Author: cprindia

By Manju Menon and Kanchi Kohli

In India, industrial, energy and infrastructural projects are legally mandated to seek environmental approvals under a range of central and state level laws such as the Environment Protection Act, 1986, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981, Water Prevention and Control of Pollution Act, 1981, and the Forest Conservation Act, 1980. Project approvals under these laws include environment and social safeguards or ‘conditions’, such as reducing the pollution load due to project operations, reforestation to make up for forest loss, and prohibition or limits on groundwater extraction. Projects are expected to comply with these safeguards during construction and through the period of operations. In case of mining projects, backfilling and ecological restoration of the land also form part of the safeguards. In effect, the purpose of conditional project approvals is to minimize and mitigate environmental and social harms caused by large projects.

During the first four decades of implementation of India’s post-independence environmental laws, there was little or no emphasis on the status of compliance with conditions by projects. The focus was on the needs of the economy and national development on the one hand, and on the other hand, the social conflicts caused by land displacement. Even though legal clauses related to environmental compliance existed in these laws, projects operated with impunity, causing widespread degradation of the environment.

It is only in the last decade that environmental non-compliance by projects and the inability of existing institutions to enforce laws have come under the scanner. Since 2010, the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has produced environmental audit reports and reported on non-compliance. The courts have observed large-scale legal violations in specific sectors such as mining. Non-governmental studies have also recorded high rates of non-compliance.

Unable to brush the problem under the proverbial carpet, the government engaged in a series of hurriedly thought out mechanisms to deal with it. These include:

• Self-regulation through the use of pollution monitors or devices to capture and relay information on pollution and other performance indicators directly to pollution control board authorities
• Provisions for penalties, fines, bank guarantees and other financial disincentives based on the ‘polluter pays’ principle
• One-time amnesty schemes to violating projects and grant of short-term or temporary approvals to violators in an effort to bring them into compliance

But these measures have neither improved environmental performance of projects nor stemmed the flow of complaints and legal cases by affected people against polluting projects.

Why Should Compliance Be Addressed Urgently?

Robust and well-thought-out environmental compliance mechanisms are hardly seen as a necessity for India’s development. In fact, governments have approached the idea of regulating projects as a liability and a drag on economic growth. They have been slow to implement existing regulations and selective enforcement has earned them the reputation of creating a ‘license raj’. This can be seen in the Supreme Court’s ongoing efforts to enforce the mandatory emission standards on coal power plants. Even though the standards have existed for several years as part of the consent permits issued under Air and Water Acts, the central government systematically dragged its feet on getting projects to comply with the norms.

Today, the impacts of unregulated projects have made it politically unfeasible for governments to ignore their effects on the economy and on people. The recent conflict due to the operations and proposed expansion of the Sterlite Copper Smelter in Tamil Nadu is a case in point.¹ The project was India’s largest copper production plant but also causing toxic emissions, soil and water pollution. Despite numerous complaints and legal cases against the project’s pollution, the company was allowed to continue its operations for 20 years. Last year, when the company sought permissions to expand its operations, there were massive local protests for over 100 days; they finally turned violent when the local police shot down 13 protestors. Sterlite also became a political flashpoint with the opposition party making it an important issue in their 2019 election campaign in the state.

There are numerous cases that are being litigated in court for non-compliance with environmental safeguards. These have resulted in huge financial implications for projects and for related economic sectors as a whole. The Goa mining case led to the total state-wide ban on mining since 2012. The National Green Tribunal imposed penalties of over INR 873 crores as fines for environmental violations in the first quarter of 2019 – an amount that is close to the total fines imposed last year.

Poor compliance causes critical environmental blowbacks in the form of severe water shortages, productivity losses and toxic air. While these conditions have been building up in most parts of the country, climate change dynamics add to these local conditions, making their impacts far more acute and complex. For example, areas already affected by large-scale water extraction for industrial purposes, coal washeries and thermal power plants could also face frequent and more lasting droughts. The visible effects of environmental impacts in eroding the positive gains of development have already caused a shift in mainstream economic thinking that traditionally ignored the economic cost of degraded and damaged habitats. It is accepted that crisis management is hardly possible any more, and that there is a need to plan reforms and strategies for economic and environmental transformation. Environmental compliance systems will form a key part of these reforms.

The case for compliance as a bulwark of environmental regulation has never been more compelling than in the time of climate change. So far, the success or failure of compliance has revolved around the compulsions of domestic politics, but it is now tied to the geopolitics of climate change. After years of wrangling over who should do what to check global warming, nations finally thrashed out the Paris Agreement, which obliges every signatory to put in place, by 2020, a set of measures to meet their respective carbon mitigation targets. However, without a systemic and robust protocol to ensure compliance, India runs the risk of falling short of its targets. Therefore, it is imperative, not to mention politically expedient, for the political party coming to power after the 2019 general elections to set up, in the first place, a credible and effective mechanism of compliance with domestic regulations before it goes about honouring its Paris commitments.

Who Should Regulate Projects and How 

Successive governments have emphasized the quantitative aspects of economic growth. They have focused on increasing the number of projects approved during their tenure and reducing the time needed for impact assessment and granting approvals. These projects have been accompanied by severe impacts as pollution and environmental degradation are viewed as the trade-off for growth. However, with over 16,000 centrally approved large projects operational and several others promised or in the pipeline, the scale of the problem has today expanded exponentially in both industrial and ‘greenfield’ or less industrialized areas. The government can neither ignore nor delay tackling this problem. Compliance with environmental and social safeguards is a necessary if not sufficient condition to improve the quality of our economy’s growth. The question, therefore, before the new government, will no longer be ‘if’ projects need to be regulated but of how to regulate and who will regulate. Given below are three sets of policy reforms with the potential to shift the government’s approach to the problem of environmental compliance of projects and achieve better results.

Compliance-based approvals

Agencies implementing environmental laws view the procedures for grant of approvals as linear systems rather than cyclical ones. This problem is best illustrated by the number of flowcharts put out by them explaining these procedures. Compliance comes downstream in these processes and there is little room for feedback. Project performances on compliance almost never influence government decisions on project expansions, extensions or applications for permission by violating companies to set up projects in new areas. For example, the Kulda opencast mine operated by Mahanadi Coalfields in Sundargarh district of Odisha has violated several conditions of its approvals. Yet, it received approval for expansion and capacity addition twice in two years, for a period of one year each. The validity of environment clearances for mining projects is otherwise 30 years. This decision of the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) set up under the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification, 2006, to review such projects was ad hoc, with no precedence and legal basis.

The lack of systemic mechanisms to address non-compliance in recent years has also created huge pressure on the bureaucracy to show legal compliance without affecting the financial status of ongoing operations. For this they have offered one-time amnesty to violating projects under the EIA, Coastal Regulation Zone and biodiversity laws. But these measures only improve the record of compliance on paper and not in reality.  Now with so many projects already operational, it is crucial to place a very high bar on projects being granted approvals. The basis of regulatory procedures should shift from approvals to compliance. Only those projects that have an established record of high compliance or which can surpass the compliance performance of others in the field, and certainly meet the legal standards, should be granted permits and approvals. The permissible standards for pollution are already pending major reforms. But these changes will prove futile if projects are not held to the highest compliance standards.

Third-party monitoring

The present practice of monitoring a project’s compliance in effect involves two parties: the project proponent and the regulatory authority. This system has so far not been able to address the problem of non-compliance and has instead led to concerns of collusion and corruption. A review of this practice has resulted in recommendations that monitoring should be done by an independent third party. The environment ministry proposed an amendment to the EIA notification in September 2018 to include this recommendation. This is yet to be finalized. The ‘third party’ proposed in this amendment is expert government institutions.

In reality, the genuine ‘third party’ in this context is the communities who experience effects of non-compliance such as loss of livelihoods, poor living conditions and displacement. Although they have the greatest stake in remedying the damages caused by non-compliance, they are nowhere in the picture when project monitoring is done. This is contradictory to the participatory turn in environmental governance in several countries since the 1970s and the constitutional mandate for it in India. Data from our research on cases of environmental non-compliance in four states shows that when communities have been involved in collection of evidence, reporting of violations and official monitoring by regulators, environmental compliance can improve significantly. Their participation also helps regulators understand community priorities for remedial actions. Regulatory bodies in these states are beginning to recognize the benefits of community participation and are more open to including communities in procedures such as site visits conducted by them for monitoring. But practices that foster community participation ¬– such as social audits of projects (which provide access to monitoring data and formal spaces for interaction with affected people) – are yet to be systematized in environment regulation.

Integrated regional networks for compliance

India’s environment regulations have largely been implemented with a project-centric approach. Approvals are granted to projects after their impact studies, cost-benefit analysis and environment management plans are assessed by regulatory bodies. These assessments routinely understate the potential impacts of projects, making them seem benign or operations whose impacts can be easily mitigated. Such assessments also generate quicker approvals from regulatory bodies, thus helping to meet the government’s economic growth targets. For long, activists and experts have demanded cumulative impact studies so that the full range of project impacts can be ascertained prior to the grant of approvals. But such comprehensive studies have been done only in a few cases. Cumulative studies are needed not just at project levels but also for regions that are affected by environmental degradation.

Similarly, a project-based monitoring system is resource intensive and not very effective in terms of the overall outcomes. But if regulators could be reorganized as integrated regional networks, they could use the resources available to them more efficiently to improve environmental standards regionally. Multiple regulatory agencies within the concerned region could pool their expertise and human resources towards coordinated responses. Such a mechanism can bring an inter-displinary approach to compliance monitoring. The regions identified for such integration could cut across administrative boundaries such as districts or states. It could be at the level of large industrial sites like Special Economic Zones (SEZs) with multiple projects operating within them, metropolitan regions, entire districts or geographical regions already identified as critically polluted, or entire airsheds or river basins.

Although envisaged by law, such a regional approach to environmental governance has only been used in a few cases. It has been used in emergency responses to environmental pollution, such as the moratorium on industrial activity in Vapi, Gujarat, or the ban on mining in Goa. But a regional approach to systematically  improve post-approval compliance of projects has not been envisaged. This is mainly because compliance with safeguards has rarely been the focus of regulation and institutional reforms to improve environmental compliance have never been on the government agenda. The ministry could develop pilots to understand the optimum scale at which such integrated compliance networks could deliver the most effective results. Given that the scale of the effects of non-compliance is such that they are no longer restricted to project areas, a regional approach is needed to improve the outcomes of regulation.

Conclusion

Environmental compliance is a critical part of environment regulation. While regulatory actions have prioritized economic growth for several decades, the costs of environmental degradation due to industrial and developmental projects are no longer possible to ignore. These issues have become politically and economically salient in recent years. This paper makes three sets of recommendations for how environment regulation can approach the issue of persistent and pervasive non- compliance by projects. These reforms are critical to avoid the costly and harmful disruptions of development.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik
• Schooling is not Learning by Yamini Aiyar
• Clearing Our Air of Pollution: A Road Map for the Next Five Years by Santosh Harish, Shibani Ghosh and Navroz K Dubash
• Protecting Water while Providing Water to All: Need for Enabling Legislations by Philippe Cullet
• Interstate River Water Governance: Shift focus from conflict resolution to enabling cooperation by Srinivas Chokkakula
• Managing India-China Relations in a Changing Neighbourhood by Zorawar Daulet Singh
• Beyond Poles and Wires: How to Keep the Electrons Flowing? by Ashwini K Swain and Navroz K Dubash
• The Numbers Game: Suggestions for Improving School Education Data by Kiran Bhatty

Ramaswamy Iyer, Honorary Research Professor at CPR, passed away on 9 September. Amita Baviskar from the Institute of Economic Growth, and R Umamaheshwari, Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, among others, recall his contributions to research and policy.

• In He Watered the Arid Fields of Administration with Intellectual Rigour and Honesty, Amita Baviskar comments on Iyer’s contribution to India’s water issues.
• R Umamaheshwari writes in A visionary on water issues how Iyer ‘saw rivers as inextricable parts of the lives of communities’.
• Nitin Sethi writes on why Ramaswamy Iyer was Not your typical bureaurcrat.
• Countercurrents shares the transcript of a talk Iyer gave to the Association for India’s Development (AID) volunteers in January, 1999.

In one of the worst terror strikes in the state of Jammu and Kashmir since the Uri attack, around 44 CRPF personnel were killed and several others injured after a terrorist rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a bus in the state’s Pulwama region. The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) based in Pakistan claimed responsibility for the attack. The attack raises pertinent concerns about the deteriorating security situation in the Valley, India’s relationship with Pakistan, and the country’s national security framework. In this curated media commentary below, CPR faculty analyse and comment on the Pulwama terror attack.

• Ambassador Shyam Saran writes in Indian Express that ‘the deteriorating security situation in the Kashmir Valley cannot be delinked from the abdication of political responsibility by successive governments in Delhi.’ He underscores the need for political parties to ‘not engage in a high-decibel blame game’ and ‘come together to deal with what is a festering wound, which could spread its toxin in the entire body politic.’ In ‘The Tribune’, Amb. Saran highlights the need for ‘a national security strategy which could guide the State (India) in dealing with crisis situations as well as longer-term challenges.’ Even more important, he writes, ‘is crafting a longer-term strategy which locates the pursuit of national security in the overall national endeavour encompassing domestic, external and military security, economic and ecological security and strategic communications.’
• In ‘Firstpost’, Bharat Karnad lays out ways in which India should deal with terror outfits like JeM. In ‘Bloomberg Quint’, Karnad stresses that India must solve the problem of Pakistan-sourced terrorism by itself. He highlights that ‘the overlapping of US and Chinese interests means Pakistan is immune to any external pressure that Delhi is able to mobilise and, in any case, can continue prosecuting its covert war in Kashmir using terrorist proxies.’
• In the ‘Hindustan Times’, Brahma Chellaney writes about China’s culpability in the Pulwama attacks. He highlights how ‘in keeping with its master plan, Beijing brazenly shields Pakistan’s export of terrorism, including blocking UN action against Pakistan-based terrorists like Masood Azhar.’ He calls for a ‘clear-headed and self-assured foreign policy, particularly for addressing the insidious China challenge.’ In another interview with ‘ET Now’, he discusses various diplomatic and economic ways to pressurise and isolate Pakistan, including downgrading the diplomatic relationship with the country.
• G Parthasarathy, in an interview with ‘NDTV’, talks about how ‘Pakistan is the prime Chinese instrument for low-cost containment of India’. He stresses on the need for clear, long-term policies to deal with Pakistan, including working with Afghanistan and Iran. Parthasarathy also appeared in an interview on ‘DDNews’, where he called for building economic pressure on Pakistan through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

By Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani

India has traditionally approached climate change as a diplomatic issue, insisting that the developed world – because of their disproportionate role in causing the problem – should lead the way in reducing emissions, and provide the developing world the finance and technology to do so. While this approach is entirely justifiable and has served India well in the past, there are compelling reasons for the country to rethink its approach to international and domestic climate policy. First, climate change is likely to have profound and devastating impacts in India, impacts that will make the task of development and poverty eradication considerably harder. Second, there are several cost-effective actions that India can take that serve its development as well as climate interests. Rethinking our approach would translate internationally into our joining, even leading, a ‘coalition of the willing’ that advocates for an ambitious and strong rules-based global climate regime. Domestically, it would translate into a proactive exploration of lower-carbon opportunities for growth that foster development, while investing in climate adaptation and resilience. Rethinking our approach at the international and domestic levels, however, calls for strong institutions for climate governance.

This paper, after a brief context setting section, lays out elements of an approach to international and domestic climate policy that is likely to serve India well in the long run.

Context

Climate change, often characterized as the ‘defining issue of our age’, is predicted to have profound ‘impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans.’¹ These impacts are likely to cause devastation in India, a country with 7500 km of coastline, extensive tracts of low-lying areas, high population density, poor infrastructure and continued reliance on agriculture for livelihoods. With the 1°C warming that has already occurred since pre-industrial times, Himalayan glaciers have begun to retreat, and there has been a marked increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves,²  droughts, extreme rainfall events³  and floods. If the world warms to between 2.6°C and 3.2°C, as the UN climate secretariat estimates it will based on current country pledges, this will have serious, pervasive and irreversible consequences for India – not just in terms of impacts on peoples and ecosystems, but also on economic growth, livelihoods and wellbeing. Climate change is predicted, for instance, to reduce agricultural incomes by 15-25% by the end of the century in India.⁴ 

International Climate Policy

India’s position in the international climate negotiations is set within larger geo-political developments that also inform and influence its broader foreign and energy policy. With the US retreat from the Paris Agreement, the Brazilian President Bolsonaro’s equivocation on it, and the defeat of the Labour Party in Australia which advocated strong climate measures, the momentum that led to the Paris Agreement has begun to dissipate. There is a leadership and imagination vacuum in global climate politics, which India could seek to fill.

For example, India could reach out to China, which has long been its negotiating partner in retaining differentiated responsibility, to forge a mutually beneficial alliance on the global solar energy transition. India leads the International Solar Alliance and provides a substantial market, while China has technological leadership in solar panels and storage technologies. Both countries are involved in the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. As the Africa region develops its infrastructure, an India-China alliance could help provide a vision of and the technological and financial means for realizing a low-carbon yet cost-effective future. In addition, and consistent with this approach, India could seek to realize its potential as a leader of vulnerable nations.  Doing so would also be viewed favourably in the South Asia region, by vulnerable countries such as Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. Notably, these measures allow India to be a climate leader even as it takes advantage of opportunities for economic and political gain; that is, they do not require the country to sacrifice economic gain and political position for climate policy.

Based on approaches such as these, India could join forces with others to form part of the ‘coalition of the willing’ in global climate politics. Such a coalition is a particular need at this juncture in the negotiations. With the conclusion of the Paris Rulebook negotiations in Katowice, Poland, in December 2018, the politically charged negotiations on obligations, rules and institutions are at an end, and the regime has shifted gears to the day-to-day business of implementation. The Paris Agreement builds on nationally determined contributions (or NDCs) from countries to reduce greenhouse gases, complemented by a normative expectation of progression and ‘highest possible ambition’ that calls for these contributions to be strengthened over time.⁵  These terms – ‘progression’ and ‘highest possible ambition’ – are not defined either in the Paris Agreement or its Rulebook. Further, while the Rulebook fleshes out informational requirements, and operationalizes an enhanced transparency framework, global stocktake, and implementation and compliance mechanism, it still preserves, out of political necessity, considerable flexibility, autonomy and discretion for states; this is particularly evident in their near-absolute control over the content of their NDC.⁶ States could choose to exploit this discretion and create a political and implementation drag in the process, or they could choose to progressively strengthen their NDCs, enhance the quality of the ex ante and ex post information they provide, and trigger a virtuous cycle of ever ambitious actions necessary to meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. It is in India’s interest to be part of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – nations that seek to progressively strengthen their NDCs, and enhance their ability to meet the procedural requirements of the Paris Agreement and its Rulebook as well as the substantive objective of the climate change regime.

Specifically, first, India should provide information on its NDC, set against the larger context of its development aspirations and resource constraints.⁷ This information should include the planning processes the country has engaged in to reach its NDC, which in turn should include meaningful stakeholder consultations and attentiveness to the human rights impacts of climate change action or inaction.

Second, India should clearly explain how its NDC is fair and ambitious, and on what objective criteria and benchmarks. This approach would allow India to ask how these criteria and benchmarks could be applied to the NDCs of other countries as well, turning its long-held emphasis on the principle of equity in climate change negotiations into a practical and applied measure. It is by providing robust information in the context of its NDC that India can introduce into the global assessment of progress criteria and benchmarks which assess ‘relative fair shares’.

Third, in relation to ex-post tracking of progress in implementing its NDC,⁸  India should identify objective defensible indicators to assess its progress with its NDC, take proactive efforts to address capacity gaps in implementation and reporting, and gradually improve the quality, precision and detail of the information it provides. India’s implementation should demonstrate a high degree of ‘due diligence’ (best possible efforts) in meeting the objectives of its NDC.

Finally, in relation to the global stocktake process every five years,⁹ India should work with negotiating partners (such as South Africa) and vulnerable nations to ensure that the ‘hooks’ on equity in the Paris Agreement and the Rulebook are duly exploited. India should submit its vision of equitable burden sharing and ‘relative fair shares’ to enable a meaningful assessment, albeit a collective one, at the international level of progress towards the global temperature goal.

India’s ability to take a leadership position in this ‘coalition of the willing’ will require a substantial scaling up of the capacity and resources – human, financial, legal, research and institutional – it devotes to engaging in international negotiations, and complementary backchannel processes.¹⁰ The country’s delegations to the climate negotiations are considerably smaller than those of other nations of comparable size and stature. The composition of the delegations tend to favour bureaucrats rather than experts, and there are limited formal channels for national positions to be informed by outputs from the growing research community working in these areas in India. In rethinking our approach to climate policy, international and domestic, India must also rethink its engagement with experts, and the processes for doing so.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of the Paris Agreement, given its hybrid architecture, lies in the strength of the NDCs that parties submit. The strength of the NDCs will in turn depend on international processes that can catalyse more ambitious domestic actions, as well domestic political will and institutional capacity for formulating and delivering ambitious NDCs. It is to these domestic issues that we now turn.

Domestic Climate Policy

As the reality of climate change looms, and its impacts become more real, India – as is true of other countries – increasingly needs to view climate change as a developmental challenge, and not simply as a diplomatic one. Simply put, climate change will make development outcomes more challenging. For example, global pressures to limit greenhouse gases and the emergence of new technologies will make it more complicated for India to power its industries and provide electricity to its citizens in conventional ways. Agriculture, on which a substantial portion of the population still depends for livelihoods, may be particularly hard hit. Cities and coastlines may be subject to disruptions from climate-related events. Water cycles may be disrupted, and the timing and availability of water through rainfall and in India’s rivers may shift. And heat waves and shifting disease vectors will complicate the problem of ensuring public health. Climate change is not an isolated challenge to be addressed by one part of the government; it is a problem that requires mainstreaming of climate considerations through all sections of the government’s decision-making apparatus.

As this discussion suggests, the institutional requirements of managing climate change are considerable. In the last few years, India has begun planning for climate change – including through a National Action Plan, eight national missions covering adaptation and mitigation, and 32 state action plans and greater investment in scientific infrastructure. Yet, a deeper dive into these efforts reveal that the research and analytical capacity in each of these areas is weak, coordination is limited, implementation is patchy across these efforts, and the strategic thinking for truly transformative approaches is lacking.¹¹

Building the capacity of Indian states to address the complex challenges of climate change is but in its infancy. The country needs to go much further down this path, devising and implementing a robust institutional structure that can generate appropriate knowledge, design policy and infrastructure interventions, coordinate across sectoral line departments and across scales of governance, ensure accountability for implementation, and provide an interface to business and civil society groups. Development remains India’s number one priority. But development untouched by climate change is no longer possible. Addressing climate change adds to India’s problem of developing adequate state capacity. A forthcoming edited volume coordinated by the Centre for Policy Research, India in a Warming World, explores how India can truly internalize climate concerns in both its energy consumption and natural resource sectors so as to address climate mitigation and adaptation.

Mitigation

Climate change mitigation, or the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions, has always been tied to India’s global negotiating stance. If wealthier countries, and not India, are largely responsible for the problem, why should India undertake costly mitigation actions? A decade ago, the National Action Plan on Climate Change proposed exploring actions that lead to both development and climate benefits. This principle of ‘co-benefits’ has guided our actions since, but actions that meet this principle have not been fully pursued and developed. Here, India’s status as a late developer is an advantage: we have not, as yet, locked into energy production and consumption patterns, and so can take advantage of new technology and knowledge to build a lower carbon development path.

India’s cities provide a particularly good example.¹² The country is urbanizing rapidly, but much of urban India remains to be built. The next couple of decades afford an opportunity to set up cities where transport needs (and hence emissions but also congestion) are lower due to sensible planning that locates work and living spaces near each other; the travel needs that remain are met increasingly with high-quality public transport and walking (rather than private automobiles); new buildings are designed to need less cooling and heating through intelligent design. Planning processes for urban spaces need to be focused on the multiple objectives that a city should meet in these times – of livability, low congestion, efficient functioning and a small environmental footprint.

India’s electricity system provides another instructive case.¹³ Long ridden with problems of unreliability, poor service and loss-making, Indian electricity is likely to be shaken up by the recent steep decline in costs of renewable electricity to levels where it is competitive with coal power. However, the transition is likely to be turbulent, and create winners and losers. For example, industries may choose to shift to renewables thereby increasing the financial burden on distribution companies. Coal-mining regions may, over time, have to move to other industries.¹⁴

Notably, these changes are inevitable and are being driven by global technology trends, not by national climate policies alone. Recently, Tata Power became the most recent example of a company that is planning to pivot from coal to solar for economic reasons.¹⁵ But planning for this future under the rubric of a transition to a low-carbon economy could help unlock possible synergies between green power, energy access and energy security. Alternatively, failure to plan for this transition may be costly, particularly for the poor. Moreover, the likelihood of green, yet competitive electricity opens the door to electrifying other sectors, such as transportation and cooking. But the challenges involved in managing these transitions, in terms of hardware required, institutional rules and making sure potential losers are not left behind, are substantial and require immediate analysis and planning.

India’s cities and electricity sector are but two examples. Mitigation also encompasses transportation networks (including for freight), industries, agriculture, forest management and use, and food consumption patterns, to name a few. For India, a consistent approach – built around understanding the synergies and trade-offs across multiple development objectives and climate mitigation – needs to become part of the policy framework across these sectors.

Adaptation

It is increasingly clear that despite our best efforts, countries collectively are unlikely to mitigate sufficiently to avoid at least some – potentially significant – effects of climate change.¹⁶ India, perhaps even more than other nations, has to pay considerable attention to the adaptation and resilience of its economy and society.

Doing so is as complex as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and perhaps even more so. For example, adaptation in agriculture requires preparing India’s agricultural systems for heat stress and unpredictable rainfall patterns against a backdrop of existing farmer distress, a creaky system of price stabilisation prone to rent-seeking, and highly inadequate insurance and risk management mechanisms available to farmers. In this context, large existing entry points into food security and employment, such as the public distribution system and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, could usefully be rethought and repurposed from the perspective of providing climate resilience. In brief, the scale and scope of potential climate impacts require mainstreaming of climate considerations systematically across development programmes, rather than an approach that rests on marginal band-aids.

In another example, India’s long coastline is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts.¹⁷ Climate change is likely to decrease the productivity of fisheries through changes in ocean temperature and acidity levels, already stressed by non-climate effects such as fertiliser run-off, with impacts on livelihoods of fisher communities. Because these effects are non-linear, beyond a point, coastal systems may be stressed beyond the point of recovery. In addition, extreme weather events and sea level rise are likely to reshape coastal zones and increase risks and costs of inhabitation on coasts. Addressing these challenges includes but goes beyond disaster preparedness. It requires, for example, coordinating the work of different departments, some of which have a protective mandate and others that seek to maximize production: these need to be harmonized around coastal resilience.

Apart from agriculture and coasts, urban areas, forests and water management also pose a complex challenge. In all these areas, the challenges of mainstreaming climate change are simultaneously scientific, economic, social and institutional.

Conclusion

As the spectre of climate change grows ever clearer, it is becoming increasingly obvious that pursuing development without internalizing climate change considerations risks ignoring a big piece of the puzzle. A central element of the new government’s agenda must thus be to internalize and mainstream climate considerations.

Fortunately, in relation to international policy, addressing climate change can also bring economic and political gains. It can enable India to work its alliances to become a leader in an impending global clean energy transition. And it opens possibilities for the country to become a political leader, notably of vulnerable nations.

Domestically, there is considerable work to be done. This involves rethinking India’s energy system in a world that prioritizes clean energy, including tackling the thorny question of remaking India’s problematic electricity distribution sector. To manage impacts on agriculture, coasts, cities, water and forests, the new government will need to invest in dedicated scientific and institutional capacity, tasked with internalizing the climate challenge and the implications climate change holds for development.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik

¹ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘Summary for Policymakers’, in Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, Contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A Meyer (Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, 2014), 6. [hereinafter IPCC]
² In 2015, a heat wave in India killed more than 2000 people. See Stephane Hallegatte, Adrien Vogt-Schilb, Mook Bangalore and Julie Rozenberg, ‘Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters’ (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017), 34.
³ O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Jacob, M. Taylor, M. Bindi, S. Brown, I. Camilloni, A. Diedhiou, R. Djalante, K.L. Ebi, F. Engelbrecht, J. Guiot, Y. Hijioka, S. Mehrotra, A. Payne, S.I. Seneviratne, A. Thomas, R. Warren and G. Zhou, ‘Impacts of 1.5°C of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems’, in Global Warming of 1.5°C, edited by V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H.O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor and T. Waterfield (Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, 2018), 263.
⁴ Ministry of Finance, Government of India, ‘Climate, Climate Change, and Agriculture’, in Economic Survey 2017-18 (New Delhi: Government of India, 2018), 82.
⁵ Article 4(3), Paris Agreement, 2015.
⁶ Lavanya Rajamani and Daniel Bodansky, ‘The Paris Rulebook: Balancing Prescriptiveness with Flexibility’, International & Comparative Law Quarterly 68 (4) (forthcoming, 2019).
⁷ Article 4(8), Paris Agreement, 2015.
⁸ Article 13, Paris Agreement, 2015.
⁹ Article 14, Paris Agreement, 2015.
¹⁰ See, for a full discussion of legal capacity constraints and their substantive effects on India’s negotiating position, Lavanya Rajamani, ‘India’s Approach to International Law in the Climate Change Regime’, Indian Journal of International Law 57 (1) (2017).
¹¹ Vijeta Rattani, ‘Coping with Climate Change: An Analysis of India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change’ (New Delhi, India: Centre for Science and Environment, 2018); Navroz K. Dubash and Neha Joseph, ‘Evolution of Institutions for Climate Policy in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 51 (3) (2016): 44-54; Sudhir Chella Rajan and Sujatha Byravan, ‘An Evaluation of India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change’ (Chennai, India: Centre for Development Finance, Institute for Financial Management and Research and Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, 2012).
¹² Radhika Khosla and Ankit Bhardwaj, ‘Urbanization in the Time of Climate Change: Examining the Response of Indian Cities’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 10 (1) (2018): e560, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.560.
¹³ Ashok Sreenivas and Ashwin Gambhir, ‘Aligning Energy, Development and Mitigation’, in India in a Warming World, ed. Navroz K. Dubash (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Navroz K. Dubash, Sunila S. Kale and Ranjit Bharvirkar, eds., Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).
¹⁴ Navroz K. Dubash, Ashwini K. Swain and Parth Bhatia, ‘The Disruptive Politics of Renewable Energy’, The India Forum, forthcoming.
¹⁵ Press Trust of India, ‘Tata Power to focus on clean energy, not to build new coal-fired plants: report’, The Hindu, 23 April 2019, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/tata-power-to-focus-on-cl….
¹⁶ IPCC, ‘Summary for Policymakers’, in Global Warming of 1.5°C, edited by V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H.O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor and T. Waterfield (Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, 2018).
¹⁷ Rohan Arthur, ‘Shoring Up: Climate Change and the Indian Coasts and Islands’, in India in a Warming World, ed. Navroz K. Dubash (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

The series is titled ‘Plugging in: Electricity consumption in Indian Homes’.

Energy-demand interventions are important for shaping consumption patterns as India’s energy and technology infrastructure transitions. At the same time, implementation of demand-side solutions is not always straightforward because of the variety of influences on consumption decisions. In the final piece of this series, we initiate a discussion about the drivers of residential electricity consumption.

What conditions electricity use in homes? In particular, are there factors outside of the technological and physical aspects of the house structure and appliances that can have an impact on a household’s electricity consumption? We examine this question in low-income households in Rajkot, Gujarat. The sample provides a suitable context in which to undertake this study, because it contains identical home units, each with the same floor area and layout. This architecture allows us to control for the physical effects of the building, the floor area and the surrounding climate across the sample. The work is part of our ongoing study on energy use in low-income urban households under the CapaCITIES project.

Conventional understanding suggests electricity consumption is a function of building, technological and climate characteristics. Alongside, appliance ownership within a household is a key driver of how much electricity is used. Homes which own only lights and fans will have a different consumption pattern to homes that also own a refrigerator and television – as will be reflected in a different electricity bill between the two. Thereby, in order to control for the effect of appliance ownership on electricity use, we develop an appliances-asset index that ranks each household according to the appliances they own. That is, households with the same rank on the index own the same appliance, in the same quantity. In affordable housing units, the index can also serve as a proxy for economic class, as wealthier households tend to have more and more expensive appliances. Having now controlled for the major building, technological and climate drivers of residential electricity use, we compare the metered electricity consumption (from the utility) of homes that have the same rank on the asset index, to test how similar or different their consumption will be (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Variation in electricity bills for households as per their score on the appliances-asset index
Source: Residential electricity use in affordable homes (Khosla et al. in preparation)

Figure 1 provides interesting initial results. It shows a dramatic difference in the electricity bills of homes, even when they own the same appliances (displayed by the same rank on the appliances-asset index between -1.5 and 1.5). Further, when categorised according to the number of people within a home to account for differences that may arise from differing number of household members (either less than or more than three per home in the Figure), the large variation in the bill remains.

What explains this difference in the electricity bill of homes that own the same appliances, have similar number of people, the same floor area, are in buildings with similar physical characteristics, and under the same weather conditions?

The literature on household energy use offers a number of different factors that influence electricity consumption. Many of these are related to physical building characteristics, for instance, building age, materials, number of windows, etc. In addition, climate conditions are important drivers of how much electricity households consume to be thermally comfortable. And within the household, the area of the home, the number of people that inhabit it and the appliances owned are important determinants of how much electricity is consumed. Figure 1 is striking because in spite of controlling for all these aspects, the electricity bills of the homes are significantly different. This points to an important finding that human behaviour, or how people actually operate and use appliances, after they are purchased, is a key factor in driving electricity use. A better understanding of such human dimensions of energy consumption is particularly needed in the Indian context, where research on the role of behaviour and lifestyles in influencing household energy use is limited.

In addition to energy use behaviour, Figure 1’s electricity bill variation could also be a function of the age and efficiency of the appliances, which can be different even for the same appliance type, along with differences in the orientation of the buildings of the different households. Uncovering these details and developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the techno-economics of electricity consumption, with the social and cultural roots of behaviour patterns, is needed to better predict the interactions between people, buildings and technologies. This will enable better management of household electricity use, especially as the urban population grows and income levels rise. More so, such insights are necessary for informed future consumption projections and policy choices, to step away from traditional economic models that assume humans make rational, utility-maximising, everyday decisions and that appliance usage hours are uniform across individuals, an assumption that many studies make. Ultimately, understanding how individuals, households, and more broadly, societies, use or convert electricity has much to bear on the effectiveness of demand-side measures.

At the conclusion of this residential electricity series, we hope its different themes have provided new insight into the challenges and opportunities of electricity use in Indian homes. These have included trends and disparities in access and consumption across states; the impact of the country’s large LED lighting programme, including in affordable homes; the effectiveness of appliance standards and labels; the energy services demanded within affordable housing and more broadly, across the National Capital Region; metering appliance use patterns; and the role of energy use behaviour in influencing consumption. These findings drew from recently published work, and from new research that will be published shortly, all aimed at emphasising demand-side solutions for energy and climate change, within the context of development.

This piece is authored by Radhika Khosla at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

We would be grateful for your feedback on this series and request you to answer this 2 minute anonymous survey.

This blog series is also available on the Prayas website here.

We will soon be compiling all the posts of this series into a document for future reference.

Other posts in this series:

• Electricity Consumption in Indian Homes
• Trends in India’s Residential Electricity Consumption
• India’s LED Lighting Story
• Illuminating Affordable Homes
• The Efficiency of Appliances
• Appliances used in Affordable Housing
• Electrifying the National Capital Region
• Exploring the different uses of household appliances

As part of our initiative to engage with law and policy makers, the Technology and Society Initiative at CPR launched a new series on ‘Navigating Interactions between Technology and Policy’. The focus audience for this initiative are Legislative Assistants to Members of Parliament (LAMP) fellows, parliamentary aides and others directly involved with law and policy making in India. This three-part series of workshops, consisting of talks and presentations by experts from and outside CPR, followed by lively interactions, aims to shed light on current debates pertaining to technology.

The first workshop in this series, with its focus on informational privacy in the digital age, was conducted at the CPR Conference Room on 22nd August. The discussion had three segments and was led by key resource persons in the form of individual presentations, followed by an open round of questions and answers. The open round was moderated by Ananth Padmanabhan, Visiting Fellow at CPR.

This workshop shed insights on several critical aspects of ‘informational privacy’ – The meaning of such privacy within the context of digital technologies, deficiencies in the current legal and policy framework to optimally safeguard the same, proposed regulatory framework to address the current gap in the form of the Personal Data Protection Bill, its significance and potential impact, and the need to constantly engage with this theme in the light of emerging technologies like automated facial recognition.

The first resource person, Lalit Panda, Research Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, discussed the fundamentals of privacy, focusing on the need for sui generis protection and the concepts and tools required to offer such protection. Privacy entails control over personal information, which then secures the freedom of thought and political association, the freedom to make self-defining life choices, and from surveillance. The debate on secrecy versus privacy needs to be seen in the light of justificatory principles and values which are rooted in social norms and political structures, and which broadly impact economic development as well. These principles and values have found new meaning in the digital era as a consequence of all-pervasive technologies expanding exponentially alongside conditions of weak regulatory capacity. The possession of data by third parties and the concepts of permanence and traceability of information on individuals complicates matters further. Panda therefore emphasised the need for special data protection rules.

Nehaa Chaudhari, public policy lead at Ikigai Law, built on this insight and detailed the regulatory structures and compliance and enforcement regime envisaged under the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018. The bill has been centred around the concepts of personal and sensitive personal data, the obligations on data fiduciaries who make determinative choices on how such personal data may be processed, and the rights of citizens whose data is being collected, processed and monetised. In the draft bill, both data fiduciaries and data processors have obligations, but the latter are saddled with a lesser number of such obligations. The bill fundamentally reiterates well-accepted data processing principles including purpose limitation, collection limitation, lawful processing, notice and consent, data accountability, quality and storage limitations. It is imperative that fiduciaries must adopt ‘privacy by design’ in their business operations and ensure that privacy is protected at all points of processing. By design, the systems should be able to anticipate, identify and prevent harms to data principals. Chaudhari discussed the role of two key players, the Data Protection Authority of India (DPAI) and the Central Government, in shaping regulations and enforcement norms under the bill. The DPAI is in charge of enforcement but the Central Government has a crucial role in tasking this independent regulator. The DPAI is designed as a highly centralised regulatory institution, with wide-ranging authority including the power to issue directions and codes of practice addressed to the data fiduciaries/processors, request information from them, conduct inquiries, appoint investigators, and decide on the merits of a case and pass final orders. The DPAI also has the task of increasing the public awareness on data protection. With these multiple and diverse functions vested in it, DPAI runs the risk of becoming an overburdened regulatory body with limited resources and capacity.

Responding to the complex question of interaction between emerging technologies and privacy, Smriti Parsheera, Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, deep-dived into facial recognition technologies (FRTs) to present her insights. FRTs are essentially algorithms used to run captured video feed against pre-existing databases of facial images and then identify matches between the two. FRTs are prone to high error rates as disclosed by compelling research studies. Even where they work, it is usually for verifications done with the cooperation or consent of individuals, such as in airports, classrooms, or for biometric attendance systems at workplaces. Importance of discussing this technology emerges from the availability of a large database of pictures uploaded from social media accounts or collected through CCTVs, and the computational advances in processing these large data sets. Alongside FRTs, drones and self-driving cars which use similar software could potentially interfere with individual and collective privacy. In India, FRTs were earlier proposed to be used as part of Aadhaar identification / authentication, though this project finds little mention now. Additionally, the National Crime Records Bureau has issued a tender for an Automated Facial Recognition System, and airports have initiated DigitYatri for seamless and hassle-free check-in. While the technology debate is swinging between ‘convenience and efficiency’ on one side, and ‘human errors and privacy concerns’ on the other, national security remains to be the most dominant rationale offered by public authorities in support of this technology. In this scenario, one needs to ask and answer the following questions: Is this technology reliable enough given instances of false identification of women and people of colour? Can it be considered legally tenable, considering that data is being collected and processed ubiquitously for an altogether different purpose without the consent of individuals? Would it end up being a tool that supports discrimination, considering the reliance on this technology on biased input feeds? Parsheera stressed the need for applying the Puttaswamy standards to a rights-based assessment of this technology, and the additional need for self-regulatory and ethical frameworks that work alongside statutory protection