 Hello, and welcome to this NewsClick series on three years of the Modi government. In this segment, we speak with the Raghunandin of the All India People Science Network. Raghunandin has served as a member on the expert group on low-carbon strategies. And we will speak with Raghunandin on assessing the track record of the Modi government on climate policy. Raghunandin, welcome to NewsClick. Let's start with the sort of international context. In the last three years, the most important sort of landmark has been the Paris Agreement, which was, you know, agreed to by 196 countries. A lot of analysts have said that it was a compromise agreement that broke the firewall between developing and developed countries. This was something that India contributed to in saying that developed and developing countries should be treated differentially. What is your assessment of what the Modi government has done at the international level so far? The Paris Agreement itself, as you suggested, I would in fact go a step further and say it wasn't a compromise agreement. It was an agreement which followed through on the earlier Copenhagen Agreement, which was virtually a capitulation by the large developing countries to the demands of the developed countries, particularly the United States, that the firewall between developed and developing countries, which was part of the Kyoto Protocol, should be dismantled. And that India, China and other major developing countries should take on far greater responsibilities for reducing emissions than they had done earlier. So that was an idea that was introduced at Copenhagen, couldn't get formalized there, but which got formalized later at Paris. The Modi government in terms of its response at Paris, while I think they were critical of the Congress government or the UPA government's performance at Copenhagen, really did not turn the clock back towards a position that defended the interests of the developing countries more, but continued with the trend of colluding with the United States and other developed countries to enter into an agreement which effectively put a much larger share of the burden on to the shoulders of the developing countries. I mean just on your point on lying with the US, after the Paris Accord, you've had the Trump presidency and Trump has clearly stated that he might not adhere to the sort of Paris Accord. So do you see that as something that was a strategic mistake on the part of India or on other developing countries to agree to what the US wanted and now they're going to even pull out of a weak deal? Frankly, this has been part of the international climate negotiations right from Rio onwards which is whether the US was part of the agreement or whether they walked out of it which is what happened earlier, they continued to dictate terms at the UN Framework Convention Conference of Parties. In fact, even at Copenhagen and subsequently at Paris, these were effectively agreements by the executive branch in the United States with no guarantees of a ratification by the legislature or the US Congress. So I have always considered it to be a strategy where developing countries were in a lose-lose situation and the United States can either join or not join because I don't see the US having done anything to advance its own position as part of this what you called a compromise which I really don't see as such. Raghu, can you help us break down India's so-called pledges what are called the nationally sort of determined contributions at the domestic level and one of the key planks is this very ambitious target of reaching 175 gigawatts of renewable energy. What has been happening at the domestic front to implement the Paris pledges? First let me deal with the nationally determined contributions which India has tabled at Paris and subsequently ratified as well at Copenhagen where India made a pledge to reduce the emissions intensity by 20 to 25 percent by the year 2025. At Paris, India has taken this to the next step basically extrapolating the same pledge by saying India will reduce its emissions intensity by 30 to 35 percent at a later date than at Copenhagen. So it's not very different from the Copenhagen pledge except it sets a later date to do it by that's one point I want to make second point I want to make is that in terms of ambition while on the one hand one could argue that given the fact that the large developed countries have not set as ambitious a target as they should have India's target is ambitious in that it's taken on a fair amount of reduction of emissions these are not absolute cuts over where India is today they allow India to increase its emissions but at a slower rate than under business as usual propositions having said that a target of reducing emissions intensity by 30 to 35 percent by 2030 is not a very ambitious target our own studies official studies by India in the low carbon committee and otherwise indicates that India has been reducing its emissions intensity by between 1.5 to 2 percent per annum in any case which would have brought us to this figure so in a sense it is not very much more than what would happen to an economy which is getting which is growing which is growing obviously by inducting more new technologies and therefore whose emissions intensity is bound to improve as we go along and so I go in I mean irrespective of what happens at the international level or India's own sort of intended contributions on emissions reduction etc it's well accepted that India is going to be extremely vulnerable to climate impacts and especially in the area of agriculture the coastal areas and what is your sense of what's happened in terms of climate impacts over the last few years how is the government sort of responded both in terms of addressing impacted communities but also in terms of proactively putting systems in place do you see any sort of progress on this front India is in a region which is well recognized to be in the top 10 most affected regions of the world impacted by climate especially in agriculture where you are anticipating maybe a 20 to 30 percent reduction in food grain production by the middle of this century which is a lot apart from coastal erosion impacts of extreme weather disasters and so on putting all this together I think in the INDCs that India has put forward there is a problem in the vision which it puts across as to what climate actions are we taking and what do we hope to achieve from it I think I for example and many other experts have long argued that India's climate actions domestically should be cast as a set of actions which have multiple objectives that is to say a terminology which is used often is co-benefit which will simultaneously address mitigation adaptation economic objectives a developmental trajectory local environment but the INDCs make very little mention of large-scale mass waste public transport in over 4,000 cities and towns that we have in this country if we had that as a focus we would not only have achieved something in terms of an energy policy we would also and importantly have increased access of the poor to energy I think something which has been very ignored in Indian policymaking is while we have been so focused in international negotiations on redressing the inequality in energy consumption and therefore emissions between the developed north and the developing global south we have not paid sufficient attention to the deep inequality that exists our interest should be also to frame policies which will increase the access to energy of the vast vast masses of the Indian people which by the way is today one of the sustainable development goals which India has agreed to but which does not figure in the INDCs and therefore to respond to your question I would say there is a lot that India could do to address developmental challenges which include the challenges that Indian development would have to face due to climate impacts challenges on agricultural front we need to diversify agriculture we need to have more climate resilient agriculture we need to counter what's going to happen in the future on decreasing food grain growth I am afraid the mandate given to our scientific community has lagged far behind the demands that climate is going to put on us we are already losing time dangerously because these impacts are going to be on us very fast and our responses to them may come a decade or so later than they should have done the same thing with disaster preparedness we have seen this in repeated floods flooding in our big cities we saw this in Chennai last year we saw it in Uttarakhand in 2013 which indicates that our urban areas our cities are completely unprepared for the heavy rainfall extreme weather events which we know are going to happen with greater severity and with higher frequency than they did earlier so we are ill-prepared on that front agriculture we have already spoken about increased access to modern energy by the vast masses of people will make them also less vulnerable to the impacts of change we are not ready on that front either and one of the big problems I think that India is going to face is in a huge imbalance that we have created in our air quality in our water quality and overall ecological balance represented in the main by a decreasing forest cover not just in magnitude but in terms of the quality of forests INDC pays lip service to this but simultaneously on the developmental front our government seems to be following a policy now of granting licenses for developmental projects for infrastructure projects for so-called straight line projects which go through forested areas not paying attention to the ecological degradation that we are causing and thinking that we can compensate for this through tree plantation elsewhere ignoring the fact that a bunch of new trees planted somewhere is not the same as a large forest somewhere else so I think on all these fronts the big mistake if we look at the big picture that India is making three years of this government that we have seen is to ignore the multiple developmental challenges that India is facing all these developmental challenges will have a climate dimension both in terms of mitigation as well as in terms of adaptation in the INDC we have just addressed some mitigation issues but we have ignored these interconnections between different developmental sectors and the impact that these mitigation policies will have on development and the impact that our developmental projects will have back on mitigation as well as on our general environment and development clearly Raghu India faces multiple challenges on several fronts but like you said there's little vision or clarity from this government in dealing with the real and imminent challenges of climate change thank you very much for your assessment thank you