Winning the battle of wills on climate policy

05 March 2010

What a month. From high-profile resignations to Union Budget announcements, there has scarcely been a day without climate in the news. While the much-maligned but also fulsomely-supported IPCC chair and TERI supremo, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has managed to hold onto his post for another month, February saw the announced departure of both Shyam Saran and Yvo de Boer. Neither was a surprise.

In Saran’s case, there has been a war of attrition with the Minister of State for Environment & Forests, Jairam Ramesh, since it became apparent that the Minister had a mind of his own when it came to Indian climate policy and politics. Since he took office in May 2009, the Minister and the Prime Minister’s special envoy have been at loggerheads with the former a reformist and the latter in the traditional mould of a defender of the faith. (The faith being the per-capita based climate orthodoxy followed by Indian governments since year dot.)

Not unsurprisingly, the Minister has had a tough time of it battling the ranked masses of supporters of the orthodoxy in both his Ministry as well as the press. But his sheer bloody-mindedness in getting things done has had an impact. Week on week and month on month, one has seen the needle rise with ever more initiatives on the multi-headed Hydra that is climate change. The Minister has made his ministry rise to the tempo and consolidated his grip on environment and climate policy across the government.

In the battle of wills with Saran, the Minister has won. But in the battle for the heart and soul of India’s climate policy, the Minister is not yet done – he has barely just begun. This is not a short-game. It is a long-game of changing risk-averse and change-averse institutions and demonstrating the economic and political benefit of action on climate change. This requires a powerful new narrative and it is not clear whether the Minister has found his compelling story on this as yet. One that will connect with both the titans of industry and the tillers in the field.

The fact that he is not quite there yet was revealed by yet another Union Budget that failed to make provisions for the much-vaunted eight Missions of the National Action Plan on Climate Change. Two years on and still no clear allocation as to how these expressions of intent are to be funded and implemented. With the riveting exception of the National Solar Mission, the flagship mission of the Government, one is at a loss as to explain how the Government has placed climate change at the heart of its policy-making. It seems very much like an ad-hoc affair still.

At the sub-national level, though, one can see the impact that a little bit of energy on climate change can unleash. State after state – though still not in the double digits – appears to be moving on climate change and expressing a new-found ambition to be ‘carbon neutral’ or the greenest state in the country. Much finer ambitions than merely to have the highest state-level GDP growth rate in the country. Especially if that growth is green and sustainable, not carbon-based and cancerous. If the national politics on growth and climate changes as a result, we could well be in very different territory come the next elections.