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4 - Extractive Regimes in the Coal Heartlands of India: Difficult Questions for a Just Energy Transition
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 74-97
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Summary
Introduction
It is now accepted that the future of coal will be decided in the developing world. Even as Western countries transition away from coal, increased production and consumption of coal in India and China have meant that the share of coal in global energy production has remained constant for the past 40 years, despite attempts at decarbonization (Edwards 2019). Nevertheless, the West continues to produce high per capita emissions compared to developing nations (Lazarus and van Asselt 2018). In response, India has asserted its rights to equitable energy access in the international arena (Jaitly 2021). At the same time, questions of intra-country equity complicate India's position, with many arguing that India must pursue low-carbon pathways to protect its poor and vulnerable groups (Bidwai 2012).
After Independence, coal became an enduring symbol of national development in India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The coal industry has deep political roots, engaging powerful stakeholders at different levels (Bhattacharjee 2017). In recent years, coal investments have lost their appeal due to unrest over their environmental impacts as well as a dynamic downward trend in the demand for thermal power (Rajshekhar 2021). Even so, production targets for the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) – responsible for over 80 per cent of India's coal production – were increased to 1 billion metric tonnes by 2024. The central government is actively looking to sell more coal blocks to raise money, despite the lukewarm response to recent coal block auctions. Coal imports have simultaneously increased, engendering a new coastal coal geography controlled by private actors (Oskarsson et al. 2021). That renewables cannot substitute for coal, despite policy support from the state, is accepted. Analysts expect coal-fired generation to continue to grow to meet electricity demand growth even if 350 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity is installed by 2030 (Tongia and Gross 2019). New energy forms, including renewables, are, historically speaking, energy ‘additions’ rather than ‘transitions’ (Oskarsson et al. 2021). Importantly, this perception is not typical of India alone, as the global energy system remains locked into high coal energy use in the midst of an RE boom (Oskarsson et al. 2021).
9 - Intersectional Water Justice in India: At the Confluence of Gender, Caste, and Climate Change
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 183-206
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Introduction
India's water crisis has been widely covered in the international and national press. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times published a series of reports and features on the prospects of Chennai and other large Indian cities running out of water (Subramanian 2019). Data on the absolute scarcity of water, sometimes illustrated using dramatic satellite imageries of water bodies, often dominate discussions on India's water crisis (Sengupta 2019). Recall, for example, the 2019 report about 21 Indian cities running out of groundwater by 2020 (ANI 2019a). We are now well past the dreaded summer of 2020 but there has been no follow-up reportage. The argument that India's water crisis lingers because its effects are experienced unequally along multiple dimensions – caste, class, and gender – is hardly a controversial one for scholars. However, there has been very little discussion in both the international and domestic press of the gross inequalities in access to water. The New York Times report mentions the poor, while another describes how women sacrificed daily showers so that office-going male members of the family could afford the luxury instead (Denton and Sengupta 2019). An overwhelming focus on water scarcity instead of water inequalities, we argue, is one of the major causes for the perpetuation of India's water crisis. In this chapter, we seek to examine how the intersection of social inequalities and climate change contributes to water injustice.
In India, access to water is determined by a complex entwining of caste, class, and gender identities that work to perpetuate structural inequalities. While geography and the quality of physical infrastructure greatly influence the extent of water insecurity, they are not entirely responsible for it. In some parts of the country, safe drinking water is inaccessible, causing widespread suffering, illness, and disease. In other regions, cheap and state-subsidized access to water is taken for granted and easily abused (Fatah 2013). The army cantonment and government districts in Delhi receive 375 litres of water per capita per day. On the other hand, South Delhi's Sangam Vihar, an area with a large number of ‘unauthorized colonies’ and home to many lower-income religious minorities, receives a meagre 40 litres of municipal water per person.
5 - Climate Justice Implications of the Relationship between Economic Inequality and Carbon Emissions in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 98-114
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Introduction
The carbon emissions of the world's richest 1 per cent are more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 per cent, despite the fact that climate change is expected to disproportionately affect the poor, especially in the warmer parts of the world (Oxfam 2020; Goswami 2020). This suggests that climate and socio-economic justice are intertwined, and understanding the nature of the relationship between carbon emissions and economic inequality can help us arrive at potential pathways to address both.
Climate and socio-economic justice are crucial in the case of India. India is a significant player in the global economy, as its gross domestic product (GDP) is the fifth largest in the world (World Bank 2021). However, the country also experiences staggering levels of economic inequality. It has the third highest number of billionaires, but it also has the largest poor population in the world (Ankel 2020; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2019). The wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the Indian population is more than four times the total wealth of the bottom 70 per cent (Economic Times 2020). These indicators of economic inequality demonstrate a dire need to enhance socio-economic justice in India.
Three different indicators of carbon emissions are widely used for analytical purposes. The present climate crisis resulted from historically accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents. The United States (US) is the largest contributor, accounting for about 25 per cent of the global cumulative carbon emissions between 1751 and 2019, while India contributed about 3 per cent (Ritchie 2019). Hence, India's historical cumulative carbon emission is rather low. The second indicator measures annual carbon emissions, or a country's current emission levels. Based on this indicator, India has the third highest carbon emission levels globally; it trails China and the US by a huge margin. The third indicator is per capita annual emissions, which accounts for differences in the population size of countries. When countries are ranked in descending order of their per capita carbon emissions, India ranked 128 out of 210 countries in 2019 (Crippa et al. 2020). Even though India's per capita carbon emissions and its share in cumulative global emissions is low, its current scale of emissions is a matter of concern (Matthews 2016).
1 - Introduction: Climate Justice in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 1-24
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Summary
Arundhati Roy famously described the COVID-19 pandemic as a
portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (Roy 2020)
As inspiring and insightful as these words are, such juxtaposition of utopia and dystopia barely scratches the surface of what and who we are as a nation. The soulcrushing images of burning pyres in parking lots turned into makeshift graveyards, which international and national media have immortalized, offer a clue, as does the sombre poetry of Parul Khakhar (Tripathi 2021). India is a land pockmarked with a million fires.
The COVID-19 crisis has come as a shock to many middle-class Indians. Yet, to India's Dalits, Adivasis, women, and other marginalized groups, haunted by centuries of oppression, this crisis is yet another in a long list of historical and ongoing crises. For example, the coalfields of Jharia in Jharkhand have been burning for over a century now. As a result, at least 130,000 families have, quite literally, lived through a century-long trial by fire (Rahi 2019). Since 1995, the state-owned Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) has claimed to have a ‘master plan’, which is possibly gathering dust in some almirah of the coal ministry (S. Kumar 2021). One would imagine that a pandemic like COVID-19 might scare the minister whose job includes ensuring the welfare of the 3.6 million people who work in mines with a less than adequate supply of fresh air. Yet, in 2020, India's coal minister valorized coal workers as ‘our coal warriors who are toiling day and night to keep the lights on even during the corona pandemic’ (Press Information Bureau 2020). They toiled very hard indeed.
A year later, as India struggled to confront the monstrous second wave of the pandemic, Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited (CIL), recorded the highest-ever single-day coal dispatch of 80 railway rakes (PNS 2021).
8 - Reimagining Climate Justice as Caste Justice
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 162-182
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The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.
Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.
We see this acknowledgement in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would remain incomplete without a serious stock-taking of those dimensions of inequality and unevenness that significantly pre-date the rise of colonial capitalism and are yet implicated in its development trajectory. These dimensions of inequality often operate at the national or sub-national levels and therefore escape scrutiny on the global stage. In the case of India, one such important and all-pervasive dimension of inequality is caste.
For decades, anthropological and historical scholarship on caste focused only on ritual, scriptural, and mythical dimensions, thus constructing the issue as a matter of religion alone. Anti-caste scholars and activists such as Ambedkar, Phule, and Periyar have resisted such ‘orientalist’ representations of caste.
6 - Climate Action Plans and Justice in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 115-139
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Summary
Introduction
‘Climate change seems to be the last of the priorities of the state and central government. Despite various climate plans, we continue to privatize coal and divert forest land. How does one reconcile these decisions with the objectives of the climate action plan?’ asked a senior administrative officer in the Odisha Revenue and Disaster Management Department when questioned about the auctioning of new coal blocks and the state's climate action plan. His grim observation points to the political and economic barriers against implementing an effective climate policy that addresses climate justice in India.
In this chapter, we argue that India's climate policy fails to adequately address difficult political questions related to climate justice and rising inequality. As our analysis of state and national climate action plans show, India's engagement with questions of climate justice remains merely symbolic. This directly follows from the country's stance in international climate negotiations, during which it has shied away from undertaking rigorous domestic climate action citing high levels of poverty and a need to focus on economic growth (Kashwan and Mudaliar 2021).
Our analysis of India's national and state climate action plans offers insights into the often-unstated normative principles that guide decision-making on climate change within the country. In this study, we demonstrate how, if at all, these action plans incorporate questions of justice and equality. We argue that most of India's climate action plans demonstrate a superficial understanding of socio-economic inequalities and hence fail to adequately address the disproportionate impact of climate events on the poor and marginalized.
We begin by discussing the principles that guide climate policy internationally and domestically. We then provide a critical overview of national and state climate action plans. We then scrutinize these action plans in terms of substantive equality and climate justice criteria, namely caste, gender, poverty, and co-benefits for development. We then analyse the action plans with regard to their treatment of these substantive criteria, the limitations in their approach, and possible strategies to address these limitations.
Background
Internationally, India is known to have pioneered the approach of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which allows developing countries to prioritize poverty alleviation and economic growth over climate mitigation.
List of Poems and Artworks
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 30 June 2024, pp vii-viii
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Preface and Acknowledgements
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp xvii-xx
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Summary
My ongoing engagements with international and national debates on climate justice are a result of an intellectual journey over the past two decades that has brought me time and again to the complex intersections of environmental protection and social justice. Market-based solutions became the backbone of ostensible global responses to climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007. The sense of excitement among environmental economists then is difficult to describe from where we are today. However, to those of us who had spent time in the field, this euphoria was evidently and grossly misplaced. The journey that marketbased solutions would have to take, from Bali to places like Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where they would be eventually implemented, is not paved with the freedom of choice that pro-market advocates like to celebrate.
Markets are designed to facilitate the accumulation of surplus in the hands of those who can channel it higher up in the ‘food chain’. In most cases, the market ecosystem is essentially a centralizing force and does not work for the poor and marginalized. Unfortunately, this argument often falls through the cracks due to the lack of interdisciplinary work that is needed to produce knowledge that may help inform public debates on these complex questions. The market-based solutions institutionalized at the Bali climate conference, especially carbon offsets and carbon emissions trading, have proven to be colossal failures.
Perhaps even more embarrassingly, the advocates of market-based climate solutions lost the battle of ideologies to right-wing reactionary forces. Even in the supposedly knowledge-driven market economies of the Global North, ultra-conservatives have been successful in labelling neoliberal policies, such as offsets and cap-and-trade policies, as part of ‘the radical Left's progressive wish list’. This is not surprising to many on the left but this also offers much food for thought for students of policy analysis, who focus rather narrowly on coming up with ‘efficient solutions’. While smart analyses can be helpful, the belief that such analyses are sufficient to drive policy change has proven to be a chimera. This is why it is necessary to cultivate a strong awareness of the extent to which the beneficiaries of the status quo use their political and economic power to thwart sensible debates on the unprecedented environmental and social crises.
2 - Urban Climate Justice in India
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- By Eric Chu , Kavya Michael
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 25-49
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Summary
Introduction
Indian cities are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their rapid population growth, high levels of socioeconomic inequality, and the general inability of infrastructure and public services to adapt to projected impacts (Revi 2008; Sharma and Tomar 2010). Although the neoliberal reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have enabled the broader participation of non-state actors in decision-making, an ideological preference for entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance have largely led to the withdrawal of the state from delivering basic services (Datta 2015). Revenue shortfalls and lack of administrative capacity have further decreased the ability of cities to deal with climate impacts and risks (Cook and Chu 2018; Sharma et al. 2014). These effects are felt most acutely by the urban poor, who are disproportionately exposed (Michael and Vakulabharanam 2016; Satterthwaite et al. 2007).
Since the 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of climate change among government officials. For the next two decades, governmental interventions in Indian cities were confined to climate mitigation and targeted select manufacturing, construction, and energy sectors (Dubash et al. 2018). To be fair, climate adaptation was still a relatively nascent priority for India, and its policy focus was on furthering its geopolitical role in global climate negotiations. As a nation that saw itself as a rapidly industrializing global power, India aggressively pushed for the country's ‘right to development’ despite its significant exposure to climate change impacts (Gupta 2010). Indian negotiators highlighted how industrialized nations could support India through technology, resource, and capacity transfers that will allow it to ‘leap frog’ from fossil-fuel-intensive to more sustainable forms of development. Widespread awareness of climate adaptation only emerged in the late 2000s, spearheaded by transnational, civil society, and national scientific bodies that documented changing climatic patterns and advocated that subnational governments play a role in addressing climate risks (Khosla and Bhardwaj 2019b; Sharma, Singh, and Singh 2014; Sharma et al. 2014). Since then, and as climate adaptation has moved from the policy to the implementation space, there have been growing concerns that structural inequalities in urban development in India may dilute or even redirect the intended benefits of climate adaptation.
Frontmatter
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 30 June 2024, pp i-iv
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10 - Realizing Climate Justice through Agroecology and Women’s Collective Land Rights
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 207-228
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Summary
Introduction
The feminization of agriculture, or the sharp increase in the number of women in farming, is the result of a deep and ongoing agrarian crisis. Some scholars have more aptly named this phenomenon the ‘feminization of the agrarian crisis’ to capture how the ongoing agrarian crisis places a greater burden on women farmers than it does on their male counterparts. Patriarchal norms and attitudes prevent women from owning and controlling land, and women from marginalized castes and classes are the most disadvantaged (Pattnaik et al. 2018). Over 70 per cent of women in rural India are engaged in farming, but since the majority do not formally own land, they are not officially recognized as farmers and are instead considered as ‘farm helpers’ (Agarwal 2021). Given the substantial inequalities that affect women's ownership of and control over land, they cannot avail the benefits of land ownership – economic security, social status, and state support, among others.
This chapter looks at climate justice in the context of women in agriculture. Climate change and gender inequalities are deeply intertwined. Governments and civil society actors have launched various programmes aimed at climate resilience and adaptation in agriculture. However, when analysed through the lens of climate justice, these efforts do not always promote social equity. On the contrary, in some cases, mainstream climate solutions threaten women's land rights and farm-based livelihoods.
Using the novel framework of agrarian climate justice, which combines ideas from agrarian justice and climate justice, we explore women's land rights within agroecology programmes in India. We argue that advancing women's collective land rights through climate initiatives can achieve the twin aims of climate resilience and agrarian justice. We focus on agrarian land and do not look at forest lands, which, although equally important, are outside the scope of this chapter. Drawing from feminist scholars’ work on intersectionality, we emphasize the importance of an intersectional understanding of the differences between women based on intersecting identities of caste, class, age, education, and marital status, among others (Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik 2011). Such an understanding is important to ensure that climate policies reduce, instead of reproduce, inequalities.
Index
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 251-264
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3 - How Just and Democratic Is India’s Solar Energy Transition?: An Analysis of State Solar Policies in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 50-73
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Summary
Introduction
In our warming world, energy provision is not simply about technology but also politics (Hughes and Lipscy 2013). Energy systems are the result of intensely contested political battles in the domains of technology selection, ownership of capital, environmental externalities, access, and siting. The geographical reach, terms of access, and forms of ownership of electricity infrastructures reflect the prevailing distribution of political and economic power (Bridge, Özkaynak and Turhan 2018). Consequently, this gives rise to injustices such as uneven electricity access, displacement, and voicelessness among marginalized communities. Control over energy infrastructure is not just the result but often also the source of political and social power (Amin 2014; Larkin 2013) – that is, energy shapes politics just as much as politics shape energy.
India is facing the twin imperatives of tackling historic energy poverty through an expansion of its energy system on the one hand and pursuing climate mitigation on the other. India's electricity sector is dominated by coal-fired thermal power, which in turn drives the country's carbon emissions. The energy sector as a whole contributed around 74 per cent of India's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2015, of which 38 per cent was from public electricity generation (GPI Secretariat 2016). On the other hand, India's average monthly residential electricity consumption is only 90 kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is one-third of the global average and one-tenth of that of the US (Chunekar and Sreenivas 2019). Despite official estimates of 100 per cent electrification, many households still receive poor quality electricity for only a few hours each day (S. D’Souza 2019). The growing feasibility of renewable energy (RE) indicates a potential opportunity to address both climate mitigation and energy poverty challenges. India announced a target of 450 gigawatt (GW) of RE by 2030 as against a total installed capacity of 370 GW in April 2020 (PMO India 2019). As we progress towards a low-carbon system, what are the implications of this transition, given existing patterns of injustice and the prospects of their reproduction in our twenty-first-century energy infrastructure?
India's electricity system can be characterized by its gigantic scale; the primary state ownership of its generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure; cross-subsidization from commercial and industrial consumers to agricultural consumers; and its federal nature.
11 - Conclusion: Pathways to Policies and Praxis of Climate Justice in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 June 2024, pp 229-245
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Summary
Introduction
Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain published a remarkable report in 1991 in which they differentiated between ‘survival emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’. It would not be an exaggeration to say that no other report has had a comparable impact on global debates and scholarship on climate justice. This distinction between survival and luxury emissions has been central to some of the most important pieces of scholarship and advocacy on climate justice (Shue 1993). Based on this report, common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) became the defining feature of the Indian government's position in international climate negotiations (Jasanoff 1993). Despite having such a massive influence on international climate negotiations, the distinction between survival and luxury emissions is rarely referenced in domestic climate policy debates. Even as climate disasters, including cyclones, floods, and heatwaves, become more intense, there is limited public debate on climate action and policy in India (J. Das 2020). On the other hand, while there is robust scholarship on India's climate policy and action in the international arena, engagement with questions of domestic climate justice within Indian academia is quite sparse (Fisher 2015; Chu and Michael 2019). The potential for domestic injustices was apparent even in 1991 and was duly acknowledged in the same Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) report that made CBDR foundational to India's position in international negotiations:
Can we really equate the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live? But no effort has been made in WRI's report to separate out the ‘survival emissions’ of the poor, from the ‘luxury emissions’ of the rich. (Agarwal and Narain 1991, 3, italics added for emphasis)
For a variety of reasons that require deeper inquiry, questions of domestic climate justice fell through the intertwined cracks of international climate change politics and sectoral silos that are endemic to both academic research and grassroots social movement organization (Gupta 2014). Many argued, quite appropriately, that the policy priority should be addressing issues of employment, food security, education, and primary healthcare for the poorest people in India and other countries in the Global South.
Environmental Silence: A Century Dedicated to the Nine Million
- Edited by Richard A. Marcantonio, University of Notre Dame, John Paul Lederach, Humanity United, Agustín Fuentes, Princeton University
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- Exploring Environmental Violence
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- 30 June 2024, pp xii-xx
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6 - Concealment and Secrecy: Hidden in Plain Sight
- Mukesh Kumar, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University
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- Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 162-186
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Summary
He who hid well, lived well. (René Descartes)
Wherever there is power, there is secrecy. (Taussig 1999)
How did devout followers of a saint respond when a dominant reform organisation deemed their beliefs and ritual practices as impure? Did they abandon all the ‘impure’ beliefs, or did they find ways to navigate the influence and power of the reformist ideology? In such circumstances, faith begins to operate through acts of concealment and secrecy, which become potent tools for managing societal and religious pressures. Some of these practices of concealment/secrecy among the Muslims of Mewat ran afoul of the puritanical Tablighi Jamaat, which discouraged the veneration of saints as bidat (innovation/heresy) and shirk (polytheism), considering them as antithetical to Islam. Concealment and secrecy practices represent a significant form of social knowledge that helps sustain social institutions and human relationships (Simmel 1906).
Fluidity across religious boundaries between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’ is not a new idea; it has been analysed in a large number of scholarly works (Amin 2016; Assayag 2004; Bigelow 2010; Flueckiger 2006; Gilmartin and Lawrence 2000; Gottschalk 2000; D. Khan 2004a; Mayaram 1997a). While these works effectively display the flexibility of religious boundaries, they fail to delve into the implications when reformist groups arise and promote the notion of a rigid, uniform and pure religious boundary. In Mewat, as in other parts of India, reformist groups strongly emphasised the segregation of religious communities based on their identities and ritual practices. However, little attention has been given to the phenomenon of resistance to, or passive negotiation with, these powerful reformist forces that oppose religious blending.
Many Meo and non-Meo Muslims, mostly women, still venerate these saints, although they conceal their devotion to evade the wrath of Meo men and other Tablighis. Their stories of concealment reveal intricate processes of contestation and accommodation between the Sufi and Tablighi Jamaat ideologies, the divergent beliefs of male and female in a family, and different dynamics of the relationships between the powerful and the powerless. To operate effectively, secrecy as a type of societal knowledge relies on three essential elements: individual actors who engage in concealment; an audience, from whom the secret is concealed; and a power structure that the secret undermines or challenges.
4 - A Fait Accompli: The Complete Hinduisation of the Laldas Order
- Mukesh Kumar, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University
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- Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 110-134
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Summary
The formulation of the persona of Laldas from a nirgu bhakti follower to a sagu saint and deity is central to the rise and success of the religious order. The complete conversion of Laldas into a ‘Hindu’ saint requires a profound restructuring of his identity. This undertaking involves assigning him a new role while simultaneously erasing or modifying his traditional religious image, which had been distinguished by a shared form of religiosity. The changes observed within the Laldas order also signify a deliberate undermining of the saint's religious teachings and principles. This subversion of Laldas's original teachings implies a shift towards a more homogeneous understanding of the order, where the liminal elements of his beliefs are now incorporated into the broader narrative of neo ‘Hinduism’.
This new imagery of Laldas has been achieved by first transforming the traditional shrines spatially and then constructing new temples in various parts of north India to practice anthropomorphic image worship. It is also an effort to achieve a new social construction of a religious space. In fact, spaces contested for ideological, economic and religious reasons generally reflect efforts to create new meanings for them in a changed context, leading to spatial transformations (Low 1996). Currently, the shrines of Laldas are examples of what Lefebvre (1991: 164–68) refers to as ‘dominated space’ and ‘appropriated space’. More importantly, the spatial changes at the religious shrines of Laldas signify ongoing efforts to transform the meanings of a traditional sacred space. This is being achieved by the process of what Low (1996, 2009) describes as ‘the social construction of space’. In this process, new symbolic meanings imbued with new religious significance of Laldas are created. Devotees’ social interactions, memories and daily use of the material setting effectively transform Laldas's traditional shrine spaces into new arenas of ritual scenes and actions, ultimately Hinduising what was once a shared/mixed sacred space.
Most of these changes are quite recent in origin and are undertaken by the financially rich Baniya community. Moreover, their socio-economic power and traditional devotional beliefs also contribute to these spatial and architectural transformations at the traditional shrines. In analysing the domination of Hindus at these traditional religious sites, the main attention is paid to the structure, control, and agency of followers, on one hand, and new religious discourses and practices surrounding these sacred spaces, on the other.
7 - The Affluence–Technology Connection in the Struggle for Sustainability
- from Part II - Critical Engagement of and with Environmental Violence
- Edited by Richard A. Marcantonio, University of Notre Dame, John Paul Lederach, Humanity United, Agustín Fuentes, Princeton University
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- Book:
- Exploring Environmental Violence
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2024, pp 156-181
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Summary
Technology will play a role in addressing environmental violence. Some common technological aims include: more equitable access to cleaner and safer industrial techniques; wider deployment of pollution safeguards; and the transition of energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels and toward batteries and renewables. Of course, alternative technologies do not address many of the structural and cultural factors involved in generating environmental violence. Shifting from one mechanism to another, or one material to another, entails a shift in economic context, but guarantees nothing about whether this new context will be more equitable, or even ecologically responsible. We propose that, in order for technology deployment to be truly appropriate to the task of reducing environmental violence, economic affluence must be an equally primary factor of concern. In this article, we introduce the “affluence–technology connection” and provide several different contexts and perspectives to support the concept. These include appropriate technology efforts in Ladakh, India, the carbon footprint of alternative transportation technologies, and the true impact of service sector versus industrial sector activities. These lead us to a fairly simple conclusion: Achieving a lower-violence future means seeking appropriate affluence alongside appropriate and sustainable technologies.
11 - The Normative Environmental Discourse in Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu
- from Part II - Critical Engagement of and with Environmental Violence
- Edited by Richard A. Marcantonio, University of Notre Dame, John Paul Lederach, Humanity United, Agustín Fuentes, Princeton University
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- Book:
- Exploring Environmental Violence
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- 30 June 2024, pp 238-258
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Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.
1 - Introduction
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 1-16
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One could start the story of an insurgent movement with a vignette of the frontline or a first encounter with some enigmatic rebel office. In fact, the deleted text that was once on this page did precisely that. While such an initial vantage point helpfully offers the reader a glimpse of the convoluted ground reality of an emerging state, it also risks depicting these territories as exotic and the author as an adventurous protagonist with privileged up-close knowledge of dangerous outposts. Indiana Jones turning to the camera to look his audience in the eyes one more time, before he enters a land of mystery and peril. To start on this footing would disguise that the depiction of these supposedly quaint and anomalous places derives in part from the peculiarities of international perceptions and from the compromised knowledge curve of people like me who seek to understand insurgencies. Let me therefore not start in Sampur or Omanthai or Jaffna but at the picturesque gardens on the northern outskirts of The Hague.
These parklands are home to the Clingendael Institute. As a junior researcher of the institute – perhaps best described as an academic outboard motor to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – I had been put on a team of consultants that had been commissioned by a group of aid donors to write a ‘Strategic Conflict Analysis’ about Sri Lanka. It was 2005, and these donors had enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had started three years prior. However, the process appeared to be going off the rails, and donors were desperate to consider their options. Hence our assignment. Having completed several visits, interviews and consultations in previous months, I was sitting at my desk overlooking the ponds and greenery of the Clingendael estate to write up our report when the phone rang. In hindsight, my struggle with the interpretative problems around the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka that has become this book started with that phone call