Kushan Mitra
The level of discourse across the world has fallen to incredible lows, and in the process, forget missing the woods for the trees, we are not even hitting the ball. Global temperatures are rising at incredible levels – 2016 has already seen the hottest January, February and March on record. And by all indications, April will follow the same trend. Last year, famously roads melted across India due to the extreme heat; this year’s heatwave could easily melt whole communities.
Parts of India, parched of monsoon rains for two years, are in the midst of an incredible drought. And despite the forecasts for a normal monsoon, it is safe to say that weather forecasting remains an inexact science even as some extremely complex mathematical models run on some of the fastest computers known to man. The Government has to start planning for long-term weather phenomena that we can predict – such as rising temperatures and the water stress that this inevitably leads to.
Much of the planning seems to be done post-facto. In every Union Budget, thousands of crores of rupees are spent on irrigation projects, yet much of this money falls through the gaps in the system. Political expediency has led to unsustainable crop cultivation and agricultural practices, such as sugarcane being grown in water-stressed areas such as Marathwada and free electricity being provided to farmers to operate ever deeper borewells to suck out whatever little groundwater remains.
Meanwhile, the debates around droughts shift to cricket – and whether games should be be played in such circumstances. While the debate around cricket matches was a necessary one, it ignored some of the root causes of the drought as well as the Government’s lacklustre response to it. At least the latter issue is being highlighted now, but Governments at every level have to study the impact of the water-stress that has been brought around by two successive weak monsoons and implore farmers to adjust their crops accordingly. Yet, electoral politics is like a narcotic drug, the high of getting elected or the desire to achieve that high compels people to make some poor decisions which hurt in the long-term.
But changing weather patterns is something that all politicians need to be worried about. While electoral politics make politicians make poor decisions, that is also because they think that they can control outcomes. Politicians and their policies, however, cannot control the weather. The heatwave that India is expected to undergo until the monsoon satiates the parched earth might be one for the record books this year.
Climate change is a very real challenge that India’s politicians need to face; and this is a challenge that we have to face together. As pointed out before, the level of political discourse has fallen to incredible lows wherein discussions on the External Affairs Minister’s attire during an official visit to Iran became a matter of controversy on social media. The instant gratification nature of politics and the television news media have prevented discussions on strategic thought from taking place at the public level. So much so, that Indians on the whole, while aware of the risks of pollution, are woefully under-informed about the risks of climate change, even though we endure some of the worst effects of climate change annually – not just through droughts but also through incredible floods.
India faces an unique situation, a situation that even China did not have to face. Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the mandate he did in 2014 because he vowed to improve the economic prospects for hundreds of millions of young Indians. That promise can only be fulfilled if the Indian economy goes into a high-growth mode. To achieve that high-growth there needs to be power, and while the Modi Government has done a stellar job promoting wind and solar power, the fact remains that with the world’s third-largest reserves of coal, India’s thirst for power will be fuelled by a deeply polluting source.
Coal is just one challenge; the other is mobility. While the Government has spoken about a significant thrust on electric cars and Modi’s most significant meeting during his tour of the Silicon Valley earlier this year was with Elon Musk, the founder of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, much more needs to be done on that front. Many public transportation projects are stuck in quagmires and delayed; electric vehicles are still far too few and far between in India with no infrastructure in place for easy recharging of such vehicles, despite the fact that in Chetan Maini’s Reva, now part of the Mahindra Group, India also has an electric vehicles evangelist.
