Fog of emissions, ‘greenwashing’ choking India’s most vulnerable

Shubham Tigga made an exceptional journey this month when he left his home state of Chhattisgarh in central India’s coal belt region for the first time ever to attend the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

It was a major milestone for the 27-year-old activist, blogger and freelance journalist who hails from India’s indigenous, or Adivasi, community.

But the experience turned out to be disappointing. “Inside the COP, we didn’t get a chance to talk, it was very exclusionary,” recounted Tigga in a phone interview to FRANCE 24 days after the UN climate summit ended.

While the protests and events outside the climate conference were more lively, the young Adivasi man felt overwhelmed and unheard. “I thought Glasgow would be a very good chance to get our voices heard, I wanted our identity to be recognised on a global platform. Our identity is very important because in India, when there are any environmental issues, the first communities to be affected are Adivasi, tribal or indigenous groups,” he explained. “We are vulnerable communities, but in my experience, inside the COP, they were not talking about social justice.”

On Saturday night, as Tigga waited for the release of the final COP26 deal, his country’s delegation was driving a hard negotiating bargain. At India’s urging, a “phase out” of coal-fired power was changed to “phase down” in the 10-page COP26 deal.

Meanwhile in New Delhi, a thick toxic fog descended on the city over the weekend, forcing the country’s top court to order an environmental lockdown in the world’s most polluted capital.

India’s lingering embrace of coal – which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the country’s electricity generation – is driven by its need to fuel development, according to officials.

The development drive has seen India set its net zero emissions target to 2070 – a decade behind China and two decades behind the 2050 goal adopted by the EU and the US, which scientists say is necessary to slow global warming.

While India trails in emission reduction targets, it is a world pollution chart-topper. A 2020 report by Swiss organisation IQAir found that 22 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities were in India, with Delhi ranked the most polluted capital.

The alarming situation on the ground though is far removed from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public discourse on national and international platforms, where the Indian leader touts his own targets and talking points.

At the start of the COP26 meeting, for instance, Modi unveiled his “Panchamrit” (five nectar) commitment, set to be achieved by 2030. These include generating 500 GW non-fossil energy and committing to produce 50 percent of the country’s energy through renewables, particularly solar power.

India’s commitment to renewable – or green – energy, is welcomed as a step in the right direction for a country with low per capita emissions with hundreds of millions of its citizens living in entrenched poverty.

The problem, though, is that not everyone is convinced the Modi administration’s path to progress – whether it is fueled by coal or renewables – will service India’s most marginalised communities.

Net zero commitments may be announced, but when mining interests are driving indigenous communities off their ancestral lands due to deforestation, those carbon neutral commitments might not get off the ground.

To make matters worse, the intimidation of tribal rights activists, coupled with impunity for corporations skirting already diluted environmental frameworks, make India a climate change powder keg.

Expanded coal production, depleted forests

On October 2, barely a month before Modi’s COP26 speech, hundreds of Adivasis from Chhattisgarh staged a 300-kilometre march against coal mining in their forested ancestral lands.

The protesters hailed from Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Aryana forests, one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest on the subcontinent, which is rich in biodiversity and wildlife, including elephant corridors that are critical for forestation.

But the Hasdeo forests are also rich in coal. In 2011, the area’s protected “no-go zone” status was revoked, triggering a decade-long, low intensity local campaign to save the forests from coal mining.

The Modi administration’s recent commitment to expand coal production to a massive 1 billion tonnes by 2024 has driven an aggressive expansion of coal mining in Hasdeo. In the lead-up to COP26, desperate villagers made a long trek to the Chhattisgarh state capital, Raipur, where their protest received national and international media coverage.

>> Click here for more on Modi’s coal push in tribal lands

But just weeks later, the government granted a mining clearance in the contested Parsa East-Kente Basan (PEKB) coal block, shocking Hasdeo villagers and local activists.

“The Hasdeo campaign is an overlap of so many issues. The central issue is of local communities and their access to sustainable livelihoods. It’s about large corporations operating in indigenous habitats, landgrabs, displacements. It’s about biodiversity preservation and maintaining elephant corridors to fight the human-elephant conflict in areas where elephants have been mined out of their habitat,” explained Priya Pillai, one of India’s leading environmentalists, in a phone interview with FRANCE 24 from New Delhi.

Pillai shot into the international spotlight a year after Modi was elected to his first term, when Indian authorities took her off a flight bound for London. The environmentalist, who was working for Greenpeace back in 2015, was to testify to a British parliamentary group looking into the coal mining activity of a UK-registered firm in a forest area in Madhya Pradesh, a state that borders Chhattisgarh.

The Delhi High Court subsequently overturned Pillai’s flight ban order, with Justice Rajiv Shakdher reminding the government that, “You cannot muzzle dissent in a democracy.”

Activists jailed or trying to stay out of jail

But that has not stopped the Modi administration from silencing its critics, sending India plummeting down press freedom listings. Activists working on tribal rights issues are particularly targeted, with leading human rights defenders arrested on charges of plotting a Maoist conspiracy against the government under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

Rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly called for a repeal of the “abusive” UAPA law, which was passed in the 1960s and has been broadened to include “an overbroad definition of terrorism…including non-violent political activity, according to Human Rights Watch.

Meanwhile leading US newspapers have done investigative reports on the planting of evidence on the detained activists’ computers. The “evidence” – which prosecutors allege prove the activists’ Maoist links – were planted using malware, according to US digital forensics experts.

But dozens of tribal rights activists continue to languish in jails without trials under the draconian UAPA law. Fr. Stan Swamy, an ailing, octogenarian Jesuit priest working with Adivasi groups in central India, died in custody earlier this year. Meanwhile Sudha Bharadwaj, a human rights lawyer working with Adivasi communities affected by land acquisitions in Chhattisgarh, spent her birthday in prison this month for the fourth consecutive year.

Pillai, a friend of many of the detained activists, is no stranger to the climate of intimidation. “Activists are either jailed or, the ones outside, are running from one court to another. The amount of time – and energy and money – that I spend to keep myself out of jail is time I could spend on my work,” she noted.

Going green without environmental checks

Adivasi villagers and activists are pitted against powerful mining interests, including state bodies and corporations with close ties to the Modi administration.

The PEKB mine in Hasdeo is operated by Indian billionaire tycoon Gautam Adani and more coal blocks in the forest are set to be operated by his Adani Group, which also owns the controversial Carmichael coal mine in Australia, according to the Financial Times.

Noting the close links between Adani and Modi, the Financial Times last year reported that, “Since Mr Modi came into office, Mr Adani’s net worth has increased by about 230 per cent to more than $26bn as he won government tenders and built infrastructure projects across the country.”

The tenders have extended into the renewable energy sector with the launch of a new subsidiary, Adani Green Energy, which operates massive solar plants in several states, including the Kamuthi photovoltaic plant, one of the largest solar plants in the world.

The plant “spans a vast area of 2,500 acres, equivalent to about 950 Olympic-size football fields,” notes the company’s website, and “the entire facility was completed within a record eight months”.

But the acquisition of these vast tracts of land has also seen the company battling court petitions and protests against the takeovers.

The Adani Group routinely denies any wrongdoing, but activists say the cases highlight the problem of India’s environmental regulatory frameworks.

“Investments in renewables do not require EIAs [environment impact assessments]. Single window clearances open up land to large scale renewable energy projects. Once you have the “go green” label, the environmental assessment processes are loose and lax,” said Pillai.

Losing livelihoods and dignity

While Pillai welcomes the shift away from fossil fuels, she is dismayed by the energy transition process under the Modi administration.

“This transition is an opportunity to bring more equality and social justice. Instead, what we are basically doing is moving investment from one sector and pushing it into large scale renewables. The question is, is large scale renewable energy any different from fossil fuels? The large scale renewable energy paradigm in this country is no different from the fossil fuel paradigm. It operates very similarly, it involves the same players and the same issues,” she noted.

As an environmentalist, Pillai calls for social justice in the transition to green energy, including smaller scale, community-led renewable energy projects. “The fight against climate change needs to be aligned with social equality,” she maintained.

For many Adivasis such as Tigga, identity lies at the heart of a socially just energy transition.

Adivasi groups are outside the Hindu caste system and their lives are guided by indigenous belief systems that attach spiritual value to every feature of the forests. Tigga says it is a way of life that is derided by what he calls “mainstream” Indians.

“There is a false perception that indigenous people don’t want development. This is bogus. We want development, but not for mining. We want social infrastructure, access to healthcare and education,” said Tigga. “When we talk about government policies and its impact on our land, our forests, our air, then they say we are [Maoist] terrorists – it’s just heart-wrenching.”

As a journalist, Tigga has reported in the Hasdeo area, which is not far from his family’s ancestral village, witnessing the havoc of land dispossessions. “I found some people who took the compensations from Adani and had turned alcoholics because there are deeper, structural problems that need to be addressed. If you give people money, they come to the city, they lose their dependence on the forest and they lose their dignified life,” he explained.

At the COP26, Tigga was immersed in discussions of carbon neutrality and net zero emissions. But in his ancestral village thousands of miles from Glasgow, he finds it hard to square the climate rhetoric circle. “Carbon neutrality means having to absorb more carbon than is emitted,” he explained. “So, they talk about carbon sinks and reforestation. But they’re cutting down dense forests. There’s so much superficial talk and no one’s talking about our issues.”