, a report by the Maharashtra government found that over 13,800 women (about 16% of the 82,300 surveyed) involved in harvesting sugarcane from the Beed districts had their womb removed in the last 10 years. Most of these women were in the 35-40 age group.

According to a report by the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management, one of the main reasons women choose to have surgery is to avoid losing wages when pain prevents them from working.

Dr Nitin Chate, associate professor at the Swami Ramanand Tirth Rural Government Medical College in Beed, who comes from a family of sugarcane labourers, blamed misinformation.

“Poverty and illiteracy are two devils,” said Chate. “Due to poor awareness, women choose hysterectomies. After this surgery, many women face a disease called osteoporosis, which is related to weak bones.”

Ishmala Raghu Patwade chose to have a hysterectomy after other women told her it would relieve her abdominal pain

Other common complications include vaginal prolapse, back pain, poor balance and urinary incontinence. “Women should be made aware that this surgery won’t address their pain,” said gynaecologist Negi.

Gaikwad told Climate Home it was her dream to go to university, but she has accepted her reality. “We cut sugarcane, no matter what. Whether there’s sweltering heat, frigid cold, or even if the sugarcane fields are flooded with rain, we have to work in the field to cut the sugarcane. There’s no other option,” she said.

“Do girls like me not deserve any justice?”

*Meera Gaikwad is not the subject’s real name, to protect her identity as a minor.

Reporting by Meenal Upreti, Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post India’s female cane cutters face child marriage and hysterectomy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Karan Gautam Wavhale, 20, wanted to join the Indian Army, but it was not to be. Instead, he became a labourer, travelling over 200km from his home in Koyal, in Maharashtra’s Beed district, to toil in the sugar fields of Karnataka.

He is one of millions who migrate with the sugar season each year. Heatwaves, drought and floods brought by climate change make the working conditions increasingly harsh. And when yields are low, many workers get trapped with debts they cannot repay.

“It is about survival,” Wavhale told Climate Home News. “Due to water shortages several months each year, there is just no work for us here… there is no option for us but to migrate.

“It is not just the story of our village. There are dozens of villages like ours.”

Climate Home News visited Koyal, about 450km from India’s financial capital Mumbai, in August. The villagers were preparing for the upcoming sugarcane harvest season in October. Here, climate change is worsening the already harsh conditions for workers.

Most of the village’s 2,500 people travel to neighbouring states Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh or western Maharashtra for seasonal work in sugarcane fields. There are no other jobs for them in Koyal and many residents hold government-issued Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards.

India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar and the second-largest exporter. 50 million farmers are involved in India’s sugar industry, cultivating sugarcane in an area spanning almost five million hectares (50,000 sq km).

According to the Indian government, during last year’s sugar season more than 500 million metric tonnes of sugarcane were produced in the country. It is a record that the government is celebrating, but it comes at a high cost to vulnerable migrant labourers.

Almost half a million labourers migrate from Maharashtra’s Beed district each year to work in the sugarcane fields

Scorching heat

More and more, these migrants have to work in scorching heat – temperatures exceeded 46C in Maharashtra in April. This takes a severe toll on their physical and mental health, leading to extreme fatigue, anaemia and joint problems as well as depression and anxiety, according to a report by Oxfam India.

Workers prepare the fields, sow seeds, irrigate the crops, cut them with sickles and load the cane onto tractors for transport to the sugar mills in the region. The days last between 13 and 16 hours, over a 4-5 month season.

Sampat Lakshman, a 49-year-old migrant labourer, told Climate Home News that he and his colleagues work day and night during the sugarcane harvest season.

“If we cut the sugarcane during the day, we have to stay till late at night to load it in [the] trucks. There’s no timetable of any sort… there’s no time to get tired,” said Lakshman.

Sampat Lakshman, a sugarcane labourer from Beed district in Maharashtra, lives in a tiny hut with his wife and five children

Debilitating accidents

Labourers are frequently injured by a misplaced machete, heavy load or vehicle accident. Snake bites are common. In extreme cases, some suffer permanent disability, amputation or even death.

Wavhale’s younger brother Sachin was killed in a devastating vehicle collision in 2021.

“We were returning home in a vehicle which ferries workers. The driver tried to avoid an accident. [Because of this] several people fell off the vehicle… when the driver reversed the car, the vehicle crushed my brother’s head,” Wavhale told Climate Home. Sachin’s name was scribbled on the wall of his small, poorly lit home in Koyal.

“Several people suffered injuries in the accident, three people including my brother died on the spot,” he said. “One died a few months later due to injuries.”

Raghu Govind Patwade of Beed district suffered spinal injuries in 2016 when a tyre of a tractor trolley drove over him while he was resting in a sugarcane field in Karnataka. Although he survived, it has not been possible for him to work since then.

“I suffered multiple fractures including one on my hip. Since then, I have been bedridden. I can’t work now and I am stuck at home. I have a bag attached to pass urine,” he told Climate Home News.

“There are deep-rooted concerns in the way the [sugar industry] functions, regarding human rights violations, migrant labour and the living conditions [of labourers], child labour and child marriages, and women’s rights,” said Pooja Adhikari, Business Global Coordinator, Global Value Chains at Oxfam Germany, who has carried out extensive research into the industry.

Minimal facilities

The labourers in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh told Climate Home that when they work in the fields there are hardly any facilities for them, whether it is food, water, toilets, healthcare or electricity.

The sugar mill provides some materials for makeshift shelters from rainfall, extreme heat or cold, Lakshman said. Their earnings are “not enough to fill the stomach but only to ensure that we don’t starve”.

According to the report by Oxfam India, “the tents are small and inadequate to give complete shelter” and “do not have water, electricity supply or toilets.”

A sugarcane labourer plants sugarcane cuttings in Satara district of Maharashtra.

Missed schooling

In Maharashtra around 1.5 million people migrate each year with their children, according to Oxfam. Of those, nearly 500,000 migrate from Beed district, the hiring hub for cane cutters.

Migrant labourers are integral to sugarcane harvesting, Mantare Hanuman, a social activist in Maharashtra, told Climate Home News. “It is labour-intensive work… it requires labour at every step, whether it is sowing or harvesting,” he said. Machines are expensive and rarely used.

During the dry season in Beed district, from November to May, villages face severe seasonal unemployment. Wavhale, who left school when he was 15, said nobody wants to stay behind and work in the fields in Koyal, because they are paid close to nothing – a mere $1-2 per day.

Once the labourers migrate, their villages are left deserted. About 200,000 children younger than 14 accompany their parents during the cutting season and live with them in temporary huts, missing school.

“I know that their education suffers but I have no option but to take them with us,” said Lata Chandrasen Patole, a resident of Paargaon in Beed district. “There is no one else to take care of [them], [provide them with] food and [look out for their] safety.”

Hanuman said parents fear their daughters will face physical and sexual abuse if they are left behind. Many children drop out of school altogether at a young age and join their parents in the fields, he said.

The children of labourers miss school for months at a time when their parents migrate to work in the sugar fields

Debt trap

The migrant labourers and their families rely on credit to get through the year. They borrow money from labour contractors, known as mukadams, who play an integral role in India’s sugar industry. Mukadams act as the middlemen between labourers, farmers and sugar mills.

Mukadams help labourers find work on the fields and offer informal credit for displacement and living costs, under strict conditions. They hire labourers, usually as married couples, through informal contracts and pay them in instalments.

Labourers negotiate payment based on their personal situation: medical needs, whether they are married and how many children they have. An advance is then paid, usually to the men, based on the amount of crop to be harvested by the couple. If crops are destroyed by floods or heatwaves, their advance (and final payment) is lower.

“Once that happens they get trapped in a vicious cycle of debt, due to high interest rates, and their condition is akin to those of slaves. There is no one to listen to them,” said Yogesh Pande, an independent advocate for the welfare of sugar farmers.

The mukadams control who gets paid and when. After his accident, Patwade was supposed to receive compensation from the sugar mill to help pay for hospitals. “But I never got it. It was siphoned off by the mukadam,” he said.

The money Lakshman and his three relatives earn in the fields is not enough to feed their family of seven. “That is why we have to rely on [the] advance from contractors… We have to repay our debt,” he said. His debt stands at 100,000 rupees ($1,200).

The home of sugarcane labourer Karan Wavhale, in Beed district, Maharashtra

High interest rates

Mukadams typically provide loans to labourers at 50-60% interest rates, compared to the lower interest rates of 5-10% provided by banks, said Raju Shetti, a former member of India’s parliament and president of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, an advocacy group for farmers and labourers.  “They make money while everyone else loses,” Shetti said.  

The fall in harvest yields means many labourers are unable to repay their loans to the mukadams. To make up the shortfall, they have to return for the next season or bring more relatives to work. “If this becomes a regular feature, they will be stuck in a cycle of heavy interest and debt,” said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Maharashtra.

One mukadam, who spoke to Climate Home on the condition of anonymity, dismissed claims of exploitation. He said it is labourers who take excess money in advance, spend it on alcohol and then cry foul.

“In fact, mill owners give us very little in advance and ask contractors like me to bring labourers,” he said. “Now labourers want their money in advance to secure their season while I only get paid at the end of the season. To ensure a steady supply of labourers I have to take money with heavy interest. How can I be blamed?”

In the meantime, labourers like Wavahle continue to toil in the sugar fields in harsh conditions. “Extreme heat or harsh winter cold is a reality for me but I have to work to survive,” he said.

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post Migrant labourers suffer exploitation in India’s sugar fields appeared first on Climate Home News.

“I won’t ever recover what I invested,” said 67-year-old Kalua Mehmood, a sugarcane farmer in Shahabpur, a village in western Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. Due to scarce rainfall, his sugarcane farm will deliver a poor harvest this year.

The rainfall during the monsoon season, between June and September, was erratic this year, he told Climate Home News. 10 years ago, farmers could count on steady rainfall. “But this year I have already irrigated my crop 10 times with a tube well [diesel pump] and even now the sugarcane has no juice,” Mehmood said, showing its stunted growth and dry yellow leaves.

Mehmood is one of millions of Indian sugarcane farmers who is suffering the onslaught of climate change. More intense and longer droughts and floods, caused by climate change, are destroying sugarcane crops and plunging millions of farmers and their families into debt, while creating dangerous working conditions. In August and September, Climate Home travelled to Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, to hear their stories.

India’s most valuable crop

India is the largest consumer and producer of sugar in the world. Sugarcane is a critical crop for the economy; it accounts for about 10% of the country’s agricultural output and the livelihoods of 50 million farmers and their dependents.

“It is no secret how important sugarcane is to India,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent food and agriculture expert. Further expansion of the sugar industry “needs to be discouraged,” said Sharma. “It is taking too much water.” The crop needs about 2,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of sugar.

“There is just no reason for us to continue pushing for sugarcane when we have options like corn syrup available,” said Sharma. “Rather than looking at adaptation measures, we need to prepare a package to take farmers away from the sugarcane cultivation.”

A tractor ploughs a sugarcane field in Hardoi district, Uttar Pradesh. 

Climate impacts

The industry is feeling the impacts of climate change, Mahesh Palawat, vice president of Skymet Weather, a private weather forecaster in India, told Climate Home.

In 2022, India suffered an extreme heatwave and recorded the hottest March in the last 122 years. Maharashtra recorded temperatures of over 46C and in Banda district in Uttar Pradesh temperatures reached 49C. According to a Lancet report, heat-related deaths of people over 65 years increased by 55% in India from 2000-2004 to 2017-2021.

Following the heatwave, Maharashtra experienced heavy downpours [in July and October], which damaged many sugarcane crops, Palawat said. In Uttar Pradesh, there were drought-like conditions until mid-September and “then we suddenly had heavy rain.”

Maharashtra experienced a sixfold increase in floods between 1970 and 2019, according to a report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi-based think tank.

“Agriculture requires stable weather… these episodes of extreme weather events are harmful,” said Palawat. “What this can result in is that we may have a bumper crop in one region in a particular year but that can quickly change in the next year due to unpredictable weather.”

Intense heat or extreme cold deteriorates the quality of the sugarcane juice and the overall quality of the final sugar product, according to a government report. Temperatures exceeding 35C-40C stunt the growth of the sugarcane crop and reduce the overall yield, according to a 2016 study.

Despite these climate challenges, sugarcane is still considered a better bet than other crops. According to a government report, the net return on cultivating sugarcane is 200–250% higher than for cotton or wheat.

Not enough water

Between May and September 2022, very little rain fell on Uttar Pradesh.

When Climate Home visited Shahabpur in Uttar Pradesh in September, it had just rained for the first time in 40 days. Farm owner Firasut Ali said the area only saw three proper rain spells during the entire monsoon season.

250km away in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district, Ammar Zaidi, a former banker, said that when he started farming in 2014, he was able to secure 40,000-42,500kg of crop per acre. But in the last two years, this has shrunk to about 30,000-36,000kg per acre due to heatwaves. “We are in the thick of the monsoon season but if you touch the ground all you can feel is dust.”

Sitting in his sugarcane field, Zaidi showed Climate Home his diseased sugarcane crop. According to Bharat Rachkar, from the Central Sugarcane Research Station in Maharashtra, when temperatures exceed 40C, “we see the problem of bugs and parasites in the stem”.  When temperatures drop below 25C, germination is also affected.

“I have calculated all my inputs and my overall costs. At the end of the day, I am not getting the return [on investment] I need to survive in this profession,” said Zaidi. “If I started making a balance sheet, I would be in the negative every year.”

“For every investment of 100,000 rupees ($1,230), a farmer is only able to secure 90,000 rupees ($1,100),” he said.

“Why am I still doing this? It is probably because like many others in my area my family has been connected to this land and farming for ages. I can’t just leave.”

Labourers prepare sugarcane fields in Sangli district, Maharashtra

Broken dreams

Diljinder Singh, who lives in the village Sheetlapur in Uttar Pradesh, told Climate Home News that he has many broken dreams. He used to work for Jet Airways and live in Gurugram, the swanky neighbouring city of Delhi.

In 2012, he left his job and returned to his village, where his family owns land, to run a sugarcane farm. His parents warned against it. Singh believed that with better sowing and irrigation methods, he could farm in a more productive way. But his harvests languished.

“The whole pattern is disturbed,” Singh said. “About 5-7 years ago, we used to get good rainfall and we didn’t require irrigation but today people are dependent on diesel-run generators to irrigate their fields.”

Too much water

Heat isn’t the only problem. In late September, heavy downpours hit Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, damaging 2.3 million hectares (23,000 sq km) of crops, including sugarcane. When heavy rains like this hits, it leads to waterlogged soil which impacts the germination process and stunts the root development, said Rachkar.

“I was born in 1989 and until 2006 I had never seen floods in my region. Since then I have seen [floods] three times,” said Ankush Churmule, a farmer whose family has been involved in sugarcane farming for 50 years.

“Areas of western Maharashtra, where the sugarcane is grown near the river, are facing a lot of impact due to successive floods. In those areas, the farmers are moving to bamboo,” said Rahul Ramesh Patil, president of the Weather Literacy Forum, a group that raises awareness about changing weather patterns.

A farmer removes weeds from floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India

The poor harvests caused by excess flooding also impact people with associated livelihoods such as rearing bulls or transporting goods. Kiran Shamrao, who rears bulls for sugarcane farming in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that flooding had severely reduced his profits.

“Our life runs on the bulls. Before, there was little rain, so we had some work for the bulls. But now, because of so much rain, the bulls don’t have work anymore, and we are at a loss,” he said.

Price guaranteed, timing not

If these regions are so prone to droughts and floods, then why do farmers continue to grow sugarcane? The simple answer is that sugarcane fetches them an assured price as it is regulated by the government, unlike other crops such as cotton and soy beans.

“From production to export, every part of the sugar industry is regulated in India. Farmers have an assured buyer and price and they know every last cane will be purchased,” said Sonjoy Mohanty, director of the Indian Sugar Mills Association.

That does not mean payment is swift. Sharma told Climate Home that payments are “often delayed for a year and sometimes even more, bringing hardship to farmers”.

Because of delayed payments, farmers are struggling to make ends meet and are falling into debt, Zaidi said. “Except for sowing, farmers have nothing in their control– neither production nor the final price.”

Representatives for sugarcane farmers told Niti Aayog, the government think tank, that climate threats, such as droughts and floods, “restrict their ability to switch to alternate crops”.

“These weather conditions lead to poor forecasting and the risk of crop failure is higher with other crops [such as cotton, wheat and soybean],” they said.

The Indian government has established a National Agriculture Disaster Management Plan to understand the impact of climate change on farming and focus on disaster risk reduction and possible adaptation measures for the sector.

But farmers told Climate Home they need more support.

No going back

In such a catch-22 situation, what is the solution?

“With climate change being a reality, the crop patterns need to be adjusted otherwise it will heavily impact the yield,” said 50-year-old Suresh Kabade, who has worked as a sugarcane farmer for the past 30 years. “We need to change with climate change.”

A 2019 study by a group of Indian scientists recommended the development of efficient irrigation practices, the adoption of a heat-tolerant cane variety and reducing the use of fossil fuel fertilisers in the near future to assist the sugar industry and help it adapt to the changing climate in northern India.

Other measures could include farmers adopting solar-powered pumps, getting crop insurance, and being taught to use weather forecasting tools, which are readily available but not widely used due to a lack of training.

Most of the farmers Climate Home spoke to were pessimistic about what lies ahead. Singh said there are times when he regrets leaving his corporate job but now there is no option but to continue. “We can’t go back.”

Asked if he will encourage his daughter to follow in his footsteps, Singh was direct. “My nine-year-old daughter enjoys farming and helps me in the fields. Considering my achievements, I would encourage her to take up farming… but if I consider present-day policies, I would never ask her to go into agriculture.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

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Over the years, there have been various vehicles for this. Loans, grants, technology and training pass from developed to developing countries directly and indirectly through multi-lateral development banks and specialist vehicles like the Green Climate Fund.

At Cop26 in Glasgow last year, a new vehicle was announced. The UK, US, France, Germany and the US announced they would provide $8.5bn to help South Africa transition from coal to clean energy.

They called this a “just energy transition partnership” (Jetp). The “just” means they aim to look after the coal workers whose jobs are under threat from the transition from coal to clean energy.

Since then, other countries have jumped on board. At the G7 summit in Germany in June, the group of seven developed economies declared their support for the concept, adding Canada and Japan to list the of potential financial backers.

The German hosts also invited Senegal, Indonesia and India along to the Bavarian summit. They, and Vietnam, then began talks with the partners on their own South-African style deals. So, as the first anniversary of the Jetp concept approaches, how are those talks going?

South Africa – Ambitious plan with stingy backing

South Africa’s Jetp got a lot of fanfare at Cop26. President Cyril Ramaphosa described it as a “watershed moment not only for our own just transition but for the world as a whole”.

Details were slow to emerge. But South Africa has been doing the legwork. On Friday, Ramaphosa unveiled a 200-page blueprint for economic transition, poverty reduction and an end to blackouts through investment in renewables, green hydrogen and electric vehicles.

This will use the $8.5bn as a catalyst, Ramaphosa said, but that “is not sufficient to meet the scale of our ambition”. After factoring in expected investments from multilateral development banks and the private sector, there is a $39bn shortfall over the next five years, he estimates.

To shore up more investments, John Kerry is proposing to finance the part of the transition by allowing banks and companies to claim carbon credits for funding emissions cuts. The idea is controversial and has divided partner countries. Kerry could make an announcement at Cop27.

The biggest concern for South Africa is taking on too much debt. Only 4% of the $8.5bn package comes as grants. The country will pay interest on the rest.

That may not matter too much if the new clean industries turn a profit and boost the economy. However social security and retraining of coal workers is not obviously a profitable enterprise – and risks falling by the wayside.

At a pre-Cop27 briefing, even South African environment minister Barbara Creecy sounded concerned. “We have to be careful of climate financing that enhances debt of developing countries”, she said.

Presenting the blueprint to his climate advisory group, Ramaphosa said he was "placing the ball firmly in the court of the international community particularly developed economy countries that have through their own industrialisation… contributed greatly to the damage of our climate”.

Indonesia - Haggling on ambition

Like South Africa, Indonesia is a coal-producing and coal-reliant emerging economy. Unlike South Africa, its coal plants are relatively new and therefore more expensive to retire early. Indonesia wants more money on better terms than South Africa got.

According to leaked diplomatic cables seen by Politico, rich countries are offering $10bn. The Jakarta-based Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR) estimates that replacing all of Indonesia’s coal capacity with renewables will cost around $1.2 trillion by 2050. Its director Fabby Tumiwa previously told Climate Home an energy transition partnership worth $15bn would be “a fair amount”.

Tumiwa added that grants should make up more of the deal than they did with South Africa - at least 10%, he said. Replacing coal with renewables will require a lot of investment from state-owned utility Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), he said, and "it is unfair if that cost [is] borne by Indonesia[n] tax payer[s], while we are not the one causing today climate crisis".

The US is co-leading on the talks with Japan. They represent the contributor group of the G7, Norway, Denmark and perhaps soon New Zealand, Politico reports.

The leaked cables reveal the partner countries want Indonesia to cancel a new 5GW coal power plant, remove coal subsidies and roll out renewables faster. IESR research suggests Indonesia could save $5.7bn in health costs by 2030 by cancelling its $1.7bn coal subsidy bill.

The Indonesian government is expected to announce the Jetp deal at the G20 summit it is hosting on the island of Bali on 15-16 November. The country is only sending a vice-president to Cop27, as president Joko Widodo stays at home.

Vietnam - Jailed activists ignored

Vietnam is a one-party state where climate activists are unable to criticise the government freely. 

While the government in Hanoi talks about coal transition to donors, it has imprisoned four leading anti-coal activists on spurious tax evasion charges. The US, Germany and others have condemned the arrests of Nguy Thi Khanh, Mai Phan Loi, Bach Hung Duong and Dang Dinh Bach. 

A spokesperson for Germany's development ministry (BMZ) told Climate Home it had raised human rights concerns with the Vietnamese government. A separate source with knowledge of these discussions, said the Germans "received significant pushback". 

The activists' freedom may not be a deal-breaker. The BMZ spokesperson told Climate Home: "With the agreement on the Jetp, we also hope to be able to send a positive signal to climate activists." 

US climate envoy John Kerry told reporters recently he is “working very hard to get Vietnam to do what is sensible regarding the transition to energy” despite the fact "some forces are fighting to keep coal". 

Jake Schmidt, of the National Resources Defense Council, told Climate Home this was a mistake. “How can you have an investment plan in a country that does not allow experts to operate and ensure that the money is well spent and delivered in the right way? Until these four experts are freed and their ability to operate is resolved I don't think a Jetp can survive in that country." 

According to leaked EU documents reported by Politico, the initial offer of around $5bn is too low to seal the deal for Vietnam. 

The EU and UK want Vietnam to peak power emissions in 2030, cancel planned new coal plants built and build out 60GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Vietnam hasn't responded publicly. 

Anti-coal activist Nguy Thi Khanh, winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, is in jail on spurious tax evasion charges (Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize)

India - Early stages still

With more people and more emissions than the other Jetp nations put together, India is the biggest prize for emissions reduction. But it's Jetp negotiations are not as far advanced as for the three nations above.

There are no announcements expected at Cop27, which prime minister Narendra Modi is not scheduled to attend. There may be more progress next year when India takes over the G20 presidency from Indonesia.

Senegal - Gas a dealbreaker

Unlike the nations above, Senegal is not a major emerging economy and is not reliant on coal. One source said it was chosen because France wanted a French-speaking nation to take a lead on.

Like most African nations, Senegal's emissions are tiny. A third of its people lack access to electricity. The issue is how much and how quickly emissions grow.

Senegal's prime minister Macky Sall has been vocal about wanting to develop offshore gas deposits. He wants developed nations' help in this and has found a sympathetic ear in Germany's Olaf Scholz.

But, as a group, the partner countries have made clear to him that a Jetp will not finance any fossil fuels. Any deal will focus on renewables, so Senegal can "leapfrog" the polluting stage of development.

These talks have received less political attention and no announcements are expected at Cop27.

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The document increases ambition from India’s previous target, set in 2016, to reduce emissions for each unit of GDP 33-35% from 2005 levels by 2030.

It clarifies the target for clean energy, which caused some confusion among experts when Modi announced it at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK. India is aiming for half of installed electricity generation capacity to come from non-fossil sources at the end of the decade, not half of energy use, which would have been harder to achieve. 

Non-fossil capacity, which includes nuclear and large hydro dams as well as wind and solar, is around 40% today.

“It’s good that they corrected that error – it’s now a lot more real,” Swati D’Souza, India lead analyst and coordinator at the International Energy Agency (IEA), told Climate Home News. “The 45% [emissions intensity] reduction target is achievable for India. It also actually gives us a lot of leg room to go over it in future.”

The timing just months ahead of Cop27 in Egypt and during an energy crisis is significant, D’Souza added. 

“India announced targets ahead of Cop27 despite the turmoil that is happening in global energy markets and with countries in Europe moving towards gas. We have stuck to our guns. That says something about the commitment of our government to decarbonise,” she said.

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Navroz Dubash, professor at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, described the 2030 goal as a “substantial pledge”.  

“It is likely to be achievable based on current policies,” he said. “Nonetheless, this is not a trivial task and will require deep structural changes in the Indian economy to de-link carbon and GDP, beyond what India has achieved in past decades.”

Dubash said the government’s decision not to commit to a clean energy generation pledge was a “missed opportunity” to curb coal. That “would have been a game-changer, because it would have required active management of thermal versus renewable energy power,” he said.  

India has a domestic target of achieving 450 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Modi’s verbal pledge to increase that to 500GW did not make the final cut. 

“Nothing analogous now remains in the international sphere,” said Dubash. “The new electricity pledge has the benefit of simplicity and clarity, but is not the benchmark for tracking Indian progress – the domestic pledge is.”

In a press statement, the government said the long-term climate goals are conditional on finance. “India will require its due share from such international financial resources and technological support,” the statement reads. 

Modi previously estimated the price tag at $1 trillion.

While the plan does not commit to sectoral emission reductions, the government highlighted policies that are expected to support the goal. These include a rollout of LED bulbs and a decarbonisation plan for Indian Railways.

Climate Action Tracker judged India’s previous goal as “highly insufficient” and in line with 4C warming, but gave the government credit for policies and actions that would outperform the target. Two thirds of its Covid stimulus package went towards a green recovery, undermined somewhat by continued support for coal development.

The updated plan is expected to be uploaded to the UN registry in the coming days. 

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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) guidelines say forests are defined by the “presence of trees and the absence of other predominant land uses”. It adds: “It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use”.

Indian forestry experts have accused successive governments of exaggerating the extent of India’s forest cover in order to make it easier to meet climate targets and access more climate finance for protecting forests.

For the first time, the government’s latest bi-annual ‘State of the Forests report’ (ISFR) maps what it regards as forestry cover in India’s seven biggest cities. An area of land over one hectare with as little as 10% canopy density is included in the tally.

According to the ISFR report, 5% of the city of Hyderabad is now covered with forest. This is more than double the level recorded of 2011.

This rise drew praise from within India and abroad. “Congrats Hyderabad!”, tweeted the president of the Green Belt and Road Institute Erik Solheim. “Good news”, said Times of India editor Syed Akbar.

But comparing the ISFR’s map of Hyderabad with satellite imagery from Google Earth shows that among the areas counted as medium density forests are the campus of Osmania University and the area known as “lab quarters” centred around headquarters of Indian missile manufacturer Bharat Dynamics.

The headquarters of missile manufacturer Bharat Dynamics is counted as forest. (Picture: Google Earth/Screenshot)

Shubham Sharma is a researcher at the Indian institute of forest management who lived in Hyderabad for two years. He told Climate Home News: “This is a defence establishment. The Indian Defence and Research Development organisations, wherever they are, in multiple cities, they have these big campuses and residential areas and it might have a lot of green but that doesn’t make it a forest”.

Similarly, he  said, large campuses of universities like Osmania often have landscaping which includes green carpets and trees.

The Navy Nagar area of Mumbai. On the left is a golf course, which is not counted as forest. The area on the right is counted as ‘open forest’. (Picture: Screenshot/Google Earth)

In the coastal mega-city of Mumbai, the government has classified much of the area known as Navy Nagar as ‘open forest’. The area is  on Mumbai’s southern tip and is controlled by the Indian Navy and houses its sailors. Satellite imagery reveals the ‘open forest’ is formed by trees in the streets and gardens around these naval offices and accommodation.

One Mumbai resident, who works near to the area and wanted to remain anonymous “because the government here is not the most friendly”, told Climate Home “there’s no forest in Navy Nagar”.

In the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, ‘open forest’ includes the Sabarmati Central jail whose spoke-and-wheel design includes rows of trees between buildings. The prison is surrounded by a railway and one side and the densely-populated Vijay Nagar neighbourhood on the other.

The area around Sabarmati central jail in Ahmedabad is counted as forest. (Picture: Google Earth/Screenshot)

In Delhi, much of the city’s southern border around the Asola wildlife sanctuary is considered ‘open forest’ including holiday homes known as ‘farmhouses’ for the wealthy and densely-populated settlements like Bhatti Mines for the poor.

Souparna Lahiri, a Delhi-based campaigner for the Global Forest Coalition said: “For years, these have been illegally converted into settlements by the construction lobby and the very rich people who grabbed and bought land”.

The swimming pools, lawns and long driveways of these farm houses are visible from satellite imagery. Lahiri said most of the owners come to these homes only on weekends or special occasions. Sometimes, the properties are rented out for weddings.

These ‘farm houses’ host wealthy people and are counted as forest. (Picture: Google Earth/Screenshot)

Sharma said that planting trees in urban areas helps with local air pollution and shade. But, he said, when they are outside forests they don’t help to sequester much carbon.

“You might think the trees are the main source absorbing carbon but it is is not the tree it is actually the soil,” he said. “In a forest, around 50% of the carbon is in the forest soil.”

Lahiri said that, for decades, successive Indian governments have sought compensation for not turning their forests to other uses. This incentivises them to use a broad definition of what a forest is.

“India has been targeting international funding for [a] long [time] on the basis of compensation for opportunity lost for development,” he said, citing India’s enthusiastic participation in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development mechanism.

India has set a 2030 target of having 33% of its land under tree cover, as part of its National Mission for a Green India. The ISFR says the figure is now 22%.

In its 2015 climate plan, the government also committed to creating a carbon sink to sequester an additional 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2, through increasing tree and forest cover. This climate plan is expected to be updated this year and may include new forestry targets.

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According to India’s latest State of the Forest report, India’s overall forest cover increased by 1,540 square kilometres between 2019 and 2021, while its tree cover increased by 721 sq km. But plantations, orchards and urban green areas are misleadingly counted as forest, while mature forests are being cleared for industrial use.

In 2019, the government changed the methodology for the first time to include trees outside the forest area, both on public lands or private land, Kanchi Kolhi, a researcher at the Delhi-based think tank Centre for Policy Research, told Climate Home News. An area of land over one hectare with as little as 10% canopy density is included in the tally.

“It gives a skewed picture of how much land is actually under forests. By this definition, palm oil plantations will be designated as forest cover when it comes to showing compliance with domestic forest policy and international climate commitments,” Kolhi said.

This allows the government to claim that it is making progress towards achieving its 2030 forestry targets, which are critical to its long-term climate strategy.

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The government has set a 2030 target of having 33% of its land under tree cover, as part of its National Mission for a Green India, and has pledged to restore 26 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2030. In its 2030 climate plan, India committed to creating a carbon sink to sequester an additional 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2, through increasing tree and forest cover.

With the latest survey the government “can show an increase in forest growth and carbon stocks, and [efforts] to reduce deforestation,” Souparna Lahiri, climate policy advisor at the Global Forest Coalition, told Climate Home News. 

“But it hides the continuing deforestation that is happening due to mining and industrial projects,” Lahiri said, adding that the ministry has given environmental clearance for forests to be cleared for development purposes.

Between 2008 and 2019, 253,179 hectares of forest land were cleared for non-forestry purposes, such as the construction of roads or industrial projects, a government official told Indiaspend. “That is an average of 46,000 hectares of forest being cleared each year,” said Lahiri. “If deforestation is happening, then what is this reality of increasing forest cover? It doesn’t match up.”

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The government can use the claim of increased forest growth to pitch for funding from the UN and other international donors, under the scheme known as Redd+, Rajkamal Goswami, research associate at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), told Climate Home News.

“The government is looking to leverage the increase in forest cover in the form of payments under Redd+ or increase their net emissions reductions,” he said. 

“[The] methodology is a wicked mix of historical obsession of forestry with growing trees and casting the net wide to access climate adaptation or carbon offset funds,” said Kohli. “It allows the government to make a pitch for Redd+ and other climate adaptation funds by showcasing a commitment to forest conservation and increasing carbon stocks.”

From 2000-2015, India was the largest recipient of international development aid for forestry, securing 23% of funds from sources including Japan, EU and multilateral development banks.

Donors including France and the UK are earmarking an increased share of their budgets for “nature-based solutions” that both absorb carbon and support wildlife.

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“A true reflection of the state of India’s forests will need to be a multidisciplinary exercise which acknowledges threats, records data and assesses its ecological status,” said Kohli. 

“I am very sceptical that things will change for the better soon,” said Goswami. For the government to improve its forest monitoring “intense pressure” is needed, “from the public, scientists and international forest, climate, and carbon governing bodies to make the data public and open to peer-review,” he said. 

The ministry of forestry and environment did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

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Analysts say the current crisis, along with falling support from investors to finance new coal-fired plants, raise serious questions about the government’s plans to expand coal production. 

According to India’s power ministry, the country’s 135 thermal power plants had an average of just four days of coal stocks on Friday, down from 13 in early August. 

While the situation is not as severe as in China, where a power crunch has forced factories to curb production and left households without electricity, India’s coal supply crisis could drag on for months and lead to power outages, its power minister has warned. 

“I don’t know whether I will be comfortable in the next five to six, four to five months,” power minister Raj Kumar Singh told The Indian Express this week. “Normally the demand starts coming down in the second half of October… when [the weather] starts cooling…but it’s going to be touch and go,” he said.

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Dave Jones, senior electricity analyst at Ember, told Climate Home News India is “on red alert” for power rationing, which was introduced in north-eastern China. 

India’s power generators have cut back on importing coal in recent months as international prices surged, following increased demand from China. “It’s clear that China is hoovering up coal and creating problems for the rest of the world,” said Jones. 

But India’s own growth in coal demand in August was “unprecedented and caught coal companies and plants unprepared,” Karthik Ganesan, fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), told Climate Home. National demand for coal in India surged by 16% between June and August, according to CEEW analysis. 

Increased economic activity as sectors open up following the pandemic, power plants not anticipating the surge in demand and monsoon rains which impact coal production every year have led to the shortages, explained Swati d’Souza, research lead for climate action at the National Foundation for India. 

“The shortages show how despite renewable energy penetration, coal continues to be the backbone of the Indian economy,” d’Souza told Climate Home. 

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Coal-fired power accounts for around 66% of India’s energy mix, up from 63% last year, according to CEEW. 

“As climate change increases erratic and extreme weather, diversifying fuel sources is going to be an important strategy to make our energy systems resilient to climate shocks,” Ulka Kelkar, director of climate at World Resources Institute’s India office, told Climate Home.

India is on track to exceed its target of delivering 450GW of renewable energy by the end of the decade but it continues to expand its coal capacity. India currently has 233 GW of coal plants in operation and a further 34.4 GW under construction. 

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi wants to ramp up domestic coal production to one billion tonnes per year as part of his self-reliant India policy. Campaigners say the government’s coal expansion plans threaten the lives and livelihoods of indigenous communities. 

India is yet to submit an improved 2030 climate plan to the UN and promised to do so by the Cop26 climate talks next month. How the power crisis will impact its plan remains unclear.

Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency warned that Modi’s coal expansion plans are “difficult to reconcile with India’s evolving energy needs and environmental priorities.”

Analysts say that domestic coal production is likely to increase over the next few months to make up for the shortfall. Longer-term, the government should move away from coal production and invest in clean energy sources to reduce vulnerability to supply shocks, they say. 

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“We don’t need to create more coal mines and power plants, the focus should be on building more renewable energy generation,” Vibhuti Garg, an energy economist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa), told Climate Home. 

“The government wants to increase domestic production, [but] we do not see much participation by players to enter the coal mining space. They understand the challenges: that arranging finance would be problematic,” she said, noting that not a single foreign investor has expressed interest in financing new coal projects since Modi opened coal mining to private investment last year. 

India received no bids for more than 70% of new coal mines up for auction, Reuters reported in July. 

According to analysis by Ember, India does not need to build any new coal power plants to meet expected energy demand by 2030. New construction will lead to 27 GW of  “zombie plants”, which are not operational, it warned.

“Every day those coal power plants are looking less likely,” said Jones, adding that the lack of investment “seals the fate of the next round of those zombie coal plants”. 

According to Garg, industrial players are already looking to decrease their reliance on coal by investing in solar power. “They want to reduce their reliance on utility coal power, because it’s not as reliant and it’s expensive. 2021 has been a very promising year for solar rooftop deployment.” 

Garg said the government may consider a U-turn on its coal expansion plans if it is able to meet energy demand through renewable energy and battery storage. 

“As long as the increased demand is met, they will be happy with that,” she said.

The post India’s vulnerability to coal shocks exposed amid surging energy demand and prices appeared first on Climate Home News.

Reliance said on Thursday that it would build four “gigafactories” to manufacture solar panels, electric batteries, green hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells on a mass scale in Jamnagar, western India, as part of its New Energy mission to achieve net zero emissions by 2035. 

“The world is entering a new energy era, which is going to be highly disruptive. The age of fossil fuels, which powered economic growth globally for nearly three centuries, cannot continue much longer,” Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, told the company’s AGM. Reliance, India’s largest public company, has an annual revenue of $70 billion. 

Biden scales down climate spending in search of bipartisan deal

“Let me tell you, in all humility, that New Energy is the most exciting, most challenging and most purpose-driven mission I will be pursuing in my life,” he said, adding that the company has started developing the green energy complex on 5,000 acres in Jamnagar. This area is equivalent to nearly 3,000 football pitches.

Analysts welcomed the announcement which they said marked a major shift in policy for one of the world’s largest oil refiners. 

“It signifies the post-pandemic private investment shift towards clean energy,” Swati D’souza, research lead for climate action at the National Foundation for India, told Climate Home News. “This announcement is a sign of a good diversification strategy.

“Reliance Industries is the biggest private refiner in India and the announcement shows a definite shift in priorities for the company since oil and gas has been its bread and butter,” said D’souza. The development would spur the creation of green jobs, she added. 

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Sunil Dahiya, from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Climate Home News that it was encouraging to see Reliance realise the potential of renewable energy, but said it still planned to continue investing in oil and gas. 

“This is definitely a good step for renewable energy development but not enough, particularly looking at the repercussions we are seeing of damaged environmental quality, health impacts and climate change catastrophes,” Dahiya said.

“We are at a stage where big corporations have to cut their absolute emissions through clearly stated policies of moving away from fossil fuels and we haven’t seen that happening,” he said. 

India is on track to exceed its target of delivering 450GW of renewable energy by the end of the decade but it continues to expand its coal capacity. The world’s third largest emitter after China and the US, India has so far resisted setting a more ambitious 2030 goal, despite mounting international pressure. 

For its climate plans to be compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C, India would need to abandon plans to build new coal power plants and phase out all coal generation by 2040, according to Climate Action Tracker.

The post India’s biggest oil refiner to invest $10bn in clean energy ‘gigafactories’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

Desperate for oxygen, hospital beds and medical supplies, friends and relatives of people infected with Covid-19 in India have taken to social media to plea for help.

The stream of requests under hashtags such as #SOSDelhi and #CovidSOSIndia are far ranging: from sourcing oxygen cylinders, ventilators and beds in intensive care units to looking for plasma donors, ambulances and testing kits and arranging delivery of critical medical supplies and food across states and cities.

With no central helpline operated by the government, social media users are filling the gap. From their phones and laptops, thousands of people are giving up their time to help connect those in need with oxygen vendors and hospital administrators.

“There are no end to the requests. It’s hard to stop once you have started,” Siddharth Singh, a climate and energy researcher from Delhi, told Climate Home News.

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Every 30 minutes, Singh checks his social media account for messages of people needing help and keeps tabs of the latest information being shared by official sources. In recent weeks, he has spent around 40% of his time connecting people through Twitter and Facebook to life-saving medical assistance.

“Most homes have somebody, maybe a relative or a friend, that is down with Covid-19 right now. Certainly everybody that has a social media presence just has to help out,” he said.

Triton hospital in Nehru Enclave, Delhi, has just about one hour of Oxygen left. It is a non-Covid children’s hospital and has atleast 10 children who are on Oxygen and 6 who are on ventilator support. Please help. Contact Dr. Deepali Gupta 8860747416
Verified at 9:20

— gurpriya singh (@gurpriyasingh) May 3, 2021

India accounted for nearly half of all cases and a quarter of all deaths from Covid reported worldwide last week, according to the World Health Organization.

The entire Indian delegation to a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in London this week was forced to isolate after two of its members tested positive to Covid-19. Ministers were due to discuss fairer vaccine distribution for poorer nations.

The scale of the crisis in India has raised further questions over whether critical Cop26 climate talks will be able to go ahead in person this November, as the UK host has been insisting.

Shooting Covid-19

Exasperated frontline workers, a patient left to check his own health, the wait for the final journey and the cremation — @AmarjeetKSingh_ continues to click the endless cycle of tragedy that repeats every day in Delhi pic.twitter.com/yF3Csf2STa

— Press Club of India (@PCITweets) May 3, 2021

As infections started to rise sharply at the start of April, the climate community in India was busy with a flurry of diplomatic events, including US special climate envoy’s John Kerry’s visit to Delhi. If, when and how the nation could reach net zero emissions was rising up the agenda.

On the day of Joe Biden’s leaders’ climate summit, 22 April, nearly 315,000 cases were reported.

The momentum for climate action that had been building since the start of the year “has been broken very badly,” said Swati D’souza, research lead for climate action at the National Foundation for India. “Cop26 now seems very far away.”

An elderly woman is tested for Covid-19 in a village in southern India (Photo: Trinity Care Foundation/Flickr)

On the face of it, climate diplomacy has continued through the crisis, with UK prime minister Boris Johnson and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi agreeing to deepen collaboration on clean energy deployment and forest protection in a virtual meeting on Tuesday.

But for Singh and D’souza, responding to the public health emergency has meant putting their work on hold.

“Some of the work that we would have liked to have done ahead of Cop26 is not happening. We will be going into the Cop with much less preparations,” said Singh, who now spends a large part of his time pulling together updated contact information for hospitals, oxygen distributors and emergency services and making calls to verify available stocks.

“I would rather not be doing this,” he said. “People would not have to do this if the government was doing its job.”

“We are running out of Oxygen. We are in a crisis mode”: Executive Director of Delhi’s Batra Hospital sends SOS #OxygenShortage pic.twitter.com/Glwo8ORNnd

— NDTV (@ndtv) May 1, 2021

Before the crisis, D’souza was working to develop transition pathways for coal mining communities in three Indian states, which she was planning to visit this month, and was hoping to publish her findings ahead of Cop26.

“But work has been more or less completely on the back burner,” she told Climate Home from her home in Delhi. “If you don’t value human life now, when are you ever going to?”

For the past month, D’souza has been working full time to help source oxygen and hospital beds to people who need it most.

As resources become scarce, the time dedicated to each request has grown with up to three days needed to find a bed in intensive care. At times, the relentless of calls of people needing help has taken its toll.  “I’m an energy researcher, I am not trained to handle people’s grief,” she said.

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For Ulka Kelkar, director of the climate programme at the World Resources Institute India, the impact of the situation on people’s mental health has made any other work “difficult right now”.

From her home in Bangalore, she watched as her colleagues across the organisation started failing ill. “It was a very difficult situation that was very stressful for everyone. We could do nothing else but to watch the suffering. This is a disaster of epic proportion,” she told Climate Home.

To cope, the team agreed to extend deadlines and prioritise supporting their families and friends.

For Kelkar, this involves reaching out to the community of climate researchers, analysts, and journalists to create a mental health support network. “I feel very strongly that we must hang on to what is true that most people are recovering from Covid-19… because otherwise we’ll only sink into despair.”

Auto #Ambulance service launched in #delhi with fitted #oxygen support
Helpline number :- 011- 41236614/9818430043
.
.#delhi #OxygenConcentrator #DelhiFightsCorona #DelhiSOS #delhioxygen pic.twitter.com/cqXnUtx3uS

— Tonu Sojatia (@tonusojatia) May 5, 2021

Mayank Aggarwal, an environmental journalist and contributing editor to Mongabay India, has found his silver lining in “the army of selfless volunteers” who have dropped everything to help address the Covid-19 crisis.

“These are unsung heroes who will never get the light they deserve and that has really touched me,” he told Climate Home.

After members of his multigenerational household tested positive in Delhi at the end of March, Aggarwal has dedicated his time to connecting people and amplifying calls for help on social media, particularly from rural and tribal areas which have received far less public attention. “I am not even a small cog in a whole wheel of the whole structure,” he said.

“People stepped up where the government failed. Had the authorities prepared, we would not be in the position that we are in right now. We are simply ignoring the signals. The pandemic is a minute example of the impacts the climate crisis could have.”

The post Meet the Indian climate experts desperately trying to save lives from Covid-19 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Raj Kumar Singh described net zero goals as “pie in the sky” during a global summit hosted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) designed to create global momentum for achieving net zero emissions by the middle of the century.

The virtual ministerial dialogue was attended by more than 40 ministers from large emitting nations.

“You have countries whose per capita emissions are four times, five times, six times, 12 times the world average,” Singh said during a panel discussion with China’s energy minister Zhang Jianhua, US climate envoy John Kerry and the EU’s Frans Timmermans, which have all backed net zero goals. 

“Now the question is when are [emissions] going to come down. What we hear is that ‘by 2050 or by 2060 we will become carbon neutral’.” But “2060 is far away,” Singh said in reference to China’s own net zero goal.

“If by that time people continue to emit at the rate at which they are emitting, the world won’t survive. So what are you going to do in the next five years, we want to know that, the world wants to know that. What are you going to do in the next 10 years?” he asked.

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Singh’s comments come as India is facing mounting diplomatic pressure to set its own net zero goal ahead of the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, in November.

Opening the meeting, Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma called “on all countries to commit to a net zero world”. “Not enough is being done to meet that net zero target,” he told ministers. “We must do much more now to turn remote targets into immediate action. We simply cannot afford another decade of deliberation,” he added, insisting on the need for short-term ambition.

Speculation on Indian plans for net zero has been rife. Recent reports suggested government officials close to Modi were considering setting a net zero goal for 2050 or 2047. But earlier this week, government sources told Reuters that India is unlikely to bind itself to a net zero target by 2050. 

“That speech by RK Singh Power Minister at the IEA #NetZeroSummit should put all speculations on India and net zero to rest,” tweeted Swati Dsouza, a Delhi-based energy consultant.

Net zero targets have come under growing scrutiny from experts and campaigners, who have denounced commitments made 30 years into the future that don’t include transformative action to cut emissions in the short term.

Isn’t it funny that the same people who are calling us naive for believing change is possible are the ones who believe fossil fuel companies, big polluters and oil producing nations will ”fix” the climate- and ecological crisis with their vague, distant ”net zero” commitments…?

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) March 24, 2021

Sunil Dahiya, analyst at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Climate Home News that it was important that countries’ net zero strategies included interim targets for the next five and 10 years. 

“Without that it’s difficult to gauge the progress towards net zero and hold countries accountable towards these ambitious targets,” he said. 

Writing in Nature, Joeri Rogelj, one of lead authors of the 1.5C IPCC report, warned against setting “vague” net zero targets. “The stakes are too high to take comfort in mere announcements. Without more clarity, strategies behind net-zero targets cannot be understood; nor can their impact be evaluated,” he wrote.

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Minister Singh argued that developing countries could not be expected to commit to net zero when they have contributed very little to historic emissions and are heavily reliant on carbon-intensive sectors such as steel and cement to grow their economies. 

“The developed world has occupied almost 80% of the carbon space already. You can’t say that [developing countries] have to come to net zero. No, sorry – they have to develop,” he said. 

In response, Timmermans said that there is huge potential for developing nations such as India to leapfrog polluting technologies and meet their energy needs, without increasing their carbon emissions. 

“Some countries are resisting [decarbonisation] despite the fact that we’re looking at the biggest job market the world has ever known,” Kerry said. “This is the greatest economic opportunity we’ve ever had to build our countries.”

The world’s third largest emitting country after China and the US, India has so far resisted setting a more ambitious 2030 climate goal despite pressure from the UN and UK Cop26 host for every nation to improve its climate plan ahead of Glasgow. 

Kerry said the US would announce a “strong” 2030 target on 22 April, when president Joe Biden is hosting a leaders’ climate summit. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is among 40 world leaders invited. The US said it had urged participants to use the summit as an opportunity to outline how they will contribute to stronger climate ambition.

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“As far as we are concerned, we have one of the fastest growing renewable capacity in the world. We are well on the way to achieving what we have set out to do,” Singh said.

India is on track to exceed its target of delivering 450GW of renewable energy by the end of the decade but it continues to expand its coal capacity, recently holding an auction for new coal blocks. 

For its climate plans to be compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C, India would need to abandon plans to build new coal power plants and phase out all coal generation by 2040, according to Climate Action Tracker.

Dsouza told Climate Home News India requires “substantial financial and technological aid” if it is to decarbonise rapidly. 

“We will need global finance to mitigate the negative impacts of the transition on livelihoods and to bring costs of new technology lower. This is true for India and for all developing countries,” she said. 

The post India calls out rich nations for setting net zero goals over robust short-term targets appeared first on Climate Home News.

Jayant Sinha, a lawmaker representing the coal producing Hazaribagh district in Jharkhand, north east India, submitted the bill to the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house earlier this week.

The bill, obtained by Climate Home News, aims to provide a framework “by which India can develop and implement clear and stable climate change policies” under the Paris Agreement.

Modelled on New Zealand’s climate law, it would require the government to establish emissions budgets every five years, starting in 2022.  An independent climate change commission would be created to drive policy recommendations and monitor progress towards achieving the net zero target.

“My objective was to start the discussion in India about a net zero target. And what would be the means and mechanisms to achieve it and start fostering a dialogue on this topic,” Sinha told Climate Home News.

My view: India can create crores of high-paying jobs and save the world by declaring Net Zero by 2050 target. (1/2) https://t.co/4fvvlKgkJZ pic.twitter.com/agFvL9R7s5

— Jayant Sinha (@jayantsinha) March 12, 2021

In practice, it is “very rare” for a private member’s bill to become law in India as the government is unlikely to support legislation that it hasn’t proposed, he said.

But Sinha, who chairs the parliament’s standing committee on finance, hopes the bill will drive the issue to the top of India’s political agenda.

“We are not going to get to 2C or 1.5C unless India completely changes its trajectory and gets to net zero as soon as possible,” he said.

In recent months, prime minister Narendra Modi has come under growing diplomatic pressure to set a net zero goal after some of the world’s biggest polluters announced carbon neutrality commitments, including China.

Government officials close to Modi are reportedly working with senior bureaucrats and foreign advisors to consider setting a net zero goal for 2050 or 2047, the centenary of the country’s independence from the UK.

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Under the bill, the climate change commission would be tasked with helping to prepare emissions budgets and report on progress in meeting them. Should the government fail to meet its goals, the commission would have the power to levy penalty fines.

Navroz Dubash, professor at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, who is working on proposals to develop robust climate institutions in India, welcomed the prospect of an Indian climate law.

But Sinha’s commission proposal does not reflect India’s approach to cutting emissions, which is focused on transforming key sectors in line with a low-carbon development pathway, Dubash told Climate Home News.

“A climate change commission is useful, but not one articulated solely or even mostly around carbon budgets. Meeting carbon budgets does not animate Indian politics and policy, transformational sectoral change does,” he said in an email.

“The proposed bill copies a little too readily from international experience, without making the effort to design institutions that will work most effectively within India. India deserves more than cut and paste.”

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Despite growing chatter over the possibility of India setting a net zero goal, analysts have previously told Climate Home News that while some modelling work and sectoral analysis was being carried out by researchers, this was not part of a detailed cross-ministerial process.

One coal analyst described the net zero discourse in India as “vague and aspirational”.

Swati D’souza, a Delhi-based energy consultant, said that “going straight to net zero will be a major shift in policy, particularly since we have just auctioned new coal blocks”.

In June 2020, Modi launched an auction of 41 coal mining blocks to private companies. Adani Enterprises won the bid for the Gondulpara coal mine in Sinha’s constituency of Hazaribagh.

For its climate action to be compatible with limiting temperature rise to 1.5C, India would need to abandon plans to build new coal power plants and phase out all coal power generation by 2040, according to Climate Action Tracker.

Sinha defended recent coal auctions as part of Modi’s strategy to build a self-reliant India. “Ultimately,” he wrote in an opinion piece last year, it “is about making India truly globally competitive, so that we build up our economic strength and can control our own destiny”.

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Speaking to Climate Home News, Sinha said there were “a range of technological solutions” to cut emissions from coal, including through carbon capture, that would allow some coal production to continue under a 2050 net zero pathway.

While achieving carbon neutrality would require significant investments, Sinha said setting the target would make funding opportunities flow.

“If India takes a proactive position on net zero, we will get so much support from the world. It would be a tremendous boost for the economy,” he said.

As long as India continues to expand its renewable and coal capacity in parallel, D’souza said it remained to be seen how the country could mobilise the resources to achieve net zero by 2050.

“It is possible with political backing, but it will mean that the government needs to start looking at issues related to ‘just transitions’ now, rather than 10 years in the future,” she said.

The post Indian lawmaker submits private bill to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Farmers from the northern states of Punjab and Haryana are demanding the government repeals laws passed in September that introduced market reforms on the sale of crops. They have organised a nationwide protest on 6 February, when they plan to barricade major highways for several hours. In recent weeks tensions have escalated, with violent clashes between police and farmers.

The government says the new agricultural laws will enable farmers to set their own prices and sell their crops to large companies, such as supermarket chains — doing away with government-regulated wholesale markets where farmers are guaranteed a minimum price.

Changing weather patterns, coupled with unsustainable practices, have led to failed harvests and shrinking incomes for millions of families across the country.

The protestors fear government reforms will allow companies to drive down prices, making it even harder for them to make a living. 

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Agriculture is the primary livelihood for around 58% of India’s 1.3 billion population. The average annual income of a farming family in over half of India’s states was a mere 20,000 rupees ($271) in 2016, according to an economic survey.

“Farming has become a loss-making proposition. As a result farmers who provide for the entire nation are heavily indebted. Not only are they at the mercy of banks and loan sharks, but also the vagaries of weather and the market,” the All India Kisan Sangharsh Committee, which represents over 150 farming unions, said in a statement.

Climate change has made rainfall increasingly erratic.

“Weather patterns are changing and the monsoon is becoming more unpredictable,” Debajit Palit, a director for rural energy at The Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi, told Climate Home News. “You used to know how much rain would happen on a given day. Now it suddenly rains so much that there is a flood.”

A 2017 study published in the journal Nature found that extreme rainfall events tripled between 1950 and 2015 — a trend that scientists have linked to global warming. Charity Christian Aid estimated intense flooding in India between June and October 2020 cost $10 billion.

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Unpredictable weather patterns have forced farmers to delay their harvests, bore deeper into the ground to extract water and intensify their use of toxic fertilisers, said Palit. 

In Punjab, known as India’s “bread basket”, farmers have access to free electricity to pump water for irrigation. Without having to bear the cost of energy, they have dug deeper into the water table.

An electricity cap could incentivise farmers to use energy more efficiently and diversify their harvests beyond water-draining crops such as rice and sugarcane, said Palit.

“When the farmers start paying, they will start valuing the electricity,” he said, adding that farmers should receive welfare benefits in return. 

Switching to less water-intensive crops such as maize and millet is the only way to reverse the damage and create a more sustainable agricultural system, Palit added. India’s ministry of agriculture has previously identified pulses and oilseeds as alternatives to the common rice-wheat cropping system.

“It will be best for farmers and the environment as a whole to shift away from paddy cultivation to other high value crops,” he said. 

Crop diversification would also solve the issue of stubble burning, which farmers do to quickly clear the soil for the next growing season. Farmers in northern India burn an estimated 23 million tonnes of straw from their rice harvests every year, according to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana shrouded Delhi in smog in recent years, sparking a public health emergency.

John Kerry promises ‘significantly’ more climate finance at adaptation summit

Youth climate activists from around the world have expressed their support for Indian farmers on social media. 

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg wrote on Twitter: “We stand in solidarity with the #FarmersProtest in India.” She shared a “toolkit” of advice to those taking part in the protests. 

I still #StandWithFarmers and support their peaceful protest.
No amount of hate, threats or violations of human rights will ever change that. #FarmersProtest

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) February 4, 2021

Ugandan youth activist Vanessa Nakate also spoke out in support of the protests. 

The people united will never be defeated #FarmersProtest

— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash) February 3, 2021

Earlier this week Delhi authorities imposed a 48-hour internet shutdown in response to the farmers’ protests. 

US vice-president Kamala Harris’ niece, Meena Harris, condemned the standoff between police and farmers on Twitter. 

“We all should be outraged by India’s internet shutdowns and paramilitary violence against farmer protesters,” she said. 

Meanwhile in the UK, farming union the Landworkers’ Alliance wrote a public letter, calling on the government to support Indian farmers by banning the export of pesticides and engaging directly with farming unions in India.

The post Indian farmers head for showdown with government over agricultural reform appeared first on Climate Home News.

On 2 May several parts of the country suffered from severe dust and thunderstorms, resulting in the deaths of at least 124 people. On Sunday, more strong storms and extreme heat led to the deaths of over 70 people.

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has set a target of zero deaths from heatwaves. Anup Kumar Srivastava, a drought and heatwave expert at the NDMA, told Climate Home News that efforts to make communties more resilient to extreme heat had reduced deaths.

According to the NDMA, heat waves in India have accounted for over 22,000 deaths since 1992. In 2015, 2,040 Indians died in shocking heatwaves. Recent years have seen declines, to 1,111 in 2016 and 222 in 2017.

Srivastava said the NDMA had launched “intense and sustained efforts for reduction in mortality”. This including assisting state governments to prepare heat action plans. This was particularly important because climate change has aggravated the problem.

“The average and daily peak temperatures in India have raised and intense heatwaves have become more frequent and severe, affecting health and livelihood of vulnerable populations,” said Srivastava.

Preparing local governments is a key to reducing deaths from heat waves and dust storms, reported the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in April.

“It is so hot that in New Delhi the street melts,” Anjali Jaiswal, NRDC India programme director told CHN. “And when children, the poor kids in the street, stop you they don’t ask for money or food, they ask for ‘pani’ – water.”

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Preparedness is the key to saving lives and helping the NDMA reach its zero mortality target. “This goal is definitely within reach. It will take strong efforts on coordination, action, and science,” Jaiswal said. “Unlike air pollution impacts, heat-related illness is largely reversible.”

The heat is most dangerous to those who are more exposed to it. A large portion of the Indian population work outside, where temperatures can hit 46C and many buildings are not fitted with air conditioning.

To combat heat waves, city officials can work together with community leaders and others to warn about heat waves early, prepare hospitals and emergency response, including drinking water, and build robust community awareness programs that inform people.

In 2015, more than 1,700 people died in the south eastern state of Andhra Pradesh. This year, the state has again seen killer heat, but not on the same scale. In response to the tragedy, the state developed inter-agency coordination across health, labour and transport departments, as well as set up 1,168 stations for weather forecasting and modelling.

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Other states, namely Telangana in the south and Odisha in the east, have developed heat action plans and local thresholds to analyse the vulnerability of communities in different parts of the state.

This will only become more necessary as the climate warms, experts warn.

“Climate change is fuelling more extreme weather in India,” said Jaiswal. “Even with modern forecasting systems, we are struggling to keep up.”

“There is an obvious link between climate change and heatwaves,” said Dr Friederike Otto, deputy director at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.

She said that it was difficult to predict extreme events without using large ensembles of model simulations, given their rarity. Authorities have to “make the most” of and be “more selective about which models [they] actually use” when it comes to making predictions.

On Monday, India’s meteorological department announced it would add 30 doppler radars which provide precise information about weather patterns and help in issuing warnings two-three hours prior to severe conditions.

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The post Indian authorities claim progress in campaign to end heatwave deaths appeared first on Climate Home News.

As negotiations begin in Bonn on 6 November on the rules to govern that agreement, these differences will have to be addressed.

However, participants have already sensed that these differences may not be ironed out either at this round of negotiations between the 197 member-countries to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or the next one, which will also be held in 2018. Already, some are suggesting that an extra round of talks will be needed next year to prepare the rules in time for the Paris Agreement to go into effect from 2020.

Here are some of the challenges expected to play out.

The pre-2020-agenda

One of the first sticking points will be what people involved with climate-change discussions call “the pre-2020 agenda”.

In 2010, each of the developed countries pledged to reduce their annual greenhouse gas emissions by specific levels by 2020 and even enhance these commitments if necessary.

Alongside, they committed to mobilise $100 billion a year starting from 2020 for the rest of the world to fight climate change. They undertook to assist the developing world with acquiring cleaner technologies to ensure that poorer countries do not become as dependent on fossil fuels as rich nations have been historically.

In addition, developed countries that had signed up to the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 to reduce emissions were required to ratify the agreement and act according to its rules. In turn, developing countries such as India and China also pledged emission reductions, not in absolute terms but on a relative basis.

However, when the list of items for discussion at the Bonn talks was drafted in September, India and many other developing countries found that it had not allotted any time to discuss the pre-2020 agenda. Several developing countries have already raised a red flag about this at preparatory meetings in September and October.

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The pre-2020 commitments are of significant interest to the larger developing economies. In the pre-2020 period, most of the obligations – to reduce emissions and to provide finance and technology – sit on the shoulders of the developed world. This acknowledges the fact that climate change has so far largely been caused by rich countries burning fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Now, as developing countries try to raise their standards of living, they will have to bear the substantial additional costs of growing in an environmentally sustainable way.

If the developed countries do not meet their obligations over the next three years, developing countries will have to share that burden in the post-2020 period. That is because the Paris Agreement requires developing countries, particularly large emerging economies, to take a greater obligation for reduction of emissions after 2020. Until 2020, only developed countries were required to reduce emissions. Developing countries could chose not to unless they got finance and technology from the rich nations.

A much-discussed review by global civil society groups in 2015 of pre-2020 emission reduction pledges showed that while countries like China and India had undertaken to bear more than their fair share of responsibility, developed countries had not. An Indian government report in 2015 showed how rich countries were not providing the money they had promised but were instead resorting to creative accounting to claim they had.

Bonn COP23 climate talks

When? 6-17 November, 2017

Where? Bonn, Germany

What? A meeting of 197 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where the implementation of the Paris climate agreement will be the major point of negotiations.

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Many developing countries, including India, are expected to fight against the pre-2020 agenda being killed in Bonn. Demanding that it be included provisionally in the agenda at this fortnight’s meeting will be the first step. Getting all countries to agree to actually discuss will be the next and more difficult step.

Facilitative Dialogue 2018

The biggest question in Bonn for negotiators will be how and when countries should enhance their commitments under the Paris Agreement. Should this be done even before the agreement kicks off or after a few years of monitoring actions to reduce emissions levels?

In Bonn, the incoming president of the talks, Fiji, has put its weight behind making an iron-clad arrangement to get countries to review and enhance their existing commitments on emissions reduction even before the Paris Agreement kicks off. This is in the shape of what the climate negotiators call the “facilitative dialogue 2018”.

Report: Poor countries spending climate cash on rich world consultants

Under the Paris Agreement, countries listed time-bound targets to fight climate change. This is a country’s ‘nationally determined contribution’. Developed countries expressed targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms. Developing countries such as India committed to targets for relative reductions in emissions growth, along with listing their needs for finance and technology to achieve these goals.

Under the UNFCCC, under which Paris Agreement is stitched, developing countries have a right to access finance and technology from developed countries – the “means to implementation”, in technical terms – to reach their targets.

“Developed countries have attempted in many ways to delink their obligations to provide finance and technology from actions of developing world,” said a senior negotiator from India. “We would not like to see the Facilitative Dialogue 2018 to become yet another vehicle for the developed countries to ride out of their obligations post-2020.”

But the two rounds of discussions in the run-up to the Bonn meet have indicated that it will not be easy to settle this debate. Some smaller developing countries that have small emission footprints (and therefore fewer concerns about the costs of reducing emissions) have been asking for others to ratchet up their targets to cut emissions. They do not emphasise that enhancing the targets of developing countries should be dependent in part on how much funds and technology developed countries will provide.

Early harvest

The concerns about the facilitative dialogue are linked to another debate that will run as a common theme through all negotiation rooms at Bonn – on an early harvest of decisions.

The Paris Agreement recognised that there are six pillars in the fight against climate change: mitigation, finance and technology transfer, adaptation, capacity building of developing countries and transparency of actions. But member-countries accord differing degrees of importance to each of these pillars. Going by their strategic needs, member-countries often try to advance negotiations on selective strands while dragging on others.

Cop23: Is China the leader UN climate talks need?

To prevent an imbalance in the final outcome of the talks, UN climate negotiations usually resort to a simple practice: nothing gets decided till everything is decided. Even negotiating strands that have reached conclusions are kept on hold till agreements are reached across all strands. This allows countries to see the full picture before they all agree to all the decisions.

But several developing countries including India fear that this convention could get shelved this year if the work on rules for several mitigation-related and transparency-related issues is concluded this year, even as rule-making for other pillars of the Paris Agreement is postponed to the next year. This could happen because the presiding country, Fiji, may want to highlight some progress to claim credit for successful negotiations. It could be aided by countries that would gain strategically from advancing work only on mitigation and yet others that would not lose much either way.

“We are not in favour of early and selective harvest of decisions,” the Indian negotiation said. “The Paris Agreement was secured by ensuring a delicate balance between different elements. That balance has to be respected in the implementation arrangements for the agreement as well. It is essential to see the full picture before we sign agree.”

These big ticket decisions will need the intervention of ministers to resolve. But there are several other important concerns that will see heated arguments across the negotiation floor.

Six of these are:

1. Money to run the climate change convention and its secretariat: Should the money be divided equally between all elements of Paris Agreement or focused on only emission reduction efforts?
2. The global stocktaking of countries’ targets: Should the review and enhancement of greenhouse gas emission reduction targets of country in the next round of commitments be based on the principle of equity and how should countries define equity?
3. The obligations of countries under Paris Agreements or Nationally Determined Contributions: Should these be centred only around emission reduction targets or also reflect how developed countries supported others with finance and technology?
4. Rules for transparency and compliance: Should these rules treat all except the poorest countries equally from the start or should the rules be different for developing and developed countries to begin with and converge over time? Should the requirements of disclosure be as detailed and strict for delivery of finance by developed countries as it is going to be for emission reduction actions of all nations?
5. The Adaptation Fund set up under Kyoto Protocol: What is its future under the Paris Agreement when Kyoto Protocol ends in 2020?
6. A quantified goal for climate finance: How much money should developed countries provide annually to the rest under Paris Agreement? Should discussions on the goal start now or in 2023-24, as some developed countries desire?

This article was originally published on Scroll.in. It is not available for republication from CHN.

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In this tiny corner of a crisis that has enveloped south Asia, the heaviest monsoon in years – India’s equivalent of Hurricane Harvey – has washed out hundreds of acres of farmland, breaking every electricity pole, snapping off phone and internet links and cutting cable connections.

Between Benai and the neighbouring village of Arit, the homes of 3,000 families (for the number of people multiply each by five) have been under water since 26 July, when the bund on the Silabati River at Ghatal was breached.

The villagers had heard the grim reports of the approaching depression. Knowing the weakness of Benai’s flood defences, Tarun Bera and his friends kept a vigil through the night by the bund on the Chandreshwar Khal (canal). Some 12km away, his friends spent sleepless nights by the massive embankment at Pratappur connecting the two banks of the Silabati.

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The defences didn’t hold. “You can stay awake but when the walls of water come charging in amidst thunder squall and furious winds, you can only rush to the safety of your home,” says Bera. “Only two lives were lost; one to the waters and one to snake bite.”

By the morning many homes had been uprooted, as if they were trees.

Multiply this plight by 160 – the number of villages thus affected in West Bengal – and at least three million people in this part of India are now left staring at the watery graveyards of their standing paddy crop. Rice is the staple for the region. The crop was destroyed across 12 districts of Bengal; the havoc spread over 1.2m hectares. There is nothing but water anywhere you cast your eyes.

It is the same story in Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, states in the east and north-east of India; in the west, Gujarat was inundated, while Mumbai, India’s financial capital is still reeling, knee deep in water; a 100-year-old building collapsing in the incessant rain, killing at least 33. Across India’s eastern and northern borders, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar are also in the throes of watery death and destruction. A thousand and a half are reported to have perished in the region.

(Photo: Aditi Roy Ghatak)

On the other side of the planet, in Texas and across the south, more communities are reeling. Scores are dead after Harvey dumped more than four feet of rain onto Houston and its surrounds.

The rainfall was actually less extreme in India, despite the catastrophically higher death toll. Comparisons are largely redundant against such overwhelming tragedy, but the discrepancy between the number of lives lost here and in the US is telling. The developing world remains profoundly exposed in the face extreme weather; extreme weather that is predicted to become ever more frequent as climate change advances. In the coincidence of these two disasters, we have the starkest articulation thus far of the UN climate science panel’s prediction that climate change will be disproportionately suffered by the poor world.

This happens for many reasons, but at its heart it is about poverty and governance. India’s National Disaster Management Authority’s budgeted expenditure in 2016-17 was $100m. In the US, a country with one quarter the population of India, the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget for 2016 was $15.5bn. In South Asia, storms regularly kill dozens of people. When a big flood comes people die in their thousands.

Standing by the Chandreswar canal near Benai, Sudipto Seth, a teacher at one of the local schools says: “There were very few rescue boats; there was no water nor water tankers; there was little evidence of disaster management teams that one hears about. Only non-government organisations came with food, medicines and other relief material.”

Report: Coal to power India for ‘decades to come’, says government planning body

But the bigger problem, he says, was the “state of unpreparedness. None of the lock gates at the bunds were working and the waters had no outlet”. The Chandreswar canal had been allowed to get choked with refuse and plastic and the waters entered and just stayed on. “Only last week, we got equipment to pull the sluice gates up to let the water out,” says a cyclist, who stands by listening to our conversation. He wants to remain anonymous.

Mismanagement also played its part. The floods were pushed on by a massive release of water from the Damodar Valley Corporation’s reservoirs in the neighbouring state of Jharkhand.

We are standing by the bank of canal, next to where the bund (or embankment) was literally swallowed by the waters in broad daylight. We watch students from Seth’s school gathering around. Nearby, diminutive Subrata Pal of class IX is waiting for his friends to arrive. Boys and girls are cheerfully making their way through the slush and mire. There is no trace of trauma on their faces, despite their homes having been submerged for a month. It is the parents who worry.

Seth believes climate change “is responsible for the incessant rains that have never been so bad. In the last 10 years at least”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also linked this devastating monsoon to climate change – although the science is still unclear on just how much the yearly rains are being influenced by climate change. In the US, the story is the same. Harvey held more water because of the warmed planet, say climate scientists.

Has Seth heard of Hurricane Harvey? Yes, he has. So has our anonymous friend, who pipes up: “That is no comparison to the devastation we continue to face; many of us here have had a devastated existence by virtue of birth; even after the floods there is little access to relief. An outbreak of cholera is bound to follow but we are just happy to be alive”.

What comes next is a genuinely frightening thought. “Financial relief has been announced but there is no evidence of it as yet,” says Seth.

“There would have been the paddy that would have fed us for the next year,” says Rabindranath Manna wistfully. He is a farmer whom we meet beside the canal. He owns roughly an acre of land in the nearby Faridpur village. Could he save any of the crop? “Nothing; not when the fields have been under stagnant water for a month; everything has gone; even the fish is rotting.” Fortunately, he still has a source of earnings as a part-time barber, assuming anyone can afford to get a hair cut.

We encounter Asit Kumar Mandal, carrying a big bundle bunch of sticks on his head; probably the only dry firewood that he can find for his home. He is a landless farm labourer. “Most of the people you see here are not farmers; we are labourers. If we do not work, we starve. There are at least 3,000 of us here; in this area. We were marooned for days and now jobless,” he says.

The road has disappeared at this point and our car is tyre deep in bog. We are still a kilometre away from where the devastation has been gravest. Prasanta Pal, a law clerk, is passing by on a two-wheeler; he needs to fetch a certificate from his daughter’s school for her to apply for a scholarship. I ask him if I can hop on. He obliges and we head for the school along a road that no longer exists, every minute fraught with the danger of toppling over; a 30-foot drop into the Silabati river.

All that remains of the bund at Pratappur (Photo: Aditi Roy Ghatak)

The scene at Pratappur is gut wrenching. The top half of the huge embankment has vanished. An earth-moving machine is working furiously at the site to restore it. What it cannot restore are the many houses that have collapsed. One can see the foundations of one building, turned upside down while the house next to it is still completely submerged.

Where is the Ghatal Master Plan – a regional flood planning document – that “has been in the offing for a decade now?” wonders Arup Dhara, also a teacher.

Tarun Seth, who runs a cable network for a couple of national companies, has been working round the clock for several days now trying to restore electricity and phone connections here. “There is also relief material and medicine to distribute”.

Not a single electricity pole was spared. They lie flat on the ground in a row; their wires entangled with the roots of trees, staring out like some gigantic extraterrestrial creature with a million antennae.

Tarun’s phone rings. “Yes mother, I have had some lunch”. He is irked by phone calls from home, wondering how he is doing. He knows that he must reassure his anxious mother whom he has not seen in days, but it is a lie. He has had no time for a meal.

The post India’s floods expose poor countries’ total vulnerability to climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Three Year Action Agenda, released on Thursday by the National Institution for Transforming India (Niti Aayog), laid out a nine-point plan for boosting coal production in India in order to feed increasing demand from India’s coal power sector.

India has 304 million people without access to electricity, the report said, which necessitated growth in all parts of the energy sector.

“The reality of India’s energy sector is that around three-quarters of our power comes from coal-powered plants and this scenario will not change significantly over the coming decades,” said the report.

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“Thus, it is important that India increases its domestic coal production to provide energy security and reduce its dependence on imports,” it continued.

The nine-point plan for expanding coal production included:

• Increase of state-monopoly Coal India’s production to 1 billion tonnes per year by 2019-20
• Exploring 25% of the country’s untapped 5,100 sq km coal bearing lands to find new reserves
• ‘Proving’ 25% of the 139.15bn tonnes of coal reserves currently classed as ‘indicated’
• Completion of three railway projects to assist in the transport of coal
• Reduce the prevalence of low quality coal
• Adopt “clean coal technologies”, such as coal gasification

Niti Aayog is chaired by prime minister Narendra Modi. It was created by Modi in 2014 to replace the government’s Planning Commission. Its reports form the basis for medium to long term policy planning, although parliament has the final say over India’s direction.

The open-ended assertion that coal will remain dominant in India’s power sector for many years echoes previous public statements by energy minister Piyush Goyal. He who told parliament in May coal “will remain and to continue to remain our mainstay and there was no such agreement in Paris that will stop us from continuing to encourage coal-based generation of power”.

Report: India to halt building new coal plants in 2022

India’s submission to the Paris climate agreement does not set a timeline for the scaling down of its use of the highly-polluting fossil fuel. Rather it proposes a reduction in the emissions created per unit of economic activity, ensuring it can continue to grow its economy but proposing to do so more efficiently.

The mention of “clean coal” technology repeats rhetoric introduced by the coal industry to describe a host of technologies. These include more efficient coal plants and converting coal to gas, which can be burned more cleanly in power stations but actually has a higher lifecycle carbon footprint than directly burning coal.

The clean coal label has become a favourite of pro-coal politicians around the world, including US president Donald Trump. However, even the most efficient coal power stations are major carbon polluters. Environmentalists reject the term.

The only way to substantially reduce the climate impact of coal is to capture and store its emissions underground. That process is technically feasible but has yet to be proven on a commercial scale.

In June, India announced it would set up two research centres focused on producing technology that could capture emissions from coal plants. India and the US have also announced plans to cooperate on furthering this research.

The Indian government’s draft National Electricity Plan, which circulated in December, found the country would need no new coal power plants between 2022 and 2027. The Niti Aayog report did not dispute that position.

An Indian company with close ties to Modi, Adani Enterprises, has plans to build a massive new coal mine in Australia in order to feed India’s energy sector.

While plans to expand domestic coal production may run against this proposal, the Niti Aayong report said “energy security may be further enhanced through diversification of the import sources and reduced energy requirement”.

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International interest in Indian coal has been fierce ever since the realisation that the nation’s reliance on coal-driven energy infrastructure and its unacceptable emissions would make nonsense of the international determination to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control.

The target of avoiding 1.5C of mean global warming shall go awry unless India finds another, cleaner way to provide power to at least 500 million people who have zero to scant access to energy (304 million without any at all) in a developing country of 1.2 billion.

Because of this, the plunging price of solar power and the news that India’s electricity authority sees no need for new coal plants until at least 2027 has generated excited headlines. “India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green,” said the New York Times last month.

In an interview with Climate Home, the former chair of the state-owned coal monopoly Partha Bhattacharya, a serious thinker in the energy space, agreed that solar has emerged as a major competitor to those wanting to build new coal plants.

Modi and Adani: the old friends laying waste to India’s environment

“The low tariff bids on solar power (most recently Rs 2.44/kwh) raises question marks on the feasibility of new coal-based power capacity.” However, he says, “this fails to take into account the enormous scope and ample technology that can take the average plant load factor of coal-based power plants… to far more respectable levels”.

Plant load factor (PLF) is the ratio between the actual power generation and the possible generation if the plant works at its rated capacity; essentially the efficiency of operations. Currently India’s coal plants are running at around 60%. Old inefficient capacities are being phased out and a “sustained demand growth for thermal power and coal can arise following from attaining average PLF of 85%. That is well within the realms of possibility”, says Bhattacharya.

The economics is simple: improving PLF of coal-based power plants from 60% to 85% could generate about 40% more power. That means a potential 400bn units of additional coal power that will entail only the variable cost of fuel, which is measurably cheaper than the latest solar power bids by about Rs 0.6-1/kwh.

“Such infusion of 400bn units of additional power will be at a marginal cost, lower than the renewable energy bid tariff, helping [state power companies] lower their cost of procurement relative to renewables”, explains Bhattacharya. This itself would create an additional coal demand of some 250 million tonnes per annum (in 2016 nationwide consumption was 832Mt) to enable the coal sector to sustain its growth momentum.

In other words, don’t read too much into cancellations of new coal plants; coal still has a competitive edge.

This is one of several reasons New Delhi continues to unambiguously back a huge expansion of coal into the future, even while enjoying tempered praise for its carbon reduction commitments to the Paris climate agreement struck at COP21 in 2015.

Bhattacharya provides perspective. Unlike most other large economies, India’s Paris pledge was tied to GDP. “Assuming an average annual GDP growth of 7%, the 2030 GDP will be 5.8 times 2005 GDP. Thus fossil fuel consumption growth allowable in line with INDC at COP21 is 3.9 times. Applying that factor on coal permits consumption of 1.5 billion tonnes per annum by 2030,” he says. An INDC, or intended nationally determined contribution, is the term for pledges made to the Paris agreement.

Report: India’s tumbling solar prices ‘a race to extinction’

According to projections from the Niti Aayog, the government of India’s planning body, India’s coal-based power generation capacity (125 GW in 2012; 192 GW in 2017) will probably rise to more than 330-441 GW by 2040 – confirming the continued dominance of coal in India’s energy infrastructure. The amount of coal burned each year is projected to nearly double in absolute terms by 2040.

Power, significantly, is not the only claimant for coal; India’s massively expanding manufacturing sector (a darling of prime minister Narendra Modi) needs coal as well. Alongside is New Delhi’s envisaged near double-digit growth over the next quarter century with rapid urbanisation.

The current government has offered consistent, full-throated backing for coal. Narendra Taneja, the key energy policy architect for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said in 2015 that coal and gas will remain the mainstay of the country’s economy for the next 50-60 years.

In April, power minister Piyush Goyal told parliament coal “will remain and to continue to remain our mainstay and there was no such agreement in Paris that will stop us from continuing to encourage coal-based generation of power”.

India is amongst the world’s lowest per capita energy users, which New Delhi seeks to remedy quickly; rightfully so. Before the Paris deal was struck in 2015, then-environment minister Prakash Jadavekar said: “We need carbon space, please vacate the carbon space, which countries have occupied… We want free carbon space where our development can be parked. We want to bring [poor people] out of poverty… And to that end, we’ll produce more energy.”

India claims leeway in that its per capita emissions are much lower than those of China or the US. Indian politicians point out that China fully-exploited the low cost, coal-driven development path, taking its per capita energy consumption to the global average. “In contrast, India is at a third of China and has a long way to go. It should, therefore, exploit its coal based development potential to the maximum, of course within the ceiling adopted as INDCs in COP21”, says Bhattacharya.

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Treating the current pledge as a ceiling is fraught with serious consequences though. An analysis of India’s INDC by Climate Action Tracker found that India’s INDC, as it stands, was insufficient to guard against warming of 2C, let alone the tougher goal of 1.5C outlined in the Paris deal. Most countries are expected to improve their pledges in coming years.

According to Research and Markets’ latest analysis, India’s energy consumption driven by its huge population and economic growth may well overtake the OECD and Europe combined and approach the US by 2040. That’s the bottom line. A modelling exercise by India’s energy planning panel suggests the country’s energy demand will increase by 2.7-3.2 times between 2012 and 2040, with the electricity component itself rising 4.5 fold.

All this translates into a humungous demand for power and thermal power continues to be the cheapest option – notwithstanding rapid strides in solar energy, other renewables and nuclear power.

India’s position on reducing overall emission intensity and improving energy efficiency of its economy over time is subservient to what the INDC calls “protecting the vulnerable sectors of economy and segments of our society”. And there lies the rub.

There is also the question of an enormous ‘vested’ investment in the coal economy by trade and industry that will find it difficult to let go of the coal raj. Climate justice is far removed from their hearts and minds. It is the same with a government that derives enormous revenues from auctioning off coal mining blocks. The first two rounds of auctions in 2015 yielded more than Rs 200,000 crore ($32bn), the coal secretary announced in March 2015. According to the government, at least 25 coal mines will be auctioned in 2017-18. Reports say 222 mineral blocks are on radar for auctions in 2017-18 at the state level.

India’s energy regime will thus be determined by convenience and affordability. Coal has enormous supporting infrastructure and coa-based power is relatively inexpensive given substantial national coal reserves. That its production is fraught with environmental and health hazards is something easily overlooked in India, where the focus is on electrification across the country.

So much for bidding adieu to coal.

The post Solar has not beaten coal in the race to electrify India appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: Pixabay)

By Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Aditi Roy Ghatak, Maya Palit

The post India ramps up fossil fuel spend amid welfare cuts appeared first on Climate Home News.

Narendra Modi being received by the President of France, Francois Hollande, on his arrival for the UN climate summit in Paris in November 2015 (Flickr/ Narendra Modi)

By Alex Pashley

The sun rose on an unprecedented initiative to scale up solar power worldwide on Monday.

In a ceremony, French president Francois Hollande joined Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in Delhi to lay a foundation stone to inaugurate the International Solar Alliance, one of the 2015 Paris climate summit’s chief creations.

Uniting over 120  sun-drenched countries based primarily in the tropics, the alliance seeks to accelerate the share of power generation from clean energy sources to counter climate change.

Modi, who first proposed a solar push by Asian countries as governor of Gujarat, said it would spur innovation allowing the technologies to compete with polluting fossil fuels in poorer countries.

Report: India hailed for constructive stance at solar alliance launch
Report: India PM proposes solar power alliance with Africa

The alliance would “work like a life-giver to mankind,” he said in a rare speech in English.

“As the developing world lifts billions of people into prosperity, our hope for a sustainable planet rests on a bold global initiative.”

India will put an initial $30 million into the venture based in the National Institute of Solar Energy in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi. Its eventual goal is to raise $400m from membership fees and international agencies, reported the Guardian.

Francois Hollande, whose country hosted UN climate talks last month, called the alliance a “gift from India.” France’s development agency will pledge €300 million over the next five years for solar energy, he said.

PM Modi,French Prez François Hollande attend foundation stone laying ceremony of Int'l Solar Alliance HQ at Gurgaon pic.twitter.com/TvtzwIlZO4

— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) January 25, 2016

UK solar entrepreneur and founder of charity Solar Aid, Jeremy Leggett said: “It’s important that people come out of Paris with the wind in their sails. Clearly it’s got good potential.

“But with all of these things you have to see how much real substance there is in all of the clatter of announcements that we heard daily and even hourly in Paris.”

Solar power is a pillar of India’s commitment to cut its carbon intensity – emissions for each unit of GDP – 33-35% by 2030. It aims to install 100GW worth of panels by 2022, plus 75GW of other renewable technologies.

Hollande was accompanied by foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who helped steer countries to last month’s landmark global warming accord.

The three-day visit comes as India and France said that they are close to closing a multibillion euro agreement for New Delhi to purchase 36 Rafale fighter jets, according to the New York Times.

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(Pic: Prakash Javadekar/Flickr)

By Ed King

India’s environment chief has delivered a blistering attack on developed countries, accusing them of going on a five year climate policy “holiday”.

In an interview with the Times of India, Prakash Javadekar said wealthy countries should “vacate carbon space” and “take care of their lifestyles”, referring to consumption levels.

“It was their historical emission (during 1850-2011) that led to 0.8 degree Celsius temperature rise in the post-industrialisation phase. They must act and lead by example,” he said.

Nearly 200 countries are working on plans for a global climate pact, due to be finalised in Paris this December.

A new draft agreement was recently released by UN officials, radically shorter than previous versions and one that will be discussed at negotiations in Bonn in little over a week.

No stranger to controversy when discussing UN climate talks, Javadekar said the text was “quite disappointing”, although did not reveal what elements he was unhappy with.

“Our negotiators will oppose this first draft text during the next round of negotiation at Bonn. Our negotiators will submit India’s suggestions,” he said.

Javadekar met UK officials in Delhi last month to discuss plans for a global deal (Pic: UK in India/Flickr)

The comments are unlikely to overly concern UN officials working on the deal, who expected the new radically distilled document, which was requested by all parties, to be criticised.

The EU’s climate chief Miguel Arias Canete said it was “unbalanced” and lacked “ambition and specificity.”

He added: “this text cannot be it, we must improve it, next session in Bonn will be crucial.”

2/2 This #COP21 text cannot be it. We must improve it. Next session in Bonn will be crucial. The EU+many others will work hard to improve it

— Miguel Arias Cañete (@MAC_europa) October 5, 2015

India’s headline contribution to a global climate deal will be a 33-35% carbon intensity cut based on 2005 levels by 2030.

It said it would also raise the level of clean sources of energy to 40% of the overall mix by the same year.

The submission, said Javadekar, as “comprehensive”, “ambitious”, “practical” and “pragmatic.”

A recent analysis by analysts at Climate Action Tracker said the country’s emissions target would be achieved fairly easily.

“India has been unnecessarily cautious in setting its emissions intensity target,” said Kornelis Blok of Ecofys, one of the CAT initiative’s members.

“Taking up stronger action will not only reduce emissions but also be beneficial for the Indian economy.”

The post Prakash Javadekar: rich countries are on a climate vacation appeared first on Climate Home News.

Golden Temple, Amritsar, Punjab, India (Flickr/ Sandeepachetan)

By Alex Pashley

India, the world’s fourth largest-emitting bloc, already has the policies in place to meet emission reduction targets for 2030, say analysts.

The Asian country committed to cut its emissions intensity – greenhouse gases per unit of GDP – 33-35% below 2005 levels in its contribution to a UN global pact.

Ramping up nuclear and renewable energy to 40% of the mix would help deliver that target, it said in its submission last week.

Report: World welcomes India climate pledge

But current policies alone – notably a target to scale up renewable energy to 175GW of installed capacity by 2022 – would lead India’s emissions intensity to fall by 41.5% by 2030, according to a report by Climate Action Tracker (CAT).

Generating 40% of its electricity needs from clean energy could increase that to as much as 44%, the consortium of research institutes said on Wednesday, though adding that hinged on international funding.

“India has been unnecessarily cautious in setting its emissions intensity target,” said Kornelis Blok of Ecofys. “Taking up stronger action will not only reduce emissions but also be beneficial for the Indian economy.”

Report: Germany offers India €2 billion in solar, clean energy funds

Despite bullish plans for renewables, critics have pointed to India’s expansion of coal-fired power plants.

That spurt in generating capacity would be “significantly larger” than the rise for non-fossil fuels, CAT said.

“This continued growth in coal-fired power generation would lead to a greater lock-in of carbon-intensive power infrastructure in India than appears necessary,” said Bill Hare of Climate Analytics.

India should also clarify if it included emissions from its vast carbon-sucking forest in its target and make its submission more transparent, CAT said.

India was among 146 countries to submit a national climate pledge by the UN’s 1 October deadline.

These will underpin a global deal to be struck in Paris this December, with the goal of holding average temperature rise to 2C.

CAT said the pledges had cooled the world’s outlook, but still implied warming of 2.7C by 2100 – a level triggering dangerous climate consequences.

The post India poised to overachieve ‘cautious’ emissions target appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: UN photos)

By Ed King

Details of India’s contribution to a proposed climate deal have been delayed till October 1, according to reports from Delhi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was expected to release details on the country’s plans to slash greenhouse gas emissions on Wednesday.

The Economic Times says the plan will focus on energy, agriculture, health and water, along with specific proposals to protect delicate coastal and mountain ecosystems.

At its heart will be a goal of sourcing 40% of its energy needs from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030, meaning installed capacity from wind, solar, hydro and nuclear would be nearing 400GW.

“The government can be expected to project the financial and technological requirement to carry out its efforts to adapt to climate change and reduce carbon emissions,” it says.

The Times adds that India is not expected to make its climate proposals conditional on receiving further financial or technical support from rich countries.

Modi is scheduled to meet US president Barack Obama during his US visit for the General Assembly.

He is also expected to take part in a world leaders climate summit in New York on Sunday, set to be hosted by Ban Ki-moon.

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