Making India Climate Smart

ON TUESDAY, JUNE 18, Delhi clocked a dubious landmark. At 3:22 PM, the national capital’s peak power demand touched 8,647 Megawatts (MW), a figure higher than those of many Indian states. A day before, on Monday, June 17, the northern region of the country clocked a peak demand of 89 Gigawatts (GW). One GW equals 1,000 MW. These exceptionally high power loads are giving headaches to the managers of the national power grid. The regional load dispatch­ers—the managers on the spot, so to speak—always have a tough time during summers when power demand shoots up. But this summer is particularly daunting: with such heavy demand, a single ‘tripping’ can lead to a system-wide failure.

It would be a mistake to consider this an unusual summer and the rising demand for electricity a result of this one-off event. The reality is that India has seen a steady rise in the number of heat waves experienced in its different parts in recent years. Data released by the Central Statistical Office this year shows that in the five years from 2019 to 2023 the number of heat-wave days has fluc­tuated considerably but has remained high. In 2019, 174 days of heat wave were reported across different states and Union territories (UTs). This number fell to 42 in 2020 and even further to 29 in 2021. There was a sudden jump the next year when the figure rose to 190. In 2023, 111 days of heat wave were reported across states and UTs. There is no point searching for a statistical regularity here and there certainly is no ‘mean reversion’ to some defined average. The reality is that India has already entered a heat zone. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) reports that this year, April 1 to May 31, nearly 70 per cent of India’s 741 districts reported at least one day when the temperature was above 40 degrees. There is, of course, considerable variation: Maharashtra was badly affected with 27 of its 36 districts reporting at least one day when the maximum temperature was above 40 degrees. There are other states where temperatures have not crossed dangerous thresholds.

These figures should be seen alongside another set of measures, ones that reflect the risks to India and its economy from rising temperatures. One measure that serves as a proxy for damage from climate change is the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). SCC is an estimate of the value of damage from one additional tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent emitted at a certain point in time. A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change estimated values for SCC across different countries. It showed that India had the highest SCC for any country at that time: $86 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

The contrast between India, one of the lowest carbon emitters on a per capita basis—1.8 tonnes in 2018—with industrial countries could not be more glaring. The US, with the world’s largest per capita emissions, had an SCC of $50 while India had a much higher figure. India’s problems don’t end here—over time, SCC goes up as later emissions lead to more damage as they only add to the existing stock of greenhouse gases (GHGs) pres­ent in the atmosphere. While the exact values of SCCs ought to be taken with a pinch of salt as they are subject to considerable uncertainties from various assumptions built into the estimates, the trend and the direction are clear—India stands to lose much more compared to other countries from climate change.

India is not only aware of the dangers ahead but has also put in place comprehensive plans to meet the challenge from climate change. At the Glasgow climate summit in 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined a five-point plan to tackle climate change. The Indian plan is quite extensive. Among its key points are meeting 50 per cent of the country’s energy requirements from renewable sources by 2030, increasing non-fossil fuel-based energy capacity to 500GW by 2030, and reduc­ing the carbon intensity of the Indian economy to less than 45 per cent by 2030. The action on these plans has been visible and aggressive: in the last five years, from FY20 to FY24, India’s capacity addition from renewable energy sources has always out­paced the addition of capacity in thermal energy. In FY24, renewables accounted for 18,485 MW of capacity addition compared to 6,168 for thermal energy, a ratio of nearly 3:1. Other targets, too, are likely to be achieved by 2030.

India’s problem, however, is not that it won’t achieve long-term targets to mitigate climate change. These goals are ‘global’ in nature—they help everyone and not just India. India’s problem is that in the interregnum between stabilisation of the climate system—a goal that lies much ahead in the future, if it can be attained at all—and the present time, it faces a daunting challenge in mitigating the effects of climate change. The heat-wave statistics point to this very clearly. In peninsular India, a number of districts, many in Maharashtra, are now in the grip of a pincer of heat waves and water shortages. In the north, as the number of days with heat waves goes up, so does the use of power for cooling purposes, something that adds heat to the climate system to the point that there are multiple ‘heat islands’ that emerge during the summer across the northern plains. Heat stroke and death due to complications arising from it are common now. For states like Punjab, with their addiction to growing water-guzzling crops like rice, the future is bleak. Punjab’s overexploitation of water and its more than 100 “dark blocks” with acute water stress is a well-known story of poor environ­mental choices and non-existent planning. These mitigation risk stories can be found in virtually every Indian state and UT.

HOW DOES ONE ‘climate-proof’ an economy as diverse as India’s? Two immediate areas of concern are obvious: one, energy generation and consumption; and two, the nature and spread of urbanisation. Both require immediate attention. On the energy front, the necessary changes are al­ready afoot. The move away from thermal power is well-known even if the problems associated with renewables, especially the ‘intermittency problem’, don’t have an immediate solution. Renewable energy generation, for example in the case of solar power, takes place at a time when the sun is at its peak while the demand for power may arise later. In the absence of power storage solutions, such as high-capacity power storage systems, the power generated has to be injected into the grid as soon as it is generated.

Other solutions, at the micro-level, such as roof-top solar power generation, appear to be impractical given the existing power generation and consumption pattern in India. This need not be the case when it comes to climate-friendly solutions—peninsu­lar India has a large untapped potential for such power generation that is localised and is certainly climate-friendly. It can augment power for households where it is needed most.

The other area that requires careful attention quickly is the nature and spread of urbanisation. Construction, in economic terms constitutes around 9 per cent of the Indian economy in Gross Value Added (GVA) terms (2023-24). In the past two years (2022-23 and 2023-24), it has grown at 9.4 per cent and 9.9 per cent, respec­tively. This is significantly higher than the overall GVA at 6.7 per cent (2022-23) and 7.2 per cent (2023-24) for those years. A signifi­cant part of this activity takes place in large urban conglomerations like National Capital Region (NCR), the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, and other large cities. This is not conducive for climate change mitigation. These large additions to built-up areas lead to high energy consumption and, in turn, the creation of heat islands.

There is no reason why this construction activity cannot be reoriented and localised to create new urban centres. While this sounds quixotic as economic priorities and experience show that large urban agglomeration leads to higher economic activities, in this age this needs reorientation if India has to get a grip on climate change mitigation. It is no case going to be easy. India is no longer the command-and-control economy of the 1970s when the Centre could reorder economic priorities. The private sector today contrib­utes more to the economic pie. This makes the task of coordinating any such action on climate-friendly economic change difficult. Unless, of course, India has the political will to do what is necessary.

Some things are a given even as India adapts to a much hotter world. For one, the country cannot sacrifice high economic growth at the altar of mitigating climate change. This zero-sum thinking is prevalent in many Western countries where ‘de-growth’ is championed as a solution not just for climate change but also for mitigating the vast inequalities prevalent in those countries. India cannot afford such thinking. Since 2000, India has made rapid strides in reducing the number of people who live in poverty. This change has been particularly marked from 2013-14 to 2022-23 when India witnessed a reduction in multidimensional poverty from 29.17 per cent of its population living under poverty to 11.28 per cent in 2022-23, a reduction of 17.89 percentage points. This large reduction in the number of poor people took place when India experienced robust economic growth. At this stage, when India confronts the most stubborn levels of poverty—especially ‘poverty traps’—it cannot afford to slow down its rate of growth. Doing that will lead to lower availability of resources for poverty reduction but will also entail the danger of throwing people who have just exited poverty back into misery. This is politically unacceptable in India.

But India has shown that another path is possible, one where higher growth can continue even as climate change mitiga­tion by aggressive adoption of climate-change technologies is a reality. Where India faces challenges is in adapting to these changes faster because the window for adopting them effectively, by limiting the damage from climate change, is narrow. And this window will progressively shrink as time passes. In this con­text, India’s approach is positive when compared to the far more severe options such as de-growth that are in vogue in the West.

In doing all this, India has relied largely on its own resources as the promise of climate finance and sharing of climate change mitigation technology has proved illusory. The issue for India is not resources—it has found them by re-jigging its priorities—but one of coordinating a diverse economy in a continental-scale country. So far, it is working.

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