Author: cprindia

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

By Philippe Cullet

India is facing an increasingly dire water situation. The NITI Aayog in 2018 warned that the country is facing the ‘worst water crisis in its history’.¹This is a crisis of availability of water with various states facing increasingly frequent and/or acute water scarcity for at least some part of the year. With increasing water use and more erratic monsoons, per capita water availability in the country is progressively decreasing. An associated challenge is the country’s dependence on groundwater. This is particularly significant because the overwhelming majority of the population depends on groundwater for its domestic water needs; for crores of people water is a source of constant worry in a context where water tables are rapidly falling and water quality rapidly diminishing. It is also a concern for irrigators since the bulk of irrigation today depends on groundwater. Juxtaposed against this water scarcity challenge is a crisis of abundance reflected in the frequent floods that afflict several states on a regular basis.

However, the most critical challenge of all is that of governance of water. On the one hand, the governance of water is organized largely around laws and institutions tasked with allocating and regulating use of water among various claimants. On the other hand, water protection is seen as an environmental mandate that remains largely distinct from water governance, even though water is an integral part of environmental governance. This makes for poor outcomes since protecting water is necessary to ensure availability today and in the future and thus conditions water use. The failure to effectively protect water is an increasingly significant cause of conflicts among different water users.

The challenge of water governance primarily emerges from an inappropriate and insufficient legal framework. This challenge can be broken into different components.

• The rules governing access to water are often drawn from old case laws that gave primary control over water to landowners.² This is problematic because there is no mechanism to coordinate the cumulative use of a river by all riparian landowners, leading to potential over-exploitation. It is also inappropriate because it gives only landowners rights over a resource that every person needs to use on a daily basis for drinking, food and domestic needs. In addition, it precludes any basin-wide or aquifer-wide protection measures since control over water is organized around the claims of individual landowners. This is particularly problematic for groundwater where each individual landowner has the right to take as much groundwater as they please, to the extent of depriving other users of the same aquifer and without considering the need to avoid use beyond replenishment.
• One of the specific problems with the above scheme is that the rules for surface water and groundwater are not the same. It was determined in the nineteenth century when the connections between the two were not well understood. This has led to the very unfortunate situation where rules for surface water and groundwater are different. Moreover, most water laws centre around issues related to surface water, leaving groundwater unregulated, even though this is the critical issue today. The largest use of water, irrigation, is mostly governed by laws that consider irrigation to be sourced from surface water when in reality farmers rely overwhelmingly on groundwater for irrigation.
• The responsibility for governing water is divided between different institutions, from panchayats/municipalities to states and the Union. The Constitution gives primary responsibility to states, while the local dimensions of water governance have been confirmed in the 72nd and 73rd constitutional amendments and the Union has some powers concerning matters that go beyond the state level. The recognition that water needs to be addressed at all levels is an excellent starting point. In practice, however, even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that the state at each level is a ‘public trustee’,³ this is not yet reflected in legislation, leading to unnecessary governance conflicts.
• The rules in place for drinking water supply are separate for urban and rural areas, with different supply norms for rural and urban residents.⁴ This fragmented governance is problematic since urban areas increasingly rely on water from beyond the municipal limits, thus making it imperative to address problems arising jointly.
• As we have seen, the rules treat surface water and groundwater separately. They also view pollution as an environmental matter and usage as a water sector matter.

As this brief description highlights, there are vast gaps between regulation and practice, as well gaps between the existing parts of the regulatory framework. These issues have been critical concerns in the water sector and policymakers at different levels have tried to address them. This has led to various law-making initiatives at the state and central levels. In keeping with the constitutional mandate, states have adopted a number of water laws over the past couple of decades. This is commendable since it reflects a recognition that a number of issues can only be effectively addressed if legislation is adopted. At the same time, states have generally not engaged independently in developing new water laws and have tended to react to policy priorities set elsewhere. The resultant patchwork of laws does not necessarily address the most critical issues.

The new government needs to focus, in particular, on two initiatives: a framework water legislation and a model groundwater law. Both of these have been in the making since the beginning of the decade, having been proposed and developed by the last two governments at the Centre. They need a much stronger push to ensure a strong legal framework for water that allows India to face the challenges of the 2020s.

Towards Framework Water Legislation

The medley of water laws that exist in most states is deficient in that these laws are not centred around any set of principles governing the water sector as a whole. Principles have been laid down by the higher judiciary over time but they have not been enshrined in legislation. This is a gap that impedes effective governance of water and prevents water conflicts from being resolved on bases that are clear for all users.

In the absence of framework legislation in any state, the Planning Commission of India took the initiative of drafting such a law in 2011.⁵ The underlying idea was to ensure that all institutions concerned with water could rely on a single frame of reference so that water governance becomes more transparent and accessible. The drafting of framework legislation was taken up again by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation (MoWRRDGR) in 2015, leading to an updated draft known as the National Water Framework Bill, 2016.⁶

There is a strong need to ensure that all water and all water uses are governed by the same principles, and that protection and use principles are clearly linked. The new government must ensure that this draft is taken up and adopted so that the country is better prepared to face the increasing number of water crises that are likely to beset a number of states in the 2020s.

Need for Comprehensive Groundwater Legislation

Groundwater is and will remain the primary source of water for most water uses for many years. Existing groundwater regulation is extremely dated; the principles were laid out in the 19th century and have not been updated. Recent regulatory interventions focus on top-down attempts to control usage; they are failing because they neither consider the broader aquifer-level protection nor reflect the fact that groundwater use is, first, a local issue to be addressed at the local level. The rapidly deepening groundwater crisis calls for an entirely new perspective on groundwater protection and groundwater rights.

The central government has played an important role in providing models that states can use to develop their own legislations. A first generation of model legislation promoted between 1970 and 2005 focused essentially on introducing new control measures for groundwater use without addressing either the rights to groundwater or the need to protect, manage and regulate groundwater at aquifer level. In 2011, the Planning Commission of India took up the challenge of drafting a comprehensive groundwater model law addressing protection and use from the local level to the state level.⁷ In 2015, the MoWRRDGR decided to go back to the draft of the Planning Commission and requested an updated version. This was delivered in 2016, and submitted for comments to states and the NITI Aayog; a revised version incorporating comments was submitted in 2017.

The new government should ensure that the Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017, is taken forward at the earliest.⁸ Where it exists, state groundwater legislation based on the old model legislation is woefully incapable of addressing today’s challenges; in any case most of these Acts exist mostly on paper. The Bill is an appropriate template that the central government must formally adopt and promote to address the rapidly worsening situation in terms of falling water tables and diminishing water quality besetting vast areas of the country.

Priorities for the New Legislature

The water sector has been the object of much attention from policymakers for several decades. Most regulatory interventions have, however, been largely piecemeal as reflected in the fact that most water laws are sectoral (for instance, irrigation-specific) and fail to address the unavoidable connections amongst different uses and between surface water and groundwater. Some of the most glaring gaps, such as a missing framework of principles governing the water sector, have been partly filled by the Supreme Court and the high courts. This is an appropriate start but does not affect the governance of water on a daily basis at the local level, which is determined by the laws in place. Further, the lack of comprehensive legislation to address groundwater leads to a situation where the most important aspect is not regulated by comprehensive regulation, contributing to the increasingly dire situation in many states.

The new government should immediately make use of the two existing drafts prepared in the previous legislature and take them forward:

• The adoption of the model law for groundwater – the Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017 – is crucial to ensure the equitable and sustainable use and protection of groundwater.
• The adoption of a framework legislation based on the National Water Framework Bill, 2016, will ensure that there is a set of overall principles for the entire water sector reflecting legal developments in recent decades. This will ensure that all actors in the sector have the same point of reference in their interventions.

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
• Interstate River Water Governance: Shift focus from conflict resolution to enabling cooperation by Srinivas Chokkakula

Air pollution exposures in India constitute a major public health threat. To prevent a full-blown national health crisis, our policy conversations and actions need to first acknowledge, and then respond to, the enormity and severity of the problem. A significant part of the Indian population is exposed to air quality that is considerably worse than nationally and internationally accepted guidelines. What is the nature of this health crisis, how much do we know, and is there enough evidence to act? We need to engage with these questions as we demand action against air pollution. Impact of air pollution on health in India are severe and prevalent across all states and socio-demographic groups. These impacts, whether estimated through mortality or morbidity rates, or through measuring reduction in life expectancy – are all growing at a significant rate. As a risk factor for disease burden in the country, air pollution is second only to child and maternal malnutrition, and ranks higher than unsafe water and unsanitary conditions – conditions we have long associated with poor health in India. As the previous article in this series showed, the annual mean ambient levels of PM2.5 are multiple times both Indian and WHO norms. Health-damaging air pollution exposures are an everyday reality for both urban and rural populations in India. And it is not only ambient air pollution. Household air pollution – primarily caused by burning solid fuels such as wood and dung for cooking, has significant health impacts as well, and 56% of India’s population, largely in the rural areas, continues to rely on solid fuels, with the highest numbers in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. The most recent India State-Level Disease Burden estimates, released by an initiative co-ordinated by the Indian Council for Medical Research and the Public Health Foundation of India, and published in The Lancet Planetary Health, show that ambient and household air pollution contributes nearly equally to health impacts.

In 2017, air pollution is estimated to have contributed to one in eight deaths in India for a total of 1.24 million deaths according to estimates published in the Lancet study mentioned above. The impact goes beyond mortality; air pollution significantly reduces quality of life by increasing the incidence of a range of illnesses. Health literature uses a metric called Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), which includes both the years of life lost due to premature death and the number of years lived with less than ideal health. The Lancet study found that air pollution contributed to more than 38 million years of healthy life lost in India.

The impact of air pollution on newborn babies and infants under the age of five years is particularly alarming. According to a recent WHO report, in 2016, 100,000 children under the age of five die annually due to exposure to air pollution – the highest in the world in this age bracket. This number is particularly astonishing, when compared to the overall under 5 years mortality in India in 2016 which stands at just under 10 lakh. Therefore, 10% of Indian children under 5 years are dying due to air pollution, a problem against which we continue to move at a glacial pace.

Air pollution is also emerging as the single largest risk factor for non-communicable diseases. This is especially the case for women. Air pollution is the single largest risk factor for women for chronic respiratory diseases, while for men, smoking and other occupational risks are also important contributory factors. A similar profile is emerging for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

We are still discovering the scale and range of damage air pollution causes on our health. Cardio-respiratory diseases and lung cancer in adults, and acute lower respiratory infections in children are the more commonly known impacts of air pollution. However, emerging epidemiological research indicate a much wider range of health impacts of air pollution such as on birthweight, child growth and cognitive abilities, obesity and bladder cancer. For instance, recent studies in Tamil Nadu have provided convincing evidence for impacts of ambient and household PM2.5 exposures on birthweight. These impacts are not currently included in the burden of disease estimates, and therefore the totality of impacts of air pollution in India is likely grossly underestimated.

While there are not many epidemiological studies on long-term mortality in low and middle income countries including India, there is evidence that adverse effects of exposure to air pollution seen in other parts of the world are also occurring in India. While further studies are critical for our understanding, we need not wait for these to act, particularly since pollution levels in India are higher than anywhere else. Changes in daily rates of mortality associated with short-term exposure to particulates in India are similar to those reported in multicity studies conducted in China, South Korea, Japan, Europe, and North America. Several Indian studies have contributed to the pool of studies included in meta-analyses for estimating relative risks of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases and cataracts in relation to household air pollution exposure. Arguments about lack of India-specific studies of air pollution on health do not hold water.

The evidence we have now sends a loud and clear message – there is a health crisis unfolding in India. Commissioning additional studies on emissions and impacts will undoubtedly help guide future policy actions. But currently available information and knowledge on health effects and exposure attribution to sources is more than sufficient to move us into ‘mission’ mode. Reasons not to make this move, whether political, financial, legal, or technical, while perhaps compelling, pale in comparison to the following reality: we are consciously subjecting the current and future generations to conditions that increase the burden of non-communicable diseases, impact child mortality, reduce life expectancy, impair cognitive skills, adversely impact pregnant women and their unborn children, and create life-long medical dependencies. We can no longer afford a lackadaisical response to a risk factor that is eroding rural and urban health, across every state in India.

Kalpana Balakrishnan is Director, ICMR Center for Advanced Research on Air Quality, Climate and Health, Sri Ramachandra Institute for Higher Education and Research (SRIHER), Chennai. Shibani Ghosh is a Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

This article is the second in a four-part series on India’s air pollution. The original article, which was published in the Hindustan Times on December 20, 2018, can be found here. For more information on CPR’s work on air pollution, visit the Clearing the Air? project page. 

In this Series:

Understanding the Curse of Air Pollution (1/4)

Public health in India a casualty of air pollution (2/4)

Delhi Has a Complex Air Pollution Problem (3/4)

Air pollution: India’s waking up, but there’s a long way to go (4/4)