A Climate Change: Jairam Ramesh Stokes Debate

“Enforcement has been the basic weakness of our environmental process in India. The idea of a statutory and independent NEPA entrusted with this critical functioning cannot be disputed,” says A. Damodaran, who teaches economics and social sciences at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Damodaran, who has previously worked in the Indian environment ministry as well as the US Environment Protection Agency (USEPA) — which NEPA copies — in the mid-1990s, says that the real issue in India is failure of enforcement at the local level.

“We need to have state and local level agencies that provide space for local governments and communities to act. Clearly, state governments have to be enthusiastic at their levels as well,” he says.

Ramesh is closely working with the state governments on most issues, say his ministry colleagues. When he had to take a call on allowing cultivation of Bt brinjal, one of the feedback he went by was from states. “Every chief minister wrote to us not to allow it [Bt brinjal],” says one official.

The minister is said to be actively engaging with the states on other issues too. Immediately after he took over, he visited national parks in every state and major institutions such as the Forest Research Institute. Every time he goes to a state, he holds talks with the local minister, the forest conservator and other department officials, says an official who travels with him often.

Conservationists say that now there is a feeling that at least someone is listening. Koustubh Sharma, regional field biologist for the Snow Leopard Trust, remembers a consultation meeting on Bengal Tiger where a ministry official came up with the idea that you should turn people living in forests into protectors. “After listening to everyone he said, ‘I realise that I was completely wrong. It cannot work the way I thought’,” says Sharma.

A Muddled Path
Yet, many fear Jairam Ramesh is tilting towards the US on many issues, most importantly climate change. He recently commissioned Arvind Subramanian, an economist with the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, to define the concept of ‘equity’ in climate change
negotiations. Ministry officials justified the decision saying that Subramanian is one of the best minds to define the principle of equity. Not many agree with that view though.

“I have worked in this field for several years, in both the US and India. I have never heard of any work of Subramanian of any consequence on climate change,” says a member of the Planning Commission’s expert group on low-carbon economy. A Times of India report quoted an unnamed Indian negotiator as saying that Subramanian is known to have a different view on ‘equity’ that will take away the country’s central negotiating plank.

Jairam Ramesh’s credibility suffered in the public eye when he wrote a letter to the Prime Minister advocating a conciliatory line at the Copenhagen talks.

T. Jayaraman of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, a trenchant critic of Ramesh’s new position, has now mellowed his criticism. He draws relief not from what Ramesh did at Copenhagen but from the complex nature of international climate change politics and the broad debate in India. “Jairam was controlled by a set of guidelines set in Parliament,” he says. “In his apparent eagerness to chart out a new pathway, he was brought down to earth by the sheer obduracy of the developed world.”

Before setting off for Copenhagen, Ramesh made an open commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20-25 percent from 2005 levels in a decade. However, the entire projection was based on a three-page Planning Commission note that admits that it had used a simplistic method of calculation and not complex modelling. “How can you commit the country to an international commitment on the basis of such a note?” asks one member of the expert group on low-carbon economy.