Author: cprindia

This paper attempts to add to the given literature by undertaking a detailed analysis of school consolidation process in Rajasthan. It seeks to answer the following questions:

First, what are the specific criteria and conditions for closure of schools and their consolidation with other schools and whether they were adhered to by the state administration?

Second, whether school consolidation led to improvements in enrolment, availability of teachers, and essential school infrastructure facilities as mandated by the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2010.

The full working paper can be accessed here.

Context

The current global architecture for climate policy and action comprises of a multiplicity of actors, organisations, and operational modalities that differ from those originally anticipated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The climate change arena is now widely populated by activities that are often outside the formal auspices of UNFCCC, including initiatives that are public, private and civil society based, operating at various scales and thereby involving different levels of governance. This scenario raises two important questions:

• What are the implications of such a fragmented climate regime?
• And, more specifically, what are the opportunities and challenges this architecture poses for a low-carbon technology transition in developing countries, in keeping with international climate objectives?

The multi-level climate governance framework lays out two dimensions of action and influence to implement low-carbon strategies. One, is between national governments and regional and local actors. And the second, is the learning, knowledge transmission and cooperation across regions and organisational boundaries. Together, coordinated interactions within this structure have the potential to narrow policy and other ‘gaps’ to help address the problem of climate change.

What is this research about?

The built environment in India is ideal to study the potential of multi-level governance, particularly since its policies often draw on international activity and knowledge to implement locally-specific low carbon solutions. In 2010, buildings accounted for 32% of total global final energy use, and 35% of total energy consumption in India. This has made the buildings sector a fast-growing market for low-carbon energy technologies.

The paper titled Deploying Low-Carbon Technologies in Developing Countries: A view from India’s building sector, co-authored by Khosla, and published in Environmental Policy and Governance, discusses this issue by examining two inter-related questions:

• How do (or don’t) low-carbon technologies get transferred and deployed in India’s built environment?
• And what implications can be drawn from the Indian case for effective low-carbon technology development and transfer for developing countries?

How was the research conducted?

Empirically, the paper draws on interviews with experts within and outside government, data from official building energy documents, and insights from supporting literature. It also draws on author experiences of direct involvement in the sector. For instance, co-author Ajay Mathur headed India’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency for almost a decade, and Khosla worked alongside the state of Andhra Pradesh for two years on building energy code adoption.

Key findings

The paper examines the coverage and nature of the multilevel linkages within India’s built environment from 2000-2015. Authors examine if the multilevel climate architecture can be leveraged to support technological change for desired outcomes in Indian buildings.

Table 1 presents a collation of key building energy technology activities and actors, and their respective governance levels. The table lists the different activities that comprise technological change: technology research and development (R&D); financial transfer to assist different stages of the technology cycle; capacity building and analytical support; policy designs and implementation.

Table 1. Activity map of low-carbon technological change in India’s buildings (2000-2015)

Three patterns characterise the nature of technological change in India’s low-carbon buildings.

• First, most activities flow through vertical linkages in a top-down (international → national → subnational) direction, as opposed to international processes and outcomes being shaped by national or subnational level activities. States or subnational bodies thereby seldom serve as ‘laboratories of experimentation’ or pioneers of policy initiation.
• Second, and a consequence of the largely top-down nature of activities, is the profusion of international actors engaging with this space in India. This international linkage is usually mediated by domestic actors, making it collaborative in scope. The expertise from various bilateral, multilateral and strategic partnerships, and additional groups has played an important role over the last decade and a half, and in most cases work is co-produced with local experts, civil society partners and national/state governments.
• Third, the activity patterns in Table 1 demonstrate a focus on the downstream stages of the technological cycle, i.e. on deployment. However, the other dimensions underlying technological change – technology R&D and financial transfer – have been less present in Indian buildings, even though both are important to advance technologies (the US–India R&D collaboration being a recent exception). This observation of a limited focus on the upstream parts (research, product development) of the technology cycle is consistent with the larger landscape of international collaborative and support activities.

Together, these patterns demonstrate the potential but also the limitations of working with the linkages between and across governance levels. The paper further discusses three factors that collectively help explain these patterns: the particularities of India’s federal structure; the constraints of capacity, which is typical of developing countries; and the growing policy linkages between energy and climate change stemming from the global climate debate. This discussion informs the subsequent policy recommendations for low-carbon technology transfer in developing countries more broadly.

Policy recommendations

• Adopting a ‘Need’-Driven Approach – Most developing countries prioritise economic and social development over investments in expensive low-carbon technologies. Technology transfer thus needs to be constructed around a collaborative and ongoing local assessment process, driven by developed and developing countries. Examples are green building designs that take into account local climatic conditions and occupant use patterns or policy delivery models that consider behaviour norms or financial realities of consumers. Engagement between developed countries and networks of local users, and with their private sector is equally relevant. Better country understanding of recipient priorities and capabilities (technologies, finance and knowledge), with ongoing local inputs, will be fruitful for international actors working in developing countries and also increase domestic buy-in.
• Differentiated Approach to Capacity Building: Most developing countries struggle with questions of capacity. While international funds often focus on capacity projects, these efforts rarely translate to a domestic critical mass. It is thus important to understand the kinds of capacity needed in order to build them – for instance, studies have shown that crucial ingredients of technology transfer are found rarely in ‘hardware’, but rather in people-embodied knowledge. More specifically, the research findings of this paper suggest that greater emphasis needs to be placed on building operational, strategic and organisational capacities.
• Strengthen Linkages and Integrate Agendas across Governance Levels: Developing countries can strengthen linkages and respective agendas across governance levels – to enable appropriate flows of knowledge regarding technology needs, possible solutions and delivery mechanisms, and allow resources to reach where they are most needed. For instance, developing countries can leverage the growing profusion of initiatives targeted at climate mitigation by investing in better coordination with international fora, communicating their specific needs and appropriately shaping the international agenda.  The linkages between the national and local levels are equally crucial, especially since the effectiveness of any climate programme ultimately depends on outcomes on the ground.

The publisher page from where the full paper can be purchased can be accessed here.

For a copy of the publication, contact climate.initiative.cpr@gmail.com.

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).

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.

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