The irrationality and waste in energy subsidies in India has been a perennial theme in analysis of the Indian economy and in reform prescriptions. Progress has, however, turned out to be elusive in the face of ground realities and feasible politics.  The power ministry, after struggling for over a decade through repeated exhortations, had the satisfaction of getting a resolution in a Chief Ministers Conference in 2001 that free supply of...

You know your negotiating strategy is in trouble when countries ranging as far as Norway in the developed world to partners like South Africa and neighbours like Bangladesh start quoting Gandhi and Nehru back to you. Two months ago, this was the unfortunate situation Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan had to face at the Durban conference on climate change. That she managed, through a passionate last-minute speech, to ensure that all was...

Observed changes in rainfall patterns and increased temperatures, particularly in the North-Eastern region, are the major projections on which Indian agriculture scientists are pegging their “mitigation and adaptation” plans in the farm sector in the absence of definitive long-term and area-specific data on climate change. Acknowledging that in India the “climate system is extremely complex and poorly understood in terms of extent, timing and impact”, Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR)...

The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India’s own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that it...

The Durban conference in December 2011 marked a breakthrough in international efforts to combat climate change. The EU and India played a key role in final negotiations that unlocked the pact on the last morning of the conference. Together, we found the compromise that provided the basis to launch negotiations on a new global legal framework for climate action that the world so badly needs.  It is no secret that the...