Presenting the Union Budget 2020-2021, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that India’s commitment towards tackling climate change made at Paris conference will kick start from January 1, 2021.
She also referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two international initiatives in the climate change arena; namely, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) and the International Solar Alliance (ISA), which according to her will also help achieve India’s commitment to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, enhance adaptation and achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The efforts to this end, she said, will be executed in various sectors through normal budgeting process.
Rs 4,400 crore has been allocated to give incentives to large cities (more than one million population) to formulate plans for ensuring ‘cleaner air’. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEFCC) will notify the parameters for such incentives.
Sitharaman also announced that old thermal power plants that do not meet prescribed emission norms will be asked to close down and their land will be used for unspecified alternative purposes. She also said PM-KUSUM scheme will be expanded to help 2 million farmers in setting up standalone solar pumps. A slew of other announcements for uptake of renewable energy and organic agriculture were also referred to in her speech.
The only thing remarkable of today’s budget speech was that, ‘climate change’ found space in her over 2 hour 40 minutes long budget speech after four subsequent budget speeches (2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19) under the same government had ignored it. The last time we heard climate change referred to in a full budget speech was in first budget presented by Arun Jaitley in 2014-15.
However, today’s announcements are nothing but a lip service to climate change and the proposed incremental measures fall short in their intent to transform India into a sustainable, low-carbon, high-growth economy is disappointing.
As Nicholas Stern famously said, “Climate change is the biggest market failure the world has ever seen”, Budget 2020 with its deafening silence on budget allocations to the National Action Plan on Climate change (NAPCC) and the National Adaptation Fund, does not augur well for India’s campaign to combat climate change.
Instead of a strategy that will re-orient how we execute climate action via an economy-wide green industrialisation that puts money into low-carbon and climate-resilient sectors such as renewables, public transport, ecological restoration, what we got was yet another set of vague and unclear announcements.
“She did not recognise climate change as a major threat to people and economy, ignoring the estimates that climate change impacts could cause a reduction of 2.5 to 4.5 per cent of GDP, and did not give any indication of revising its emission reduction targets. The message to the states on old and polluting coal fired power plants is weak and advisory in nature,” said Harjeet Singh, global climate change head of Action Aid International.
“…the finance minister had no clear allocation or incentives in today’s speech on how India intends to develop resilient infrastructure, retrofit existing infrastructure for resilience, and to enable a measurable reduction in infrastructure losses, ” said Sanjay Vashist, Director of Climate Action Network South Asia.
While forest cover has been increasing in India as claimed by the MOEFCC in its recent report that will put India on track to achieve Paris Accord target of creating an additional carbon sink by increasing forest cover, the Finance Minister was silent on any further investments required for research into restoring biodiversity, conserving landscapes and preserving the natural balance of biodiversity in various parts of India.
Considering that she referred to climate change as part of the three themes woven around ‘aspirational India, economic development and caring society’, there were high expectations that the Finance Minister will go the extra mile to mainstream climate change in the design of the first budget of the decade — but it was business as usual with no real incentives to mitigate or adapt to climate crisis.
Shailendra Yashwant is senior adviser, Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA). Twitter: @shaibaba. Views are personal.
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