Making Sense of India at the COP25
So far, the Indian Pavilion at the COP25 has been a large display of Mahatma Gandhi’s Charkha, and the well known quote by him that essentially warns against greed. This is India’s visible stand on climate change at the UNFCCC’s Climate of the Parties in Madrid.
In action, however, if we are to go by the details of this documentation: India’s climate decisions have been two of the following:
1. Cancelling loans to mining companies. In light of the ease of business approach, this seems like another act in line to support the growing mining industry, but to pay no need to the negative impacts of the industry on people or the environment. See a detailed article on how mining is polluting here.
2. While sticking to the Paris Agreement and decisions that push countries to limit pollution levels to 1.5 Degrees, India is demanding that developed nations pay for poorer countries to be able to grow at a level that enhances their economies with clean technologies. Therefore, India is keen to negotiate for its potential to pollute and add carbon to the atmosphere. This stand has been a historic negotiating tactic of India and the developing nations.
Since both of these actions display a bias towards growth and development, contradictions emerge.
Despite the development of clean technologies and the historically sustainable ideas of Gandhi that are being propounded at COP25, there is an internalised hypocricy in the idea that:
"Every country which is developed today, has done it on the basis of fossil fuels," as said by Ravi Prasad, the additional secretary at the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change- in a quote here.
This is a limited perspective, because countries such as Costa Rica have managed to prevent emissions by making a commitment to grow forests as explained here.
Why must India only follow the European example? Why not implement people and environmentally friendly policies from across the world? A lay person is left wondering where the Gandhian idea of self-sufficiency or cottage industry stands today. If India is meant to develop in the European way, with COP funds to make sure that it can increase emissions to limits that are set by a global standard - then has India assessed the local risks of adopting these aspirations?
Even though India’s historical emissions have been lower than most of the developed world, and the target is to remain below the per capita emissions of the developed world, see more information here, it remains to be asked- India’s green house gas emissions have been rising, by 4.8% in 2018, have the impacts of this rise been calculated, even if it falls under the commitments made at the Cop?
Have the Indian decisions and pollution commitments taken into account the actual lived impacts of climate change? According to the World Bank and this summary of India’s NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution), the most vulnerable people in India are those without access to clean drinking water, approximately 92 million people. Is access to clean drinking water imagined and realised in the current growth climate?
On the contrary, Prime Minister Modi recently inaugurated the Narmada dam and displaced thousands of indigenous people and farmers. Do these people fall into the beneficiary list from COP commitments or do the continue to be vulnerable? In light of their homes being flooded by a dam, the latter is more likely.
The blind spot of the COP thus remains India’s colonial hangover. The hunger to mimic European lifestyles, industry and infrastructure without looking into indigenous methodologies, or the ideas being propagated from other parts of the world. Such news is now old, it garners distaste and politicians refuse to engage with the negative outfalls of their development practices, journalists are killed for their reports if they counter parties and politicians refuse to make amends towards a more just, equitable and safer country.
India continues to ignore most of its people and the environment. Instead, why can’t powerful people begin to learn from the ideas at the COP, to take the youth, indigenous people, and women into account as equals in their professional and personal capacities.
The Indian nation needs to focus not only on clean technologies, but on providing its citizens with equality, and access to basic services such as water to create resilience to the potential impacts of climate change.
