The right to sanitation has been recognised in India for more than two decades, and progressively integrated into the international human rights law framework since the beginning of the century. Courts in India have derived the right from the constitutional right to life and repeatedly affirmed its existence. However, key issues persist concerning the realisation of the right to sanitation for all, the scope of the right, its links with other rights such as health, gender equality and environment, as well as issues of specific relevance in the Indian context, such as manual scavenging.
This book represents the first effort to conceptually engage with the right to sanitation and its multiple dimensions in India, as well as its broader international and comparative setting. It critically analyses the contributions of the law and policy framework to the realisation of the right in India, including the role of the Swachh Bharat Mission, institutional aspects, initiatives to foster community participation, infrastructure dimensions, wastewater treatment and re-use, manual scavenging and rights of sanitation workers, and gender dimensions.
This volume presents an integrated collection of essays around the theme of India’s failure to grapple with the big questions of human rights protections affecting marginalized minority groups in the country’s recent rush to modernization. The book traverses a broad range of rights violations from: gender equality to sexual orientation, from judicial review of national security law to national security concerns, from water rights to forest rights of those in need, and from the persecution of Muslims in Gulberg to India’s parallel legal system of Lok Adalats to resolve disputes. It calls into question India’s claim to be a contemporary liberal democracy. The thesis is given added strength by the authors’ diverse perspectives which ultimately create a synergy that stimulates the thinking of the entire field of human rights, but in the context of a non-western country, thereby prompting many specialists in human rights to think in new ways about their research and the direction of the field, both in India and beyond.
In an area that has been under-researched, the work will provide valuable guidance for new research ideas, experimental designs and analyses in key cutting-edge issues covered in this work, such as acid attacks or the right to protest against the ‘nuclear’ state in India.
How is India engaging the climate change challenge? This introductory chapter explains the changing context for climate change debates in India, from one focused on diplomatic concerns of equity and responsibility for the problem, to one equally concerned with understanding its development implications. The chapter lays out the rationale for why the book examines climate change impacts, negotiations, politics, policies and integration across sectors, briefly discussing key themes. It ends with four overarching messages on the contours of the Indian climate debate.
India will undergo an immense urbanization in the coming decades, doubling its urban population by 2050. This transformation is unique as it will come at the time where the impacts of as well as the global momentum to respond to climate change heighten. India’s urban transformation will, therefore, have deep implications for not only local welfare and environmental conditions but climate mitigation and climate adaptation as well. As most of urban India is yet to be built, India has a unique opportunity to lock-in low-carbon, resilient and equitable urban forms for the long term. This chapter discusses the evolution of India’s urban climate actions from addressing climate risks to, more recently, mitigation while also exploring the governance characteristics of these actions. These actions, while nascent, provide an indication that the future trajectory of urban responses to climate change will be shaped by how local development and climate goals will be linked and prioritized.
This chapter sets the stage for a discussion on policies by reviewing the emergence of national policies and national institutions. This discussion starts with the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and its various Missions. It discusses how Indian climate policy was frequently dictated by the pursuit of ‘co-benefits’ that bring both climate and development gains, and the emergence of a multiple objectives framing as a useful guide for policy formulation. This leads to a discussion of the formulation of India’s NDC for the Paris Agreement. Significantly, the chapter also covers the spread of climate institutions, which while weak and in their early stages, provide the spaces within which climate discussion is likely to be mainstreamed, if at all, in coming years.
Due to the extent of unionization in India’s coal and other carbon-rich sectors, trade unions can resist a tide of privatization and play an active role in formulating a just transition that integrates worker and social concerns into climate responses. An Indian just transition will be located around the need to peak coal usage soon and transition to renewables, with the additional complication of protecting livelihoods, as India’s coal-rich states are also its poorest. This chapter puts forth that democratic, public and co-operative management of energy systems can prioritise social alongside climate concerns, as part of a wider industrial strategy to retrain workers and decarbonize industry. Climate change will also impact working conditions and workers’ health, with the burden likely falling on households. Access to social services in workplaces, streets, and homes becomes necessary to alleviate the impacts of climate change on the most vulnerable.
The international climate change regime comprises the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, and numerous decisions under these instruments. These instruments, in particular the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement represent fundamentally different approaches to the three central issues the international climate change regime has been struggling with since the inception of multilateral negotiations. These issues are: the architecture of climate instruments; the legal form of climate instruments and the legal character of provisions in them; and differentiation among countries, in particular, between developed and developing countries. This chapter explores each of these central issues in turn, with a focus on how the Paris Agreement resolves these issues, and represents a step change in the international community’s efforts to address climate change.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 was shaped by several rounds of negotiation in decades prior. Events in Copenhagen in 2009 were pivotal in defining negotiation dynamics between developing and developed countries. This chapter offers a vivid first-hand account of the pressures and intricacies of negotiations that year. It describes uneasy coordination between India and China as they worked to represent the interests of the developing world under the umbrella of the BASIC grouping. It also lays bare the fundamental divergence in interests between the developed and developing world. It does so by detailing tense side-negotiations on differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions, the financial commitments of developed countries and systems for transparent evaluation of commitments.
Since the 1990s, several developing countries have put into place Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) procedures to regulate the establishment and impacts of industrial and infrastructure projects. In India, a formal EIA regime was established in 1994. Public hearings were made a mandatory part of this process so that affected people could legally participate in these decisions. This chapter discusses the developmental context within which EIA emerged in India and how the EIA process has been at the heart of environment and development trade-offs and become one of the most debated decision-making processes. On the one hand, it has been extensively utilized by community based organizations and environmentalists to politicize development while on the other hand, it has been criticized for legitimizing impacts. Over the years, project authorities and governments have sought weaker regulation and environmentalists have held on to a broken law. The outcomes of these contestations influence how environmental justice is defined within India’s present economic and political context.
The “APMC Act” remains among the most widely commented upon and most deeply misunderstood laws governing Indian economic life. APMCs – Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees, more commonly known as mandis – are notified, physical primary markets designated as the main and, in some cases, the only state-sanctioned sites for the regulation of the critical “first transaction” between the primary producer and the buyer of his or her agricultural produce. The APMC is not the regulated market itself, but the local body constituted to oversee its regulation, and this is only one of many conceptual and practical confusions generated under the diverse state-specific agricultural marketing acts, which have been implemented with even greater diversity across varied agro-ecological, political-economic, and administrative contexts. Drawing on long-term archival and ethnographic research in a mandi and market town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, this chapter sketches out the regulatory biography of an agricultural market, the diverse narratives and experiences of legislative amendment and yard-level market “reform,” and illustrates the empirical and analytical purchase of embedded exchange and contested jurisdiction of markets on the ground.
