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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

A time for numbers


The government appears to have taken a final call going into the climate change summit at Copenhagen that India’s traditional stand, that developing countries are not obliged to cut emissions, is unlikely to change. Yet there remains considerable wiggle room available to India’s negotiators. The temptation, however, to keep that wiggle room as large as possible, at the cost of atmospherics going in, must be avoided. The government for a while dithered over whether to quantify India’s already decided voluntary efforts on climate change — from renewable energy to reforestation. A mistake: it allowed others to seize the initiative, and to let the focus for some considerable time be on how India was the sole major participant who was unwilling to quantify. The belated announcement by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh in Parliament today of India’s best estimate of the figures — emissions per rupee of national income will decline by 20 to 25 per cent between 2005 and 2020 — should be seen as India’s attempt to ensure that Copenhagen starts without any finger-pointing.

The debate in the Lok Sabha that preceded Ramesh’s tabling of the figures revealed two things about the discussion in India: first, the level of awareness about the problems and possible solutions is still pretty low; and second, it is likely climate change itself will at some point in the future cease being the near non-issue in national politics it is at present. (Almost without exception, parties trotted out their younger MPs: Jyoti Mirdha, Ananth Hegde, Jayant Chaudhary.) The beginnings of a political conversation began to be apparent: the speakers from the BJP, for example, warned against “bending the knee” to foreigners, and against “making India the carbon sink of the world”; MPs from primarily agrarian parties or areas, were uncomfortable talking of the problem’s history, but became eloquent about the danger that erratic rain patterns or salinity present to farmers; and still others expressed concern about reforestation efforts, and whether or not those would cause the displacement of forest-dwellers. At least one Congress MP expressed the hope that the prime minister would go to Copenhagen.

India’s climate negotiators will only have their hand strengthened by the release of these numbers: their fears that the simple act of quantification increases the chances that the numbers will become “legally binding” are groundless. The echoes of the growing popular concern on display in the Lok Sabha, too, will strengthen their hands in the “political commitment” that is likely to conclude the Copenhagen negotiations.