Independence Day Special – Issue #66
Climate Challenges in India: As India celebrates its 76th Independence Day, Energy Trends delves into the nation's evolving landscape.
News of the week
This edition of Energy Trends is being tapped out on Independence Day. India is now 76 years old.
Over these decades, the country has vanquished some old demons (like the fear India would balkanise). Still, it continues to face a clutch of others (like majoritarianism, caste- and religious fissures, and mass poverty). Meanwhile, newer threats have also emerged – climate change and its many challenges to the convention, oligarchy, worsening inequality, a fading contract between the public and the political apparatus, and eroding environmental foundations.
The week gone by illustrated most of these trends. Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand saw fresh cloudbursts. As this newsletter gets written out, social media is filled (once again) with videos of landslides, rampaging rivers, and buildings collapsing like cards. We know how we got here. Rainfall patterns are changing (in part due to the rapidly changing planetary climate systems like the Western Disturbances), resulting in a lot of rain in a matter of hours and days. The local impact of this concentrated rainfall has been amplified by an array of highways, hydel projects and urban construction, built largely with little consideration for the ecological and seismic fragility of the setting.
The 900 km CharDham road project, which set out to build a four-lane highway between four Hindu pilgrimage centres, was approved without an environmental impact assessment. The courts didn’t halt the project either. The highway, like most road projects in the Himalayas, was built by cutting into mountain slopes. The result -- mountain slopes were left destabilised. Now, after heavy rains, landslides are rising in frequency.
In all this, there is little sign that India’s drawing the right lessons. The government of Himachal has demanded Rs 658 crore from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), saying the highway body encroached onto the riverbed while erecting a double-decker four-lane highway in Mandi district. Between the resultant narrowing and the silt carried downstream by the Beas, says Himachal, the 126 MW Larji hydel project has been damaged, resulting in financial losses to the state government. And so, Himachal wants NHAI to pay up.
The union minister for highways, however, is more sanguine. Last week, Nitin Gadkari told reporters that NHAI was thinking of making concrete roads in landslide-prone areas. Elsewhere, at a press conference in Kullu, the minister also suggested straightening the river's course to prevent floods and the consequent destruction. According to Newslaundry, the minister said: “Roads have been constructed next to the river... The bed level of the river is rising, which causes flooding... after a technical committee presents its report, we will dig it [the river] for 2-3 metres and use the stones and sand taken out to build such a strong wall of stone and concrete on both sides of the river that the water won’t go anywhere.”
One barely knows where to start. In video after video, we see rivers bursting banks and hurtling downhill with unimaginable power. One wonders how high and strong Gadkari’s wall will need to be.
Elsewhere, the Adani group had a bad week. Deloitte quit as the auditor of Adani Ports and SEZ (APSEZ), the most profitable part of the group. While auditing the firm’s latest accounts, Deloitte found a clutch of transactions between APSEZ’s subsidiaries and firms linked to Adani in short-seller Hindenburg’s report. APSEZ, for instance, sold a container terminal in Burma to Solar Energy Ltd , headquartered in Anguilla, at a sale value revised downwards from Rs 2,015 crore to just Rs 246.51 crore. The questions are obvious. Given its location in a tax haven, who owns Solar Energy Ltd? If it’s a related party, are Adani’s shareholders taking a loss while the unknown backers of Solar Energy profit?
While the group denied these were related party transactions, Deloitte was unconvinced and stepped down. For its part, Adani has dismissed Deloitte’s reasons for stepping down and appointed a new auditor – MSKA and Associates. For now, the group’s shares have fallen. MSKA, however, looks like a small firm, a far cry from the clout and credibility carried by Deloitte, particularly amongst global investors.
Deloitte just resigned as the statutory auditor of Adani Ports after the company failed to provide “appropriate audit evidence” to address issues raised in the @HindenburgRes report. - Nate Anderson
In the meantime, the group is looking at other ways to raise money. It might exit its edible oil business, a statement denied by the group. It’s also thinking of tapping India’s nascent domestic bonds market. Also came news that Adani might go solo on its hydrogen plans. TotalEnergies might be backtracking on its initial plans to get into green hydrogen with Adani New Industries, said Bloomberg News.
Other news. Tata Power is getting into Pumped Storage. It wants to set up 2,800 MW of capacity in the western ghats. FoxConn wants India to become its third EV hub. It remains to be seen if the company’s entry will kickstart India’s EV market, which seems to have entered a sluggish phase.
Arunachal has handed 12 stranded hydel projects back to state-owned dam builders. In many ways, this is life coming full circle. In the mid-2000s, a clutch of these projects had been taken away from state-owned dam builders and given to private companies. Most of these projects never got made for all manner of complicated reasons – lack of roads, lack of construction power, delays in construction due to rains, etc. Firms began lobbying the centre to take these projects back. For its part, the state government, too, wanted to wrest these MoUs away from private companies – it couldn’t award MoUs for these dams to fresh firms without extinguishing older MoUs. That problem has now been resolved. One waits to see if the state-owned firms fare better on dam building than private-sector peers. And if so, what environmental costs come along, given the new dilutions to India’s Forest Conservation Act?
New sand mining alert
Say hello to India Sand Watch. This is a new platform that uses tech and activism to monitor sand mining in India.
Climate Reads of the Week
The FT is running a series on batteries. The new commodity superpowers; How China cornered the market for clean tech; The battery revolution: rivals race for car market supremacy, and more to come.
India was a tree-planting lab for 200 years. It has a lot to teach us about restoring forests (FastCompany)
Odanthurai’s windmill experiment, a pioneering move that had its wind knocked out (Mongabay)
Europe blinks in its commitment to a great green transition (WaPo)
America Is Deindustrializing Europe (CompactMag)
Are carbon offsets all they’re cracked up to be? We tracked one from Kenya to England to find out (Vox)
Caste’s Role in Shaping Water Access Is Missing From Indian Environmental Discourse (Wire)
On the Highway to Climate Hell: The world's infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists (Foreign Policy)