Does India Need An Environment Ministry? – Issue #47
India's Project Tiger has turned 50; however, numbers remain the same due to poaching and habitat loss, made worse by quick clearances for industrial projects that take less than 70 days.
The Big Picture
India’s environment ministry hit headlines multiple times last week. We learnt that Project Tiger, which was set up after India’s tiger numbers fell to just 3,000, has completed 50 years.
The milestone would have called for celebrations if not for the fact that India’s tiger numbers now stand at 3,000. The country, as this oped in Hindustan Times says, could have easily boosted their numbers to 10,000. We know what went wrong – there was poaching, as in Sariska which lost all its tigers; but, more sizeably, there is habitat fragmentation and loss – a process which continues absolutely unchallenged.
We know it continues absolutely unchallenged because of another news report. The average time taken to approve projects at the ministry has fallen from over 150 days in 2019 to less than 70 days in 2022, as the ministry itself told the Lok Sabha last week. This number begs for context. And so, here we go. “Between 1982 and 1999, the ministry took an average of five years to give full clearance,” says a 2012 report in Economic Times. “Between 2000 and 2004, when the BJP-led coalition was in power, the time taken fell to three years. Under UPA-I (2004 to 2009), this fell further to 17 months. And the UPA-II (2009 onwards) has been clearing coal projects in about 11 months.”
If taking five years for granting a clearance is bad economic policy -- from what we remember, India’s environmental clearance process wanted ecological field-data for a year -- granting them in 70 days is ecocidal. This acceleration has happened while the number of clearances granted by the ministry was climbing as well -- from 577 in 2018 to 12,496 in 2022.
What we are seeing is a scapegoating where biodiversity takes the brunt. The factors retarding industrial investment in India run deep, but rather than addressing these, successive governments have created this figleaf that environmental laws are the biggest impediment to industrial investment. And diluted those unceasingly.
The outcome is an unceasing usurpation of hard-won environmental rights by the state. The link below maps the lost legal terrain within the environmental clearance regime alone.
In tandem, with core economic ills going unaddressed, India has incurred all the environmental costs as China while reaping few of the economic gains.
As things stand, this list of losses is set to climb. Last week, the environment ministry also released its updated draft of India’s Forest Conservation Act. Not only does it exempt a chunk of projects – especially those coming up in border areas – from forest clearances, it also says deemed forests will not need a clearance either.
Also emerged a new study by Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research. Analyzing 37 regional and federal heat action plans, it found that:
Most HAPs are not built for local context and have an oversimplified view of the hazard;
Nearly all HAPs are poor at identifying and targeting vulnerable groups;
HAPs are underfunded;
HAPs have weak legal foundations;
HAPs are insufficiently transparent;
Capacity building is sectorally-targeted.
All of which brings us to a story that badly needs to be told. Take a look at the ministry’s key responsibilities – India’s environmental indicators; the health of forests and the biodiversity which resides in them; the country’s climate change adaptation/mitigation measures; the state of India’s environmental protections – and it is hard not to be underwhelmed by the delivery.
The question writes itself. Does India even need an environment ministry? What public purpose does it serve currently that cannot be absorbed by other ministries and departments?
News of the week
On other fronts too, the environment ministry made headlines.
It announced a fresh tiger reserve at Dibang – without addressing the concerns of the local community which fears restricted access to their local forest. One of the eight cheetahs relocated to India has died. Another delivered four cubs – and so, mathematically, we are up three cheetahs. Yet another ambled well outside Kuno – thanks to an “open spot in the fencing”. As the report says, the local DFO managed to contradict himself on how it will be brought back – captured or left to find its own way back.
In other news, the Indian government has allowed commercial mining from captive blocks even within reserve forests. The old argument that the country needs coal for electricity, however, stands on shaky ground. Coal production is rising steeply. Not only are Coal India’s volumes up 13% since last year, Pralhad Joshi, the union minister for Coal, Mines and Parliamentary Affairs, said last week India can start exporting coal from 2025-26. Why are we mining coal in forests if the overall coal position is comfortable?
Elsewhere in the country, unseasonal rains and hailstorms have damaged India’s mango crop. As previous newsletters have said, other crops have been hammered as well.
Turning to renewables, with the Adani group in crisis, a clutch of its industry peers have bagged the second PLI tranche for solar. Even in sectoral M&As, other companies are rushing to bag firms and build scale. The latest in this list of buyers is JSW, which has bought Mytrah Energy’s renewable energy assets.
This, as CarbonCopy has said earlier, is a part of India’s gambit to woo supply chains to the country. Last week, WSJ had a report on how this competition between countries is playing out. “At stake for the governments of low- and middle-income countries eager to help is the chance to turbocharge economic development and create millions of new jobs,” it wrote. “Countries including India, Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines are competing on subsidies, tax breaks and other perks to convince businesses that their country is the next best thing to the well-oiled manufacturing machine that China has honed over decades.” So are countries like Canada, which has rolled out its version of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Adani group stayed in the headlines. Adani Transmission and Adani Ports continue to stay at a BBB- rating, said Reuters, “due to weak governance at the parent conglomerate and other companies in the group”. This means their capacity to raise funds will remain constrained. The group’s Godda power project is now becoming a political controversy in Bangladesh. The group is trying to renegotiate the loans it took to buy ACC and Ambuja Cements.
This raises a question, when seen in tandem with its capex cuts, about the state of its financial health.
Turning to the rest of the world, Bangladesh is struggling with high food prices – and cracking down on anyone who points that out.
China’s rooftop solar project is moving fast. “Cities were encouraged to cover almost a third of commercial buildings and a fifth of farmhouses in panels by the end of 2023,” says a BNN Bloomberg report. This set off, it says, an unprecedented boom in small-scale solar installations.
There is a lesson here for India, which is struggling to raise incomes of its people. “For Li, the decision was financial,” says the report. “With one son about to get married and another preparing for college, he and his wife wanted to secure another income source before they retired... Since connecting its first panel to the grid in early 2018, Li’s family has made more than 62,000 yuan ($8,963) selling clean electricity.”
In other news, there is an alarming new report about slowing ocean currents, another tipping point for global weather systems. In the US, insurance companies are withdrawing from areas vulnerable to climate change. As Scientific American reported: “Reinsurance companies, which help insurers pay catastrophic losses, ‘have been withdrawing from high-risk areas, around wildfire and flood in particular,’ (Eric) Andersen told the Senate Budget Committee. He added, “Just as the U.S. economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is over exposed to climate risk’.”
There is little sign, however, that world leaders are paying attention. The US has put an enormous swathe of the Gulf of Mexico, spanning an area the size of Italy, up for auction for oil and gas drilling. It – and the UK’s new energy plan -- drew flak.
Video of the week
One guy took apart the Tesla engine. If you are a gearhead, you do not want to look at this.
Radio Episode of the Week
“Begum lives a two-hour boat ride from the nearest road – and farther still from any flood shelter. She doesn't read or write and doesn't have a cellphone.
But before the floodwaters overwhelmed her home, Begum knew precisely when to evacuate – and how to save her own life. That's because of a human chain of communication that relies both on high-tech forecasting and low-tech relationships.”
NPR, on adaptation and mitigation in Bangladesh.
Discovery of the Week
“Researchers in Israel report in the journal Cell on March 30 that tomato and tobacco plants that are stressed—from dehydration or having their stems severed—emit sounds that are comparable in volume to normal human conversation. The frequency of these noises is too high for our ears to detect, but they can probably be heard by insects, other mammals, and possibly other plants.”
Read more here.
Climate Longreads of the Week
“Back in 2017, Japan became the first country in the world to release a national hydrogen strategy. The goal was to take the lead on a low-carbon fuel with high potential, with companies like Toyota pushing hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles as an effective alternative to battery electric vehicles... nearly six years later, Japan has little to show for its initial push. There is no sign that hydrogen can help decarbonise the power and transport sectors as initially envisioned.” To understand why, read this report by Energy Monitor.
Inside North Korea’s oil smuggling: triads, ghost ships and underground banks. This is a stunningly produced piece by FT.
“The health impacts of windmills on communities adjacent to them are well documented in a 2009 book, Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment, where author Nina Pierpont found that families living near windmills in Mexico were witnessing ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’. Assessing the long- and short- term impacts of exposure to the low-frequency sounds of windmills, Pierpont found that families suffered from sleep disturbance, headaches, ear pressure, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, irritability, problems with concentration and memory, and ‘panic episodes associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering which arise while awake or asleep’.” Scroll.in finds similar patterns in India as well.
Dhaka: A Refuge that Needs to be Rescued. This longread on Dhaka, attracting climate migrants even as it faces its own threats, draws Mike Davis to mind.
Assam’s rural solar scheme fails to keep the lights on. (Third Pole)
Book of the Week
Given that we started with Project Tiger, our book of the week is biologist Raghu Chundawat’s The Rise And Fall of The Emerald Tigers: Ten years of research in Panna Tiger Reserve. Why this book? Because, as its description says: “By 2002-03, the fortunes of Panna’s tigers, and Chundawat’s research, nosedived when the park management changed. Monitoring privileges and access to the park were curtailed, and subsequently, poaching and poisoning of tigers spiked. When Chundawat blew the whistle on the alarming decline, he faced immense backlash from the state wildlife authorities.”
Read a review here.