The Economic Survey has wide gaps and odd arguments on climate change

The government’s chief economic advisor has rightly pointed towards the need to adopt an all-hands-on-deck approach and emphasized the importance of government-private-sector-civil society partnerships. 

However, there is little to reassure other research and academic think-tanks or other civil society organizations on their fear of punitive action should they challenge the policies or approaches of the government and private sector from a sustainability perspective. 

A productive partnership with this sector would start with an appreciation of their important role as critics and conscience-keepers when other actors are focused mainly on economic prerogatives.

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Recognizing the sustained role that agriculture must play in food and nutritional security as well as in employment generation, the survey notes the challenge of crop productivity, albeit primarily in the context of land-holding sizes and emphasizing the need for land consolidation. 

Merely talking about this without addressing the resultant incremental need for livelihood opportunities—beyond the need for 8 million additional jobs already identified—that such consolidation would require rings hollow. 

And linking farm productivity to holding sizes while overlooking the issue of land degradation smacks of a biased approach. India lost 30 million hectares of land to degradation in the period 2015-19. 

According to the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (2020), 32% of the land in India is considered degraded and 25% of it is undergoing desertification. Surely, addressing the underlying causes for this should be prioritized and taken up in mission mode? Many pages of the survey are devoted to the issue of livestock, their feed demands and irrelevant comparisons with the West.

The survey seems to blame erratic monsoons and stresses the need for temporally and spatially well distributed rainfall. While this may not be under the control of the human species, a strategy on (i) rapidly and significantly enhancing water storage capacities—integrating climate resilience efforts—across the country to meet spatial and temporal water security objectives, and (ii) measures to enhance water-use efficiency, supported by adequate budget outlays, would have been reassuring.

The survey’s most confounding discussion is on climate change and the energy transition. In some parts, the survey appears to condone relative inaction by developed countries. No doubt, constructively engaging with climate imperatives is a deeply uncomfortable task, one whose successes and failures lie squarely on the shoulders of governments across the world. 

Also read: Need balanced approach to climate change, diversified energy transition: Survey

While civil society globally is exerting pressure on the fossil-fuel industry to decarbonize, India’s case reveals how demand reticence—on the part of governments in particular—is encouraging further fossil energy supplies. 

By highlighting the vulnerabilities of being dependent on a small set of countries for energy resources of the future, the survey has also spotlighted our complete lack of preparedness and foresight to deal with a problem that has been in the making for decades, with its impacts becoming more tangible by the year. 

Using selective quotes from literature, the survey highlights historical experiences with the time needed for an energy transitions, but it does not say why 2024 should be taken as a starting point when India had developed its National Action Plan on Climate Change in 2008 and ratified the Paris Agreement in 2016. 

We must, in this context, recall our goal of energy self-sufficiency following the two oil price shocks of the 1970s and the establishment of a renewable energy programme back in 1981.

Yes, renewable energy sources need fiscal subsidies to be viable. But in the same chapter, the survey also recognizes continuing subsidies to fossil energy sources. 

The CEA, while presenting the survey, stated that India cannot jeopardize energy security in the name of an energy transition. One can only hope that an honest exercise to assess the trade-off between human and energy (fossil-based) security would be undertaken.

The survey makes no meaningful reference to extreme-event exposure or climate-related disasters that the country is already facing. India continues to witness record temperatures, cloud bursts resulting in floods, receding glaciers, extreme droughts, forest fires and their consequences in terms of lost lives, infrastructure degradation and wasted opportunities. 

In 2022, extreme weather events claimed 3,026 lives, affected 1.96 million hectares of crop area, damaged 423,249 houses and killed over 69,899 animals. 

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In 2021, India suffered an income loss of an estimated $159 billion in the service, manufacturing, agriculture and construction sectors due to extreme heat (Climate Transparency Report, 2022). These casualties and damages are likely to go up.

A profound statement in the Economic Survey reads as follows: “Economic policies have to be crafted in such a manner that they do not address issues narrowly or incompletely while rendering problems in other areas more intractable." We need to give effect to this wisdom—systemically, for sure, and temporally too.