Voting starts; Field reports come in about climate distress – Issue #96
The 2024 election season kicks off, with climate change at the forefront. Ground reports highlight pressing issues like unseasonal rains, impending heatwaves, and erratic rainfall patterns.
News of the Week
The 2024 elections have started.
This is the time when the supply of ground reports abruptly ratchets up. It’s bound to, given hordes of reporters descend on the Indian hinterland, trying to gauge the issues on which voters’ behaviours might hinge. A five-yearly dipstick survey on how the country is doing, if you will. This time around, climate change and precarity seem more pronounced than before.
One sees them in a series at the People’s Archive of Rural India — from Bhandara (Maharashtra); drought-hit Palamu (Jharkhand); and Gondia (Maharashtra) whose people live off NTFP collections. One sees climate change and precocity in Business Standard’s reportage as well. Vidarbha, which goes to polls on 19 and 26 April, has been hit by unseasonal rains. In contrast, the tea growing belt in eastern India — Siliguri, Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri — is not getting enough rain.
That is from just two publications. Other publications had additional dispatches.
1. CarbonBrief travelled to Hasdeo Arand to talk elections, forests and coal.
2. In North Gujarat’s Granite-Rich Idar, Locals Fearful About Aravalli Mountains’ Future (The Wire)
3. The Polls in Darjeeling: Amidst Tourism Boom, Environmental Concerns Remain Unaddressed (The Wire)
4. How Guwahati Air Became World’s 2nd Most Polluted (Indiaspend)
5. Desperate For Work, Impoverished Adivasis From Prosperous Kerala Toil & Die In India’s Coffee Heartland (Article-14)
6. Purvanchal’s migrant workers are desperate & poor. But they are determining India’s politics (The Print)
Little here is surprising, though. India is already one of the countries worst hit by climate change. The question is: when does this become an overriding election priority for voters? On that note, see this dispatch from Raini, Uttarakhand.
This year too, the country might see large spatial variations in rainfall distribution. Last week, the IMD predicted above-normal rainfall in 2024. In a subsequent interview to Business Standard, IMD’s director-general said he expects “below normal” rains in Odisha, J&K, Ladakh, Gangetic West Bengal, Jharkhand, and the north-east, and above-normal rainfall in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and the Godavari basin.
This is not very good news. Ladakh has been contending with low rainfall for a while now, for instance.
IMD’s predictions, however, can be an unreliable guide. And so, read this report in Livemint which tests the IMD’s predictions against the southwest monsoon that followed. “Over the past 23 years, the IMD has over-predicted rainfall 11 times and under-predicted 12 times,” says Mint. “However, statistical forecasts are not expected to achieve a 100% strike rate, and the IMD’s forecast has an error tolerance of 5% on either side. Allowing for that, the IMD has over-predicted nine times, under-predicted seven times, and got it right seven times.” Now to see how that strike rate fares this year.
For now, the summer heat is starting to envelope India. The first of the year’s heatwaves is here — with Bengal and Odisha in its maw. Day temperatures have crossed 40 degrees in several areas, wrote Hindustan Times. “These states are also experiencing warm night conditions and high relative humidity of around 50% to 75% in the afternoon, creating a deadly mix of extremely hot, humid days and nights. The peak heat in summer is normally recorded in May and June.”
Other parts of the country — like Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and parts of south India — are also reporting temperatures far higher than the norm for this time of the year. Higher up in the hills, the country is seeing more glacial lakes forming than usual. In the middle of all this, the country’s holding its elections. And, as The Print reported last week, it doesn’t look like we have learnt anything from the Kharghar deaths last year when 14 people died at a political rally held in the sun.
In Bengal, a TV anchor fainted from the heat while reporting on the heatwave.
Elsewhere in the world, last week will be remembered as the week when climate change-denying Dubai flooded after intense rainfall. The kingdom got a year’s worth of rainfall in just 12 hours. Intense rain also hammered southern China’s Guangdong province. Elsewhere in the world, Canada continues to contend with forest fires. Coral reefs, incidentally, are bleaching again.
In all this, the global fossil fuel industry is not letting up. It’s now directing ever more petroleum into polymer (plastics) manufacturing than before. See this FT report on Exxon, for instance. For their part, instead of clamping down on the use of plastics, a clutch of countries are pushing recycling instead. India’s not letting up either. Not only do we continue to double down on gas and coal, we are now about to grant a new environmental clearance to one of the dams washed away in the 2013 Uttarakhand floods — the 76 MW Phata Byung project.
One wonders, though, if the project will secure bank finance. A story worth tracking is this one. The firm’s promoter is a private entity — Mandakini Jal Urja.
Hardwired into all this is a critique of climate capitalism. The market is yet to figure out how to make money off adaptation and mitigation. It has figured renewables and, to some extent, decarbonisation. And so, most money is heading into those directions. This suboptimality was on display all through last week. In news reports that told us that India might float more green bonds this year; that more green money is coming to India from the World Bank, which is readying a $1 billion line of credit for State Bank of India that has to be used solely for Battery Energy Storage Systems and electric mobility. Similarly, after introducing import restrictions on solar modules, the government is now mulling similar curbs on solar cells as well. This, as CarbonCopy was told last year, is one way to create a local manufacturing chain.
That might be true. But it still feels like we might win a couple of battles but lose the war itself.
Climate Long-reads
1. 100 bustards and the challenge to India’s solar flight path (Mint). Also see this: Climate litigation has entered the room. But could great Indian bustards be inched out? (Mongabay)
2. The “Epic Row” Over a New Epoch: Scientists, journalists, and artists often say that we live in the Anthropocene, a new age in which humans shape the Earth. Why do some leading geologists reject the term? (New Yorker)
3. What Modi Govt's Shift in Health Spending – From Infrastructure to Insurance – Shows (Indiaspend)
4. Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing (The Atlantic)
5. New World Order? (The Polycrisis)
6. The world is still on fire! The disaster of development finance in 2023 (Chartbook, Adam Tooze)
7. Why did India fail to industrialise where East Asia succeeded? (Himal)
Book of the Week
Business reporter N. Sundaresha Subramanian is just out with his first book.
Titled The Dirty Dozen: India’s Twelve Biggest Corporate Defaulters, the book takes a look at India’s NPA crisis — and the gravy train that precipitated these speculative runs in sectors like real estate, power, aviation and more. Here is an excerpt.