often funded by international donor agencies and so tended to reflect the interests and research agendas of the funders (Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999). This international influence likely constrained the development of an intrinsically Indian climate change policy canon in this phase by instead diverting minds and attention to address better-funded issues of less relevance. For example, despite India’s reliance on the monsoon and vulnerability to climate impacts, few studies into impacts and adaptation were undertaken, whereas studies of mitiagation abatement options proliferated (Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999). The development of ‘home-grown’ analysis of domestically important issues would determine whether Indian researchers and politicians would be captive audiences to international assessment, critics reacting to their undesirable features, or equal collaborators” in the production of knowledge (Sagar & Kandlikar, 1997).
Like many developing countries, international environmental issues - as climate change was generally perceived to be - were overshadowed by urgent domestic issues of underdevelopment and concomitant environmental degredation. Even the Center for Science and the Environment (CSE) which had engaged so forcefully on the issue of equity in relation to climate change in 1991, had been focussing more on domestic environmental issues like urban air and water pollution (Narain in Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999). Thus to the extent that India began to formulate its ideas about climate change policy it was due to the activities of a small number of researchers and government officials (Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999) and was framed by broader concerns that the Developed countries would use environmental problems as a means to “sabotage the South’s developmental aspirations” (Najam, 2005).
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Figure 25: Real GDP Growth – annual percentage change Source: April 2015 World Economic Outlook (IMF, 2015a)
“The decision adopted by the Plenary (FCCC/CP/1996/L.16) expresses concern over the slow pace of technology transfer” (IISD, 1996a). This was a refrain that was heard repeatedly throughout this phase. Some developing countries highlighted an incompatibility between the technical information offered by developed countries and the developing countries’ requirement for the transfer of technology on preferential and non-commercial terms (IISD, 1997a), but overall technology transfer was slow and not facilitated at the international level of the regime. The little technology transfer that did take please largely focused on mitigation and not adaptation (South Centre and Center for International Environmental Law, 2008) reflecting the concerns of the donors and not the needs of the recipients.
The Adaptation Fund was established in 2001 as part of the Marrakech Accords (UNFCCC, 2002:
decision 10/CP.7, para. 1) and was to be “financed from the share of proceeds on the clean development mechanism project activities and other sources of funding” (UNFCCC, 2002: decision 10/CP.7, para. 2). As it was established as a fund under the Kyoto Protocol, the Fund could not come into effect until the Protocol itself was ratified and came into effect in 2005. The Fund was eventually only officially launched in 2009 as negotiations over its governance and working procedures took almost five years (Trujillo & Nakhooda, 2013); thus the Fund will be fully considered in phase three.
5.2.2 India’s material capabilities: slow but (mostly) steady improvement
The graph of GDP growth in Figure 26 shows India’s fluctuating fortunes in the mid to late-1990s.
Two good years of over 7.5% growth – 1995 and 1996 – were followed by a slump in GDP by almost half in 1997, the year of the onset of the Southeast Asian economic crisis. Ironically, India’s economy was somewhat sheltered from this crisis due to its lack of full integration with the region. Given the imposition of economic sanctions by the USA following the nuclear tests at Pokhran II, the recovery
of the GDP growth rate in 1998 might have been somewhat unexpected, “were it not for the absence of the foreign exchange constraints of the past” (Nayar, 2006). 1998 was also the year that the population exceeded 1 billion people (World Bank, 2015). By 1999 the percentage GDP growth rate had increased to nearly a robust 8.8%.
Unfortunately the GDP growth was not sustained in the early years of the new century: growth plummeted to 3.8% (2000), 4.8% (2001) and 3.8% (2002) before recovering steadily in 2003 to 2004 to just below 8% as can be seen below in Figure 26. Nevertheless, India’s performance in this phase on the Human Development Index improved steadily, although remaining below the average HDI of its smaller and less economically dynamic neighbours in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Figure 26: India’s GDP growth between 1995-2004
Source: Own graph based on data from World Development Indicators, World Bank (2015)
Cox’s conceptualisation of material circumstances realistically include factors like sanitation and access to water, as these are the material conditions that frame the lived experience of people. By the end of this phase, 29% of the population had access to improved19 sanitation facilities - up from 21.2% in 1995 (World Bank, 2015). Data extracted from the decadal census of 2001 relating to both the location and the main source of drinking water indicates that only 39% of households had access to water on the premises while the majority of the population still had to walk some distance
19 defined as a range of interventions from providing a covering for an open latrine to the installation of indoor plumbing
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to find water20. In addition, the largest proportion of households was still without a piped water supply and instead procured water from wells (18.2%) or sources like rivers or canals (3.9%) or handpumps etc. (35.7%) (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2001). These numbers, and those realting to sanitation above, are indicative of the scale of developmental challenges still faced by India at the beginning of the new century – challenges that shaped India’s approach to economic growth and its conception of equity at an international level.
India’s growth was primarily fossil fuel driven - an economic growth-model it shared with the majority of developed and developing countries. The percentage of fossil fuels in the overall fuel mix rose just on 6% over the period from 1995 to 2004. Of more concern, however, the country’s net energy imports as a percentage of the total energy used nearly doubled from 12.62% to 21.42%
in the same period (International Energy Agency, 2014; World Bank, 2015). This rising trend was indicative of the Indian state’s increasing reliance on imports to fuel the economy, which in turn raised concerns about the country’s energy security.
India’s emissions intensity of GDP showed a significant decline in this phase as seen in Figure 27 below. Given the significant variation in GDP growth seen in Figure 26 above it would not have been unreasonable to anticipate some slowing of the downward trend of GHG emissions per unit of GDP.
The downward trend remained strong however, indicating the government’s continued efforts to address the energy intensity of the economy and perhaps also the increasing relevance of the low GHG-producing service sector to the economy. In just under a decade, the country reduced the GHGs emitted to produce GDP of US$ 1 million by 138tCO2e – remarkable for a country still on a development trajectory. In fact, by 2004 the emissions intensity of India’s economy equalled that of Japan and had surpassed Germany and significantly undercut China’s GHG intensive growth (Bacon
& Bhattacharya, 2007).
20 “Away” was classified as more than 100m in urban areas and more than 500m in rural areas.
Figure 27: Emissions Intensity of the Indian economy
Source: Own graph based on data from Climate Analysis Indicators Tool (CAIT) (World Resources Institute, 2015)
This sub-section has discussed a selection of indicators of the material capabilities of the Indian state in this phase. While there were slow but steady improvements in some areas (provision of improved sanitation for instance), and a decrease in the energy intensity of the economy overall, the poor showing on the Human Development Index and the fluctuating GDP growth still indicated a developing country with both huge developmental challenges and an uneven income stream with which to deal with them.
Even given this status quo, the Indian Government – regardless of which party or coalition was in power – continued to pour large sums into the nuclear programme. India established an Atomic Energy Commission the year after independence and the Department of Atomic Energy in 1954. By the 1970s it was one of the few countries to have realised the complete nuclear fuel cycle from uranium exploration to waste management (Ahn & Graczyk, 2012). To its advocates the nuclear- energy industry held the potential to make India fossil fuel import free and energy secure; thus far this possibility had not transpired. While India had historically been a vocal opponent of nuclear- weapon proliferation internationally, it established and perpetuated a military nuclear capability under the guise of the nuclear threat posed by China and Pakistan. India chose to cross the nuclear weapon threshold with a test in 1974 (Pokhran-I) and again in 1998 in Rajasthan. The Pokhran-II tests were conducted in spite of, and possibly because of, the looming extension of the nuclear non- proliferation regime to include the CTBT (Ganguly & Pardesi, 2009; Chacko, 2013). India had long refused to sign the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state (as was outlined in 5.1.2 above) – construing it as a threat to its sovereignty and national dignity.
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