Climate justice in India

In the recently concluded United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27) India once again reiterated the importance of international climate justice and how equity and justice should be the guiding principles for climate action. India along with other countries from the Global South pioneered the global climate justice debates early on establishing claims around historic responsibility for anthropogenic climate change. This was supported by arguments in relation to environmental colonialism, per capita carbon emissions and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, evoking debates on important themes like colonialism, global capitalism, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism. These are all stories of global climate justice, however; what about climate justice in India? Climate justice within India has not yet been a major theme in climate change or policy deliberations. What does climate justice mean for one of the most unequal societies, and a country that is home to the largest population of poor people in the world? In this context, Climate Justice in India, edited by Prakash Kashwan brings together a collective of academics, activists, and artists for an action oriented vision for climate justice in India.

In the introduction, Kashwan makes clear that interrogating climate justice in a country like India that is deeply unequal means to engage with this inequality that has roots in the socio-ecology of the country, colonial extraction, post-colonial state making and the contemporary neoliberal re-organizing.

Chapters in this volume thus address urban climate adaptation plans, the question of how just the transition to solar energy is, economic inequality and carbon emissions, an analysis of climate action plans and justice, the caste question and climate justice, and social mobilizations for climate action, amongst others. These chapters weave together an analysis of justice from across sectors to demonstrate how and why socio-economic, caste, gender, and environmental justice play a central role in the experience of climate change in India and in the process of adaptation and mitigation. Together, they demonstrate how climate change would further push out the most marginalized and poor in the country.

For example, the chapter on coal extraction demonstrates how Adivasi communities, who bear the historical brunt of extraction, also risk revictimization during an energy transition, and an uncertain future given the future of coal in India. The chapter on water justice, in turn, addresses the complex entwining of caste, class, and gender identities that work in determining access to water, and how these relations and climate change thus contribute to water injustice. Chapters also demonstrate how the existing policy frameworks do not address these inequalities and justice issues. For instance, the chapter that analyses state and national climate action plans unpacks the failure to address the root causes of climate vulnerability, including caste-based injustices, socio-economic inequalities, and a lack of social safety nets, and how climate action plans fail to incorporate the substantive criteria of climate justice.

Within scholarship on climate change in India, this volume makes three major contributions. First, it is the first edited book-length effort to understand what it means to say climate justice in one of the most unequal countries, where climate justice is entangled with socio-ecological and economic, caste, gender, and several other inequalities. These inequalities are at the center of the climate crisis, similarly to how COVID-19 became a deeply disturbing social crisis in India. Second, the chapters in this book are an effort to build social, economic, and environmental resilience in sectors as diverse as food (p.207), water (p.183), energy (p.74), urbanization (p.25), and climate policy and development (p.115) at both the national and state levels.

Third, the book tries to bridge the gap between critical social science scholarship and largely technocratic, apolitical policy-oriented previous scholarship around climate change in India with historically informed analyses (chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 and 10), which inform policy (chapters 6 and 11) and bring together a wider agenda for change (p.229) not only through policy but through new imaginaries and powerful grassroots intersectional mobilizations for socio-economic, gender, environmental and climate justice.

What could have been addressed in greater depth is the vulnerability of the Adivasis, the Indigenous people of India who comprise nearly 10% of India’s population. This is covered in the book just in relation to the coal economy and as part of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada) movement. Yet Adivasi movements across India were also the first to raise questions about land, water, and forests, and were at the center of their political mobilizations across India.

The question we are left with – on which further research can usefully build on this volume – is what these imagined intersectional climate justice mobilizations might look like in practice. This may take multiple forms; for example, India just witnessed one of the single largest protests in human history by farmers in New Delhi, around the controversial agricultural reform laws and the impact of climate change on the agrarian sector. The impact of climate change and demand for climate justice are also part of the ongoing Adivasi mobilizations, Dalit movements, women’s movements, and more. Hence, the movements for climate justice in India might not take the form of isolated climate justice movements as they are in Europe or North America. Finally, claims such as ‘caste justice is climate justice’ along with ‘Climate Justice Is Racial Justice’ will need to be explored further, paying particular attention also to climate vulnerability and caste, along with historical analyses of land and agrarian relations. Overall, the engagement with the intersection of the climate crisis and the socioeconomic crisis makes this volume an important one towards framing climate justice in India. A wide audience from academia, policy and civil society should be interested in this.