In June this year, New Delhi received the heaviest rainfall in 88 years, with “228 mm of rainfall in a span of 24 hours” when the average for whole month is usually around 75 mm. Four people died, and part of Terminal 1 at the airport collapsed.
The increased number of high-intensity rainfall events (and longer periods of dryness) is one of the easiest visible impacts of climate change. The physics is simple. Warmer air holds more moisture. As we heat up the atmosphere, rainfall events happen more infrequently and with greater intensity.
Any responsible government would take such issues seriously, but not – it seems – the Government of India. In fact, in its latest Economic Survey of India, the chapter dedicated to responding to climate change says, “Man, and Nature (gross forms of Purush and Prakriti in the Samkhya Tradition) are indestructible entities that interact to provide meaning to consciousness in the form of reality as we know it. Hence, any strategy that aims to alter things far beyond the comprehension or control of man, such as ensuring that the planet’s temperature doesn’t cross 2 degrees Celsius, must travel the journey inwards and not outwards.”
What, you may ask, does this mean? How will this help drowning children, or make sure our infrastructure is built to sustain increasing climate-related disasters? That, apparently, is the wrong question because the unknown author of this chapter is far more concerned about why people watch things on mobile phones rather than together.
She, or he, or they, note, “It is the absence of such contentment that has made erstwhile communal things in the home become individual – e.g., television. Things unavailable didn’t cause grown men to cry and children to shrink from playing with others. This stands in contrast with the consumption-oriented living of today, where every individual is a consumer (especially children), instead of a family. That’s why households, today, need more devices per person as compared to a single television earlier.”
You see, everything, according to this author was already known to us – although it is a bit weird for them to mention television (maybe there’s some ancient text to cite about watching saas-bahu serials together).
And, “the developing world should not only avoid emulating the environmentally and climatically unsustainable practices of the West but also point the way to the West, with its own food-feed balance practised for aeons.”
This is, of course, in the context of agriculture – one of the sectors most directly impacted by climate change due to changing rainfall patterns, thus droughts and floods, as well as the spread of diseases and pests. It is a little hard to understand what food-feed balances the author is talking about.
Would these be the ones before the Green Revolution, when we were still being made to humiliatingly beg for grain to feed our undernourished citizens, or is this after the Green Revolution with its ‘Western’ technologies and vast imports of fertilisers and seed-tinkering?
But not to worry, India has all the answers, it always has all the answers, or as the author puts it, “Time and again, when a major adversity shakes the world out of its stupor, the relative resilience of Indians is a subject of great surprise.”
Yes, the astounding response of the Indian government was a subject of “great surprise” just recently, especially to millions of labourers who were forced into a lockdown with 4 hours’ notice, without any supplies or care, and then had to march miles back to their homes as a government let them starve.
We have the answer, notes the sage, because, “we also believe in the collective power of small individual actions. That each person contributes to both emission generation as well as emission reduction is a simple fact that we must take into account while designing policies, and awareness programmes, or even while tabulating statistics related to the environment.”
This is an odd “simple fact”. An individual may contribute to emission generation, but an individual with two cars generates far more than an individual with none. Half of the chapter is dedicated to the inequity of the developed world which emits more per carbon dioxide per capita than those in India, but now we are all just individuals? How bizarre.
Of course, all of this is a lead up to the introduction of “Mission LiFE, announced by Prime Minister Modi, at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCC COP2026)”. For anybody who wants the details, they are simple: Indians have low per capita emissions, and thus our lifestyles must be emulated.
The reality is that Indians have low per capita emissions because they are largely poor. Richer Indians, say the top 20%, have seven times the emissions of the poor. But hasn’t the government promised to make India a developed country? Is the author anti-Modi?
If you are confused by the end of the chapter, you may not be alone, but take a deep breath, listen to the sage as they tell you, “It’s time to rebuild societies with equanimity. Internal equanimity contributes to more acceptance of others and, therefore to better human relations, which we now know, is also more conducive to larger, cohesive families, and consequently better social and sustainable impact. Access to more material choices and economic betterment shouldn’t throw us so off-balance that we forget we come from Nature and must return to it.”
What any of this has to do with climate change, or a strategy to address a combination of melting glaciers, rising seas, and plunging groundwater levels, nobody knows. And, apparently, the Government of India does not care. Also, apparently beef is evil (maybe), and so is toilet paper.
