New Delhi: The world needs to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are causing climate change but these actually hit a new high in 2018, as per a new United Nations report.

GHG emissions peaked at 55.3 gigatonnes in 2018, at which rate the world will emit over the next nine years 480 gigatonnes of toxic gases that should have been spread across 81 years in order to control global warming.

Over 10 years to 2018, GHG emissions rose 1.5% annually and unless they fall by 7.6% each year over 10 years to 2030, the world will not be able to limit global warming to 1.5 deg-C as decided under the 2015 Paris Agreement, said the 10th edition of the Emissions Gap Report by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched on November 26, 2019.

The findings are “bleak” and the global failure to stop the growth in global GHG emissions will necessitate deeper and faster emission cuts, said the report.

“This shows that countries simply cannot wait until the end of 2020, when new climate commitments are due, to step up action,” said UNEP’s executive director Inger Andersen in a statement. “They–and every city, region, business and individual–need to act now. If we don’t do this, the 1.5°C goal will be out of reach before 2030.”

Even as many countries of the G20 club–together, they account for around 78% of global GHG emissions–falter on their promises to cut emissions, India, the fourth-largest emitter, is on track to meet its national target set under the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) at the 2015 Paris Agreement. The pact aimed at limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5-2 deg-C, as we further explain.

The emission gap report–which marks the run-up to the 25th Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP25) starting on December 2, 2019 in Spain–provides the latest assessment of scientific studies on current and estimated future GHG emissions. It also compares these with the levels permissible for the world to progress on the least-cost pathway to achieving the Paris goals.

At current emissions level, world will be 3.9 deg-C warmer by 2100

“There is no sign of GHG emissions peaking in the next few years; every year of postponed peaking means that deeper and faster cuts will be required,” the emission gap report said.

At the current level of emissions, global temperatures can be expected to rise by 3.4-3.9 deg-C by 2100, bringing wide-ranging and destructive climate impacts such as cyclones, wildfires, droughts and floods, the report concluded.

Even if all countries met their NDCs under the Paris Agreement, annual emissions will still reach 56 gigatonnes by 2030, the report said. This will lead to a 3.0-3.2 deg-C warmer world by the end of the century.

To limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5 deg-C, the annual GHG emission in 2030 needs to be 32 gigatonnes lower than what current NDCs imply, a 57% cut. Similarly, annual emissions in 2030 need to be 15 gigatonnes lower for the 2 deg-C goal, a 27% drop. On an annual basis, this means a 7.6% global emissions cut between 2020 and 2030 to meet the 1.5 deg-C goal and 2.7% to achieve the 2 deg-C target.

To deliver on these cuts, NDC ambitions must rise at least five times to meet the 1.5 deg-C goal and thrice to meet the 2 deg-C goal by 2020, said the report.

Had serious climate action begun in 2010, the average annual cuts required to meet the projected emission levels for 2°C and 1.5°C would have been just 0.7% and 3.3% respectively, the report said.

Hope lies with G20 nations

The report focuses especially on G20 member countries because they account for around 78% of global GHG emissions, as we said earlier. These countries will, thus, determine the extent to which the 2030 emissions gap will be closed.

Six members–China, the European Union (EU), India, Mexico, Russia and Turkey–are projected to meet their national NDC targets with current policies. Among them, three countries–India, Russia and Turkey–are likely to overachieve their emissions cut targets by 15%.

India should ramp up its efforts

India’s NDC includes:

• Achievement of 40% of installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources 
• Reduction of the emissions intensity of its gross domestic product by 33-35% (from 2005 levels) by 2030
• Creation of an additional 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon sinks [reservoirs that accumulate and store carbon dioxide] through the planting of additional forest and tree cover.

India’s progress indicates that it can increase its NDCs substantially, said the report, which also suggested that this can be achieved by:

• Planning the transition from coal-fired power plants
• Developing an economy-wide green industrialisation strategy towards zero-emission technologies
• Expanding mass public transit systems
• Developing domestic electric vehicle targets and working towards 100% new sales of zero-emission cars

However, key economies of the world continue to drag their feet on promised emission cuts. Seven G20-members–Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, South Africa and the United States of America–require varying degrees of action to achieve their NDC, the report said.

In 2009, G20 members adopted a decision to gradually phase out fossil-fuel subsidies but none of them have committed yet to fully phasing these out by a specific deadline. And globally, CO2-centred GHG emissions from fossil fuel use in energy and industry sectors, which dominate overall emissions, grew 2% in 2018, reaching a record 37.5 gigatonnes per year, as per the report.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Toxic Emissions World Needs To Slash Soared To Record High In 2018: UN appeared first on SabrangIndia.

New Delhi: Tribals’ dissatisfaction with the slow implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), which offers formal recognition of forest-dwellers’ land rights, could be a deciding factor in more than 62 of the 81 assembly constituencies (over 77%) in the upcoming state elections Jharkhand, an analysis by an independent research group has concluded.

The analysis is based on the fact that the number of Scheduled Caste & Scheduled Tribe (SC and ST) voters eligible for land rights under the FRA is more than the margin of victory in the last election in 94% (58) of the 62 seats considered FRA-sensitive. Nearly 70% of the population in constituencies spread across Jharkhand–Chakradharpur, Gumla, Latehar and Simdega, for example–belongs to SC/ST categories.

Analysing the results of the 2014 assembly elections in these 62 constituencies, researchers concluded that any political party that promises effective implementation of the FRA and other laws protecting land rights of tribespeople could defeat the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The FRA, that came into effect in 2006, is critical to the livelihoods of at least 3.8 million SC & ST voters in Jharkhand, 52% of total 7.3 million voters, as per 2014 voting statistics. Of the SC-ST voters, 75% (2.9 million) belong to Scheduled Tribes, the constitutional term for government-recognised indigenous tribes, found analysts Tushar Shah and Archana Soreng, both members of the NGO network Community Forest Resource-Learning and Advocacy (CFR-LA), who conducted this analysis independent of CFR-LA.

Elections in Jharkhand will be held in five phases between November 30 and December 20, 2019, and the results declared on December 23.

The BJP has lost a substantial number of FRA-sensitive seats in at least four assembly elections in the past year. In Maharashtra–which had elections in October 2019–the incumbent BJP lost about 22% FRA-sensitive seats and could not win a majority to form the government, as we explain later.

Similarly, the BJP lost the 2018 assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, partly due to the FRA, according to the assembly election analysis by the CFR-LA.

The BJP-led central government has since withdrawn a controversial amendment to the Indian Forest Act of 1947 that was criticised for, among other things, proposing to give more powers and immunity for using firearms to forest officials, Livemint reported on November 16, 2019.

On November 21, 2019, hundreds of tribals–from states including Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar, Uttarakhand and West Bengal–gathered at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to protest against the tardy implementation of the FRA.

Jharkhand lags in FRA implementation

Community rights–which vest forest-dwellers with the right to manage and govern the natural forest they have been using for generations–are one of the most important provisions of the FRA. Even by conservative estimates, Jharkhand has the potential to distribute community rights over 1.9 million hectares of forests–bigger than the area of Kuwait–according to a 2015 study by the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Washington-based non-profit.

Jharkhand had recognised just over 2% of its community claims potential, over 40,380 hectares, as on April 2018, according to government data. And it has recognised only a little more than half the claims filed by individuals.

In a recent affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, the state accepted that it had wrongly rejected claims under the FRA. It asked for time until July 2020 to review all the rejected claims and ascertain the number of wrongfully rejected claims.

This low number of settled claims has placed Jharkhand in the list of worst FRA implementers, earning it the tag “laggard state” from Oxfam, a non-profit, in a 2018 report. “For a state where 26% of its population is Adivasis, 31% of who reside in rural areas, this should be a matter of concern,” the report said.

The FRA is a strong tool for financial empowerment for economically backwards STs. In Jharkhand, every second person (49%) from Scheduled Tribes–and two of every five (40%) from Scheduled Castes–lives below the poverty line (BPL), said this 2017 report by the government think-tank Niti Aayog. Overall, 39.1% of people in Jharkhand live below the BPL as against the average national rate of 29.8%.

Source: Ministry of Tribal Affairs, India

Voting patterns

To break down the number of seats against the degree of influence FRA could have in the election results, researchers divided the seats into three ‘value’ categories: critical, high and good. In ‘critical’ seats, the most number of voters is affected by FRA, a high proportion of the population is tribal, and a large area comes under forests. Those categorised under ‘good’ have a comparatively lower population of tribespeople and area under forests.

Source: Independent analysis by Tushar Shah and Archana Soreng, FRA researchers 

In the 2014 assembly elections, the ruling BJP won about 42% of the critical 62 seats. The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), the main opposition party in the state, won about 30% seats. The Congress, which has never won an assembly election since the formation of the state in 2001, won only about 5% of seats while the remaining 23% went to candidates from ‘other’ parties.

The JMM and candidates from other parties were collectively runners-up in about 37% of the 62 seats, and could have ensured victory in more seats had they emphasised implementation of the FRA as an election issue, the analysts said. If the BJP, which heads the Jharkhand state government, fails to emphasise FRA in the upcoming elections, it may win fewer seats than in 2014.

FRA and voting decisions 

The BJP has lost FRA-sensitive seats in at least four assembly elections in the past year with Maharashtra being the latest where the party lost 22% critical, high and good value FRA sensitive seats, combined, according to the analysis of Maharashtra election results held in October 2019. In 2014, the BJP had won three of the seven critical value seats. In 2019, it lost all three.

FRA could, if made an election issue, change the results on at least 70% of the total 288 assembly seats in Maharashtra, IndiaSpend had reported on October 18, 2019.

FRA also played an important role, as we said, in the defeat of the incumbent BJP party in the 2018 assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In its manifesto for the 2018 Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, the Congress had promised to implement the FRA, and won 68% more seats of the total 39 seats reserved for SCs and STs than in the 2013 election. The BJP lost 75% of the seats it had won in the last election, as per the CFR-LA’s analysis.

In Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the Congress won by a smaller margin than in Chhattisgarh, the party had not pushed the land rights issue as vehemently, according to the analysis.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Bhasker Tripathi – For the last five years, Bhasker has specialised in development journalism, writing on environment, agriculture, energy and gender. He started his career with Gaon Connection, a rural-media platform. His last job was coordinating Land Conflict Watch, a non-profit data journalism project that analyses land conflicts across India. He was named as one of the best young journalists from developing countries by the United Kingdom’s Foreign Press Association & Thompson Foundation.

Courtesy: IndiaSpend

The post In Jharkhand, Forest Rights Could Decide Votes In 77% Assembly Seats appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“I feel that the data is misleading,” Sanjay Upadhyay, an environmental lawyer and founder of the Enviro Legal Defence Firm (ELDF), India’s first environmental law firm, told IndiaSpend. “It shows that the number of environmental offences have increased so many folds but without any true impact on the environment.”

In 2016, the police registered 4,732 environmental offences, which rose 790% to 42,143 cases in 2017, according to the NCRB’s latest crime data released on October 21, 2019, after a year’s delay. As many as 29,659 cases were under the tobacco law.

In comparison, the police recorded only 36 offences under the laws for air and water pollution, even though India is home to 14 of the planet’s 20 most polluted cities.

The police registered about 8,400 cases (20% of all cases) under another new category of environmental offences: noise pollution. Some of these offences might impact the environment, such as noise near a forest reserve, but these could also be related to offences within a city. There are no publicly available data on the details of the crimes.
 

Source: National Crime Record Bureau, 2017

Crimes under the tobacco law

The Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 prohibits public smoking, advertisement of tobacco products, and regulates the terms of trade of such products, among other things.

Of the 29,659 cases under the law, Tamil Nadu registered the most–20,640 cases, or about 70%. The second-highest number of cases was in Kerala, with about 23% (6,743) of the total cases. (Click here for the state-wise number of environmental offences.)

The data do not specify whether these offences are related to the use of plastic in packaging of tobacco products, public smoking or the illegal sale of tobacco or tendu leaves, a forest produce used to roll bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes), Upadhyay said. “These numbers need to be disaggregated to show their environmental impact.”

Offences for air and water pollution

Experts found the 36 recorded offences for air and water pollution misleading too.

“This number is completely disputable,” said Upadhyay. “There are 5,000 cases in the NGT [National Green Tribunal] itself, out of which a good 80% would be related to air and water act.” The NGT was set up in 2010 as a special tribunal for the expeditious disposal of civil cases relating to environmental protection and conservation of forests and other natural resources, including enforcement of legal rights related to the environment.

One of the reasons for such a low number of environmental offences in the NCRB report is because it records only criminal cases related to the environment, whereas most of the environmental cases are civil in nature, Upadhyay explained. Any agency collecting data on environmental crimes should also source data from pollution control boards and all environmental regulatory agencies, he said.

Law targets tribespeople

The police recorded 3,842 environmental offences under the three laws governing forests—the Indian Forest Act, the Forest (Conservation) Act and the Wildlife Protection Act, making up 9% of total environmental offences recorded in 2017.

All three laws govern resource extraction, often excluding people from the forest and restricting human activity in protected areas such as national parks and tiger reserves. Some experts believe that these laws unfairly punish deprived communities, especially tribespeople.

“… State officials tasked with implementing pollution control laws often do not fully comprehend them,” Geetanjoy Sahu, an associate professor at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences wrote, in an article co-authored for Scroll.in in January 2018.

“While they rarely punish industrial polluters and illegal miners, pollution control officials often deploy the full might of the law against the deprived communities that are dependent on natural resources for livelihood such as the Adivasis (indigenous peoples),” Sahu wrote.

Sahu advocated that the forest administration must make tribespeople aware of the environmental rules and regulations they seem to be breaking.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post 70% Of Environmental ‘Crimes’ Involved Smoking Or Tobacco Products appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Centre amended the Special Economic Zones Act (SEZs Act) in August 2019 to broaden the definition of “person” who can set up their units in these zones. After the amendment, “trust” or “any entity as may be notified by the Central Government” can set up their operation in SEZs.

The bill does not review taxes imposed on units inside SEZs, nor does it address fine-tuning of the policy according to state- and sector-specific requirements, rising dependency on imports, or lack of connectivity and infrastructure, experts pointed out.

SEZs are clusters developed to foster industries which can help boost exports. The government has, so far, notified 351 SEZs of which 232 across India were operationalised. However, about 150 SEZs across India remain non-operational, with half of the land notified for SEZs lying vacant.

The establishment of these SEZs has also fueled land conflicts ever since their inception. About 11 such conflicts have been recorded so far by Land Conflict Watch (LCW), an independent network of researchers and journalists across India mapping land conflicts.

This is the fourth story in our series examining the 35 bills that the 17th Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) passed during its last session, when it worked for 281 hours over 37 days to pass a bill every eight hours on average, referring none to a committee for detailed scrutiny. The SEZ bill was passed on August 5, 2019, when the lower house of parliament abrogated Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional provision. Critics say many approved bills had infirmities that further debate and committee appraisal could have ironed out. 

More industries likely in SEZs

After the amendment, infrastructure investment trusts and real estate investment trusts (REITs) will be permitted to operate in SEZs, Sharmila Kantha, principal consultant, Confederation of India Industry, an industry body, told IndiaSpend. The construction and development of SEZs can benefit greatly from the REITs which have attracted significant investor attention.

The government is planning to create large Coastal Economic Zones (CEZs) consisting of a series of SEZs, and this process will involve real estate and infrastructure development where these entities [REITs] can participate, Kantha said.

CEZs are economic regions, which can comprise of many SEZs, that are being developed by the Indian government along the country’s coastline, to utilise port connectivity. They are part of the Centre’s ambitious Sagarmala project that aims at port-led industrialisation. Ports would be developed across all the coastal states and union territories, which would reduce the time and cost of cargo movement, and hence, boost exports.

Businesses and ports that are fashioned as trusts will now be eligible to invest in SEZs. The amendment will therefore open up a plethora of new investments and help promote exports, Kantha said.

Before bringing the bill, the government had passed an ordinance to allow trusts inside SEZs. This step was criticised by other parties in the Lok Sabha. “Large chunk of trusts owned by minorities have been shut down under the previous Act. There are suspicions that the government has a hidden agenda to favour a selected few who are close to the government and have vested interests,” D N V Senthilkumar, DMK party leader, had said in the Lok Sabha, The Hindu reported on June 26, 2019. 

An increased number of units in SEZs would improve their utilisation–many SEZs are spread across more than 400-500 acres (equal to 378 football fields combined) but have only a few exporting units, resulting in acute under-utilisation of the land allotted, said Malini Laxminarayan Tantri, assistant professor, Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), a Bengaluru-based interdisciplinary research and training institute.

“Removal of the sunset clause is more urgent [than allowing trusts to set-up their businesses inside SEZs] as the clause is creating doubts in investors minds,” Anand Giri, deputy director, Exports Promotion Council for EOUs (Export Oriented Units) and SEZs, an arm of the commerce ministry, told IndiaSpend.

According to the clause, only SEZs operationalised before 2020 would be able to enjoy the fiscal benefits of the policy. 

There are still many notified SEZs that are yet to start operation, which see no benefit in starting their operations if the sunset clause does not end. It should be withdrawn urgently for at least the 351 notified SEZs, Giri said adding that decline in investments in SEZs would mean decline in jobs and growth of exports.

SEZ exports in 2018-19 are 70x of 2001, but growth story has gaps

The concept of SEZs was first introduced in India in 2000. Before that, India had a number of export processing zones (EPZs), which also aimed to boost exports but lacked infrastructure and attractive fiscal packages, and involved complicated regulations. 

To overcome these shortcomings, India announced an SEZ policy in April 2000, and enacted the SEZ Act in 2005. The Act exempted export-related profits from income tax for the first five years, and applied income tax on 50% of such profits for the next five.

Currently, besides tax exemptions, industries set up in SEZs enjoy fiscal benefits including duty-free import and purchase of goods, exemption from goods and services tax and levies imposed by state governments.

In 2018-19, India exported goods worth Rs 7.01 lakh crore ($98 billion), up about 30% from Rs 4.94 lakh crore ($69 billion) in 2013-14, according to government data.

However, these numbers do not attest to the success of the current SEZ policy, experts told IndiaSpend.

In absolute numbers, SEZs’ exports have increased significantly from Rs 10,000 crore in 2001 to Rs 7,01,179 crore in 2018-19 (70 times of 2001), increasing SEZs’ share in India’s total exports from 5% in 2001 to 30% in 2018-19, said Tantri of ISEC. However, she asked, “Why [have] India’s exports have not increased at the same rate?”

“Does it not indicate realignment of investment and exports from non-SEZ domestic trade areas to SEZs?” Tantri said, adding that to ascertain the real success of SEZs, their “import intensity” would have to be assessed but the government of India has stopped publishing those details after 2010.

Import intensity of exports is the degree of value addition to an imported item that subsequently gets exported. It shows the dependence of exports on imported raw material. In the Indian context, gems and jewellery is a typical example of an export product with high import intensity.

In 2007-08, SEZs had an import intensity as high as 75%, with an increasing trend noticeable after 2000, compared to the earlier EPZs structure, according to a 2010 study that Tantri wrote about in the journal Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).

Compared to some other countries where such zones have catalysed exports, Indian SEZs have under-performed, said Kantha of CII. Exports from SEZs have grown much faster than overall exports in recent years, showing that they are becoming more popular with exporters, she added.

How SEZ policy can be improved

SEZs can become a more dynamic and potent instrument for expanding exports with some additional steps, including setting up the new SEZs in CEZs as envisaged under the Sagarmala port-led development strategy, as CEZs have strong hinterland connectivity to create domestic supply chains, Kantha said. Proper interlinkages with the domestic tariff area should also be ensured.

Minimum alternate tax (MAT) imposed on entities in SEZs could be reduced, Kantha said, referring to the Centre’s 2011 decision to impose an 18% MAT on book-profits, which applies despite their income tax exemptions. In September 2019, the government slashed MAT to 15%.

The SEZ policy should include low-cost worker housing and amenities to attract workers from different parts of the country for labour-intensive exports, Kantha added.

Tantri, on the other hand, was of the view that fiscal incentives to companies operating or setting up inside SEZs should be kept in check.

“Undue emphasis on incentives may just lure investors to shift their production base rather than encouraging new investments in an economy,” she said. “Under such circumstances, SEZs may not really have any value addition to the economy.”

The SEZ policy should be fine-tuned as per sector- or state-specific priorities. Emphasis should be laid on making it easier to do business within SEZs, Tantri said.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Infrastructure, Realty Trusts Can Now Set Up Business In SEZs, But Will This Increase Exports? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Representational image: Protesters stage a demonstration at the Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam.

Just days before, the government had invited the private sector to participate in reclaiming land and thereby, “make money”. Of the 320 million hectares area of the country, about 30% or 90 million hectares is wasteland, and should “immediately” be put to economic use, as per Anil Kumar Jain, special secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEFCC).

Nearly 30% of India’s land area–as much as the area of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra put together–has degraded due to deforestation, over-cultivation, soil erosion and depletion of wetlands. This land loss is not only whittling away India’s gross domestic product by 2.5% every year and affecting its crop yield, but is also exacerbating climate change events in the country which, in turn, are causing even greater degradation, as IndiaSpend reported on September 2, 2019.

However, the two statements have revived the controversy over the involvement of private players in land restoration in India, with activists warning that without involving local communities and legally recognising their tenurial rights over forest resources, private participation would fuel conflict. Private participation must be allowed only outside forests and in agroforestry, some experts told IndiaSpend, while others emphasised the need to ensure local communities’ involvement.

Reclaiming 26 million hectares (mha) of degraded land would also require an integrated national policy, and massive resource allocation, experts said.

A need to safeguard local community rights
Since private players bring in both investment and trade in forest produce, it could lead to conflicts in Indian forests, undermining the livelihood of forest communities, said Souparna Lahiri, climate campaigner and advisor for Global Forest Coalition, a non-profit for forest-related policy debates. He warned against disenfranchising local communities while bringing in the private sector.

Already, the country’s top court is reviewing state governments’ rejection of two million forest-dweller families’ claims over forest land they have traditionally inhabited, after having stayed its own order to evict these families.

Involvement of private players is ideal only outside forest areas and in agroforestry, opined Pia Sethi, senior fellow and area convener of the centre for biodiversity and ecosystem services at The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI), a think-tank.

Of the 26 mha degraded land that India has promised to restore, 21 mha (about 81%) is forest land, and 5 mha lies outside forests.

Private players could help create additional tree cover outside the forest area through agroforestry (a practice where farmers plant trees along with other crops for selling wood), which will not only help India achieve its restoration target, but also help achieve its climate pledge of creating an additional carbon sink (a natural reservoir that stores carbon) of 2.5-3 billion tonnes, Sethi said.

“Within forest areas, one can look at a PPP [public-private partnership] model, but it will then require a lot of safeguards to make sure the rights of people are not affected,” Sethi said, adding that, “third party monitoring will also be required to make sure the benefits like forest produce are equitably shared and natural forest areas with high biodiversity are not targeted.”

Where private players are invited to manage forests, the communities should be protected by first settling their community forest resource (CFR) rights under the Forest Rights Act of 2006, said Yogesh Gokhle, fellow and area convener of the centre for biodiversity and ecosystem services at New Delhi-based research group TERI.

CFR rights enable the Gram Sabha (village council) to actively manage forests in collaboration with the forest department, Gokhle said, warning against denying forest dwellers’ rights over resources in the name of generating employment.

In fact, any private organisations that choose to get involved must ensure local communities’ participation in restoring degraded land and forest cover. Only then would they be seen as “neighbours of choice”, said Mukund Ranjan, chairperson of the environment committee at industry association FICCI.

Private businesses can safeguard community rights and encourage their participation by sharing profits with the locals, involving them through the various phases of restoration work, and encouraging them to take ownership of reclaimed lands that become productive assets.

IndiaSpend sought comment from Anil Kumar Jain, special secretary, MOEFCC, over email and on the phone, over three days. This story will be updated when he responds.

A coherent approach
The government’s promise to restore 26 mha of degraded land is not only economically crucial, but will also help the country support the global fight against climate change by creating an additional carbon sink. Degraded land loses its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2)–the greenhouse gas (GHG) that is the biggest factor in global warming.

However, the country’s approach to dealing with land degradation has been scattered, experts said, and needs greater fund allocation.

The first thing that India needs to do is to create an integrated land-use policy. Currently, all measures are being taken in silos, said Sethi. While separate policies for agriculture and forests are present, what is needed is an all-encompassing land-use policy. All activities to reclaim degraded agricultural or forest land should be connected to a nodal department that monitors and addresses these issues and ensures synergy.

Currently, India has no such policy. The Union Ministry of Rural Development, however, attempted to bring a land-use policy in 2013 but failed to operationalise it. According to the draft, this policy aimed to demarcate the country’s land into zones based on predominant land use. For example, if a land zone has been used for agriculture, the policy would insure against diversion of that land for any other use, preventing even the government from acquiring agricultural land for industrial or any other activities. Similar was the case with land zones that were ecologically important, such as forests.

“This policy could not see the light of the day due to political reasons as land is a state subject,” a researcher with expertise in the field, who does not wish to be named, told IndiaSpend.

The Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP) of the Department of Land Resources of the Ministry of Rural Development, which aims to conserve and develop natural resources such as water and soil to protect regions against land degradation and droughts, has an annual target of 5 million hectares. However, allocation of funds to these programmes is dismal, said Gokhle. There are no data available on how far these yearly targets have been fulfilled.

While the IWMP was launched in 2009, the Modi government, in a policy change, made it a part of its Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayi Yojana (Prime Minister’s Agriculture Irrigation Scheme) in 2015; after that the budget allocation to IWMP shrank by 19% to Rs 1,841 crore in 2018-19, against Rs 2,284 crore in 2014-15.

While watershed programmes have been in place for more than 50 years, the IWMP was a notch above because it had a proper mechanism to restore degraded land. It should be bolstered and allocated sufficient funds, Gokhle said.

“Beyond merely offering financial support, private players can play a direct role in the redevelopment of degraded or wasted land,” Rajan of FICCI said, citing some examples. The private sector has been responsible for the restoration of depleted mine sites to revive the traditional flora and fauna; the Tata Steel mines in Noamundi, Jharkhand, are an example.

Similarly, wastelands have been utilised by private players for various agricultural activities, including plantations. JK Paper, for instance, started massive farm forestry and agroforestry plantations in its paper mill catchment area in 1990. It invested significantly in research and development for disease-resistant, high-yielding varieties of eucalyptus, subabul and casuarina, and offered farmers subsidised seedlings and clonal plants, as well as financial support through banks, technical guidance for pulpwood farming, harvesting support and buy-back assurance for wood.

Public-private partnerships, including the leverage of corporate social responsibility funds (whereby corporates are required to invest some share of their profits in social welfare activities), could further help a range of land reclamation and anti-desertification activities, including the creation of green belts, water conservation, forestry projects, and so on, Rajan said.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post India’s Pledge To Restore 26 Mn Hectare Degraded Land Could Fuel Land Conflicts appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Air quality plummets every year at the onset of the winter in northern India, and stubble burning in the farm states of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh is estimated to account for 20-30% of Delhi’s fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5).

The ‘Odd-Even’ rule (that allows odd- and even-numbered vehicles on the road on alternate days) will come into force from November 4, 2019, for about two weeks. Delhi government is also considering staggered office hours to reduce traffic congestion.

Meanwhile, the Punjab government has asked the Centre for financial help to offer farmers an incentive of Rs 100 per quintal for not burning crop residue.

Due to the short window between the harvesting of paddy and the sowing of wheat, farmers clear their fields for sowing by setting fire to the leftover post-harvest paddy straw.

This process of stubble burning in the farm states of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh accounts for 20-30% of Delhi’s fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5), according to two separate estimates–a 2016 study from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT Kanpur); and a 2018 study by a Delhi-based think-tank, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).

PM 2.5 is a pollutant about 30 times finer than a human hair. It can be inhaled deep into the lungs, and can cause heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and respiratory diseases. The extent of PM 2.5 pollution is considered the best indicator of health risks from air pollution, according to the World Health Organization.

The current stubble-burning incidents will not have much effect on Delhi’s air due to climatic conditions, Kuldeep Shrivastava, senior scientist at the India Meteorology Department (IMD) in Delhi, told IndiaSpend. The situation will change in the second half of October.
“Due to heavy Easterly winds entering Delhi from Central Uttar Pradesh region and moving towards Punjab and Haryana, all the pollutants from current stubble burning are being pushed into the Pakistan side,” Shrivastava said, adding that for the next 10-15 days stubble burning will not have much effect on Delhi’s air.

“But towards the end of October, wind patterns change into north-westerly, meaning air enters Delhi from Punjab and Haryana, carrying the pollution of stubble burning,” Shrivastava said, “And because at this time of the year winds are lighter and there is no rainfall activity, the pollution does not disperse.” 

Fires caused mostly by burning of early basmati varieties
The recent fire incidents have been spotted in Amritsar and Tarn Taran districts of Punjab which predominantly grow early basmati varieties (varieties that are harvested earlier than the common type), as per a tweet by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a Delhi-based think tank, on September 26, 2019.

The most number of fire counts in a day, about 99, were spotted on September 24, 2019. CEEW has been tracking the fires through satellite imagery.

Usually the activity of stubble burning picks up in October and goes on until November. During these two months in 2018, Punjab alone recorded more than 50,000 stubble-burning cases, according to this March 2019 study by CEEW.

Stubble Burning In Punjab During Oct-Nov

Source: CEEW

In 2018, there were more than 108,000 stubble burning incidents in Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. This was a 47% decline compared to 2016, The Print reported on September 9, 2019, using data from different sources. These states burn about 20 million tonnes of paddy straw in October and November each year–about 2 million truckloads of paddy straw at 10 tonnes per truck.

The governments of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, in coordination with the central government and the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), have been trying to reduce the number of such cases by 70% in 2019.

Measures include: Promotion of Super Straw Management System (Super SMS), an attachment compatible with any combine harvester which ensures that straws are cut and spread evenly on the field; promotion of a machine called Happy Seeder which helps in sowing wheat crop without the need of moving the straw spread by SMS; establishment of custom hiring centres (CHC) from where farmers can rent such machines.

Under a centrally sponsored 2018 scheme, the ‘Agricultural Mechanisation for in-situ Management of Crop Residues’, the central government has approved a budget of Rs 1,151.80 crore for 2018-19 and 2019-20 for the promotion of Super SMS and Happy Seeder in Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, according to this August 2019 government release.

Under the scheme, individual buyers get 50% subsidy and farmers’ cooperatives, self-help groups, registered societies and other entrepreneurs looking to set up a CHC get 80% subsidy.

However, CEEW’s 2019 study noted, even after the scheme farmers continued to burn residue in the wheat harvest season in 2018, just as they seem to be doing again at paddy harvest time now.

However, Trilochan Mohapatra, director general of ICAR, is optimistic that the number of crop burning cases will fall substantially this year.
“This year Haryana is likely to be free from stubble burning. But Punjab and Uttar Pradesh will not be completely free. There has been vast improvement after our intervention,” Mohapatra told The Economic Times in an August 2019 interview. “Chief secretaries and secretaries of concerned departments along with ICAR officials review the situation every month and take corrective action. The pollution index will improve substantially this time,” he added.

After studying the ground realities and how the farmers are reacting to the mechanisation scheme, the CEEW study makes the following suggestions:

Make paddy residue management technologies available with fixed rentals: The Happy Seeder technology coupled with Super SMS-mounted combine harvesters are an innovative and potentially scalable solution to manage paddy residue. To widen use, a careful assessment is needed of farm-level constraints to scaling up, of trade-offs, and of viable business models. However, it is important to fix a uniform rental rate to improve the efficiency of usage and even pricing; app-based rental models could be promoted.

Promote short-duration rice varieties: Punjab Agricultural University has developed early-maturing varieties of rice, such as PR 126 and PR 127. The PR 126 matures in about 123-125 days after seeding and PR 127 in about 137 days. Both the varieties yield around 30 quintals per acre and consume less water than late maturing PUSA varieties that require more water and also leave heavier stubble. A shift to early-maturing rice varieties will allow farmers more time for clearing and preparing fields for sowing wheat. These varieties have a higher yield, consume less water, and resist diseases better; therefore, they can prove more profitable.

Raise farmer awareness: Misperceptions of practices or of cost of alternative technologies of residue removal and other in situ practices seriously constrain uptake. Better residue management practices need to be demonstrated through more, better awareness campaigns and design information tools.

Give farmers incentives to move away from the rice-wheat cultivation cycle: In the long term, Punjab needs to shift away from rice-wheat rotation. Current price signals and marketing and procurement policies of crops other than paddy do not offer farmers at-par incentives to shift away from paddy cultivation. Even if MSPs are announced (for pulses, for example), procurement is still an issue. In choosing between the labour and mechanisation options of managing straw, farmers prefer cash incentives to subsidies.

Set up mechanisms to collect paddy residue: Enterprises such as paper plants can recycle paddy residue; but, to run economically, a plant needs residue from 60-70 acres of land daily, along with six months of storage infrastructure. Currently, there is no uniform mechanism to collect, store, or transport paddy residue; since supply is not assured, industry lacks an incentive to invest in additional plants. Assigning economic value to the residue and recycling it should incentivise the building of this mechanism.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post As Nearby States Report 350 Stubble Fires In 7 Days, Delhi Prepares To Deal With Bad Air appeared first on SabrangIndia.

New Delhi: The Delhi police are India’s best in terms of staffing, infrastructure and use of budget, followed by Kerala and Maharashtra, a new study has revealed. Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar are the worst and most overworked among the 22 states analysed. 

These findings are based on a Police Adequacy Index, derived from national data, part of the ‘Status of Policing in India Report 2019’, released on August 27, 2019 by Common Cause and Lokniti–Centre for the Study Developing Societies, a nonprofit and a think tank, respectively, based in New Delhi. 

The study of 11,000 personnel in 22 states used available government data to analyse and rank the performance of state police on parameters of staffing, infrastructure and budget. Researchers also interviewed 11,834 police personnel across 105 locations in 21 states between February and April 2019. The survey covered the personnel’s opinions over adequacy of police infrastructure, their duties and their perception over several types of crimes and different sections of the society. You can IndiaSpend’s full coverage of the study, here and here.

The index

To derive indices, researchers used data from the Bureau of Police Research and Development and the National Crime Records Bureau for the following parameters:
 

1. Strength:
   1. Police strength as a percentage of sanctioned strength (2012-16 average)
2. Infrastructure
   1. Police stations having vehicles (2012-16 average)
   2. Police stations having telephones and wireless (2012-2016 average)
   3. Computers per police station (2012-2016 average)
3. Budget
   1. Police expenditure as a percentage of budget (2014-16 average)

These indicators are then used to derive index scores on each of the three heads: An index score of zero indicates the worst performing state and a score of one indicates the best performing state.

Overall, as of 2016, Indian police forces were working at 77.4% of their sanctioned capacity, the study said, leading to personnel being overworked. 

The study also pointed out the lack of diversity in the India police. About 86% states (19 of 22) did not fulfil their Scheduled Castes (SC) quota, 73% (16 of 22) did not fulfill their Scheduled Tribes (ST) quotas while 59% (13 of 22) failed to fulfil their Other Backward Classes (OBC) quotas, it said.

None of the states achieved the mandated 33% representation of women in the police force. Further, while 14.3% of all police personnel were officers in 2016–up from 11.6% in 2007, the proportion of officers among policewomen has declined from 11.4% in 2007 to 10.2% in 2016. 

While 41% personnel think women lack the “physical strength and aggressive behaviour” required for the job, 32% think “women police are incapable of handling high intensity crimes and cases”, and 51% think that, due to “inflexible working hours, it is not alright for women to work in the police force as they cannot attend to homely duties”, as IndiaSpend reported on August 29, 2019.

Further, 267 police stations across India had no telephones and 129 had no wireless communication devices as of January 2017, as IndiaSpend reported on August 24, 2019, citing the latest available data from the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD).

There were eight vehicles for every 100 police personnel for responding to distress calls, patrolling and maintaining law and order in their jurisdictions.

Across the 22 states analysed in the study, police stations had, on average, six computers each. Delhi had the highest (16.5 computers per police station) and Bihar had the lowest (0.6). 

The utilisation of police forces’ modernisation budget was less than half (48%) of the funding available, according to an IndiaSpend analysis (cited above) of government data.

Nagaland, Kerala had best staffing, Delhi best infrastructure, Tamil Nadu spent best

Delhi police performs well on both infrastructure (1.03) and strength (0.70) parameters. 

Uttar Pradesh, the worst performer in the country, scored poorly on both the police strength (0.10) and the budget utilisation (0.05).
However, it scored well in Infrastructure indicators with an index value of 0.79. The overall index value of the state remained at 0.31, lower than the national overall index value of 0.42. 

Nagaland had the best score on police strength (0.80), followed by Kerala (0.71) and Delhi (0.70). Delhi had the best infrastructure (1.03), followed by Haryana (0.94) and Kerala (0.89). Tamil Nadu scored the highest on budget utilisation (0.09), followed by Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan and Haryana (0.08).

Telangana (0.41), Andhra Pradesh (0.41), Jharkhand (0.41), West Bengal (0.40), Gujarat (0.40), Bihar (0.35) and Chhattisgarh (0.34) also scored below the national average on the Index.

In general, states performed better on infrastructure indicators than on budget utilisation, the study said. The inadequacy of police infrastructure can hardly be attributed to the inadequacy of budget, said the study, adding that most states by a margin underutilised their budget resources.

“Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, despite using comparatively marginal proportion of the allocated budget, boast of a better infrastructure than many other states. Yet, both States land in the absolute bottom of ranking,” the study said. 

Uttarakhand is the exact contrary to these two States, the study pointed out. The state uses much lesser proportion of the allocated budget but boasts better infrastructure and better proportionate strength and hence a better overall ranking.

These inadequacies affect the working conditions of police personnel, with many of them being overworked, as the survey’s findings show:
 

• Police personnel work for 14 hours a day on an average, with about 80% personnel working for more than 8 hours a day
• Nearly half the personnel work overtime regularly, while 80% do not get paid for overtime work
• One half the personnel do not get any weekly off days
• About 75% believe that their workload is affecting their physical and mental health
• A quarter reported that senior police personnel ask their juniors to do their household/personal jobs even though they are not meant to do it. Personnel from the SC, ST and OBC are more likely to report this than other caste groups
• 40% personnel report the use of bad language by senior officers
• 37% personnel are willing to give up their jobs for another profession, if the perks and salaries remain the same.

Political pressure biggest hindrance in investigations

About 28% police personnel believe that “pressure from politicians” is the “biggest hindrance” in crime investigations, found the survey.

When asked about the frequency of such pressure, one in three personnel reported facing such pressure “many times” in the course of a crime investigation. A similar percentage reported that unwilling witnesses were a hindrance “many times”.

The question posed was: “Considering the past 2-3 years of your work experience, how often have you encountered political pressure during investigation of a crime?” They were asked to choose one of these responses: many times, sometimes, rarely or never.

Further, 38% personnel reported always facing pressure from politicians in cases of crime involving influential persons, the study said.

Three out of five police personnel surveyed reported transfer as the most common consequence of not complying with external pressures, the study said.

(Tripathi is an IndiaSpend reporting fellow.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post ‘Delhi Police India’s Best On Numbers, Infrastructure & Money Use, UP Police Worst’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The subsidy should only be provided to poor households, and the wealthy should be removed from the beneficiaries list, according to the June 15, 2019, policy brief titled “Ujjwala 2.0” by Collaborative Clean Air Policy Centre (CCAPC), a multi-organisational initiative.

With these two changes the central government’s Ujjwala scheme can help poor families make cooking gas their primary cooking fuel, and not burn firewood and cow dung, the easily available biomass fuels, the policy brief stated.

By distributing 73 million connections (as on July 14, 2019), the Ujjwala scheme has met 91.25% of its target of 80 million connections to poor households by 2020. This is a 35-percentage-point rise since 2014. However, despite the soaring consumer numbers, cooking gas consumption rose by just 0.8% over two years to 2017, and the number of customers increased by 6%, IndiaSpend reported on April 22, 2019.

Beneficiaries under the Ujjwala scheme have only bought 3.4 refills per capita annually, according to government data. For these households to completely switch to cooking gas, at least nine cylinders are required per year, according to the CCAPC brief.

Ujjwala beneficiaries have not switched completely to cooking gas because the refills are expensive. Around 85% of Ujjwala beneficiaries in rural Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh–where two-fifths of India’s rural population lives–still use solid fuels, IndiaSpend reported on April 30, 2019.

This is due to gaps in the Ujjwala scheme itself. The CCAPC brief suggested plugging these gaps with increased subsidies to poor households, and better targeting of subsidies.

Strengthening the Ujjwala scheme is also important to mitigate the health burden of India. Burning firewood, dung and agricultural residue for cooking and other household uses accounts for 25-30% of exposure to outdoor particulate matter (PM) pollution in the country. Each year, around 480,000 Indians die prematurely due to direct exposure to household air pollution, and another 270,000 succumb to indirect exposure outdoors, the policy brief stated.

Using cooking gas can help prevent such deaths, as well as reduce government expenditure on treating ailments that result from exposure to biomass fumes.

With each cooking gas cylinder distributed, the government can save between Rs 3,800 and Rs 18,000 on health expenditure. When cooking gas usage mitigates the household biomass burning completely, 58% of the country’s 597 districts will breathe safer air, the brief said.

Budget for cooking gas subsidies grew by 63% in 2019-20

The initial goal of the Ujjwala scheme launched in 2016 was to target 50 million poor households, of 87.3 million identified by the Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011 (SECC).

In February 2018, this target was revised to target most of the 80 million poor households by 2020. The scheme was also expanded to cover all scheduled caste/scheduled tribe households, beneficiaries of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Gramin) (PMAYG), Antyoday Anna Yojana (AAY), forest dwellers, most backward classes (MBC), tea and ex-tea garden tribes, people residing on islands, etc. in addition to the SECC list.

In the 2019-20 budget, the government is estimated to spend Rs 32,989 crore on cooking gas subsidy, which is 63% higher than the revised estimates of 2018-19, according to IndiaSpend’s analysis.
 

Source: India Budget

The allocation for cooking gas connection to poor households fell 15%, while the allocation for direct benefit transfer (DBT) is up by 79%.
“I am glad to see the increase in allocation. It is likely that the increase is directly a function of the increase in beneficiaries,” said Santosh Harish, fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a Delhi-based think-tank. Harish is also the editor of CCAPC.

Increase cooking gas subsidy for poor households 

Under the Ujjwala scheme, the government gives women from below-poverty-line (BPL) households their first cooking gas connection. The connection includes a cylinder, regulator and  connecting tube.

The government pays for the upfront cost of the connection, around Rs 1,600, to the cooking gas agency concerned. It is repaid by the households later as monthly installments that come from the Rs 200-Rs 300 subsidy provided for refills. However, here is the catch: until the amount of Rs 1,600 is recovered by the gas agencies, these poor households do not get the per-cylinder subsidy credited through DBT in their bank accounts.

It can take six to 10 refill cylinders for these households to repay this loan. Meanwhile, they are forced to buy refills by paying the market rates upfront. It can cost between Rs 700 and 900 per cylinder, due to changing prices in the international fuel market. This is unaffordable for the poor households, as it is up to 25% of their monthly family income, IndiaSpend found in its April 2019 ground reports from Rajasthan, Maharashtra and West Bengal, which can be read here and here.

Ujjwala beneficiaries having to pay the market rate for refills is a “structural” flaw in the scheme’s design, and a key reason why poor families are unable to sustain their cylinder use, IndiaSpend reported, citing a 2018 article from the Economic & Political Weekly.

This also means that poor households under Ujjwala, for the period of loan repayment, pay more for refills than richer households.

Starting from April 2018, the government, however, is trying to bridge this gap by allowing households to defer their loan repayment upto six refills or one year.

Even after loan repayment, a poor household will have to pay the upfront cost of the refill cylinder first and the subsidy gets credited to their bank accounts later, due to the design flaw. “Therefore, when non-subsidised cooking gas price is high, the poor household finds it difficult to pay the full market price at the time of purchase and gets demotivated to use cooking gas even though the government subsidy is deposited quickly in the consumers’ bank account,” said the policy brief.

Therefore, the amount of subsidy should be based on the household’s willingness to spend for cooking gas–roughly 4% of a poor household’s monthly income, said the paper quoting a 2016 survey by CRISIL, a market analysis company.

For example, in March 2019, when cooking gas rates for a 14.3 kg cylinder were Rs 701, the central government provided a Rs 206 subsidy to get the subsidised rate of a cylinder to Rs 495. If this subsidised rate comes down to Rs 350, poor households would more likely switch to cooking gas as a primary cooking fuel, said the brief.

Will limiting the cooking gas subsidy only to poor houses help?

The survey quoted in the policy brief (see the table below) also shows that the poorest two-quintile classes require cooking gas prices to be lower than the present subsidised price of Rs 495 per kg to keep their cooking gas costs within 4% of their overall monthly expenditure.

However, for the richest quintile, the same calculation suggests that these households do not require subsidies.

The table, as per the brief, also shows:
 

• With respect to monthly income, the percentage expenditure on cooking gas increases as one moves from the richest quintile to the poorest quintile. 
• The price of a subsidised cooking gas cylinder for households in the top three quintile classes is lower than the price these households are willing to pay to use cooking gas. Therefore, even if the subsidised price for these households is increased, they will likely continue buying cooking gas. 
• On the other hand, the subsidised price for the bottom two quintiles, with the most number of unconnected households, is higher than the price these households may be willing to pay to purchase cooking gas. These households are unable to pay for cooking gas, and will further shift away from cooking gas if the price increases.

Source: Policy Brief Ujjwala 2.0, Collaborative Clean Air Policy Centre 2019

Hence, the provision of universal subsidy should be scrapped as it reduces the subsidy rate, because the overall amount available for subsidy is shared across a large number of beneficiaries. Universal subsidy is also “regressive” as it makes cooking gas “unaffordable for the poor, while the benefits accrue to the relatively wealthy”, said the brief.

For better targeting of the subsidy, the government has initiated steps such as the “Give It Up” campaign in 2015, which resulted in more than 10 million middle-class households surrendering their subsidies. The government also excluded from cooking gas subsidy those who earn Rs 10 lakh or more per annum. These steps, however, “are not sufficient to focus the subsidies on the poor entirely” because the income threshold is fixed so high that most cooking gas consumers are still entitled to receive the subsidy, as per the brief.

Therefore, Ujjwala should have a two-tier, differential pricing for households: a lower price (or a higher subsidy) for the poor identified from the SECC list, and a higher price (lesser or no subsidy) for other consumers, recommends the brief.

If the government restricts the cooking gas subsidy to the households thus identified, more than 65% consumers will be removed from the list. This targeting will significantly reduce the financial burden on the government, even if the quantum of subsidies to poor households is increased, said the brief.

For example: cooking gas subsidy on nine cylinders, at Rs 350 per cylinder (as recommended above) to 87.3 million SECC households will put a Rs 27,500 crore ($4 billion) financial burden on the government, as per the brief. This is 58% lower than the current subsidy burden of around Rs 65,000 crore ($9.4 billion), estimated as per the current practice of giving 12 subsidised cooking gas cylinders with a per-cylinder subsidy of Rs 205 to all of India’s 280 million households with an cooking gas connection, it said.

A criticism of differential pricing in the market is the opportunity for diversion of lower-priced cooking gas to the non-subsidised commercial market, the brief said, adding that the DBT scheme will ensure against any subsidy leakage.

Experts, however, suggest that removing wealthier families from the cooking gas subsidy ambit could prove futile. “Given such wide solid fuel use even among richer households, it seems that increasing the price of a refill for them would be counterproductive,” said Ashish Gupta, research fellow at the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE), a non-profit research organisation.

“I think that we should experiment with further reducing the price of a refill for all rural households. I also think that for a small subset of very poor households, the cylinder should be much cheaper (or almost free),” Gupta said, adding that given the large health benefits of using cleaner fuels and the relatively small expenditures on cooking gas subsidies, fiscal considerations should not be given too much weight.

Cost and affordability or poverty is certainly important, but there are other important factors behind people choosing biomass over cooking gas including gender inequality (women do the cooking with solid fuels), and beliefs regarding the ease, taste and health impacts of cooking with solid fuels versus cooking gas (people think chulha food is tastier and healthier), said an April 2019 RICE study that Gupta co-authored.

Most rural households can gather free solid fuels–firewood, dung and agricultural residue–in their neighbourhood, and an cooking gas refill is considered an expensive alternative. Even in the richest rural asset decile, no more than 40% of households used cooking gas exclusively, as per the RICE study. This calls for generating awareness of the harms of burning solid fuels and encouraging men to cook, said Gupta.

Health gains offset the increased subsidy burden

The government should not see the potentially increased subsidies on cooking gas for the poor as a burden because it has substantial health benefits, according to the CCAPC brief.

Nearly 15.8 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)–the sum of the years of productive life lost due to disability–were lost in India on account of household air pollution in 2017. Household air pollution killed about 480,000 people in the same year, as reported earlier.

Using these numbers, the brief calculated that even by the most conservative estimates, the health value of a single cooking gas cylinder can vary between Rs 3,800 and Rs 18,000, said the brief, which is “far greater” than the Rs 350 per cylinder subsidy. “Therefore, the subsidy to poor households should be considered as a social investment,” it added.

Now, the question is how much effect would mitigating household biomass burning have on air pollution? If emissions of PM 2.5–inhalable particles 30 times finer than a human hair that can enter the bloodstream and cause illness–from all household sources are mitigated, 58% of the 597 districts of the country will meet the national safe air standard, an increase from 41% in 2015. Another 187 million people will breathe safe air, according to this April 2019 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a US-based peer-reviewed journal.

(Tripathi is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Make Cooking Gas Cheaper For Poor, Remove Subsidy For Rich: Study appeared first on SabrangIndia.

World Resource Institute

All other countries on the list belong to the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, receive almost half of India’s annual rainfall and have fewer natural water sources.

Even within India, all nine states and union territories that report the worst water stress lie in the Indo-Gangetic plain, which has a web of big and small rivers and lakes.

Chandigarh tops this list, as per the WRI, followed by Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

Why is India water-stressed despite widespread rainfall and a large number of water sources? “Overexploitation and mismanagement of water is the reason for this water stress,” said Shashi Shekhar, former secretary, ministry of water resources and Ganga rejuvenation, and a senior fellow with WRI India.

Inefficient agriculture, that uses up to 80% of all water resources in the country, is one of the primary reasons for India’s water stress, said Shekhar. Groundwater extraction–which provides for 40% of the country’s water needs–is significantly more than recharge.

The 17 countries dealing with acute water stress are home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population (1.75 billion). India ranks 13th on the list but at 1.36 billion, its population is more than triple that of the aggregate of the other 16 countries grappling with a water crisis, the study said.

About 600 million Indians are dealing with high-to-extreme water stress wherein over 40% of the annually available surface water is used every year, according to a 2018 study by government think-tank Niti Aayog 2018, reported by IndiaSpend on June 25, 2018.

About 200,000 people die every year due to inadequate access to safe water. The situation is likely to worsen as the demand for water exceeds supply by 2050, and India will face a 6% loss in its gross domestic product by 2050, the Aayog study said.

It is important for countries to address water stress because it can exacerbate conflict and migration, endanger water-dependent industries (mining, thermoelectric power generation, and manufacturing) and threaten food security, said the WRI study.

Climate change is also exacerbating this crisis leading to erratic rainfall, we further explain.

Qatar leads the list
Over a third (2.572 billion) of the world’s population lives in the 44 countries with “high” to “extremely high” water stress, said the WRI study.

Qatar, Israel and Lebanon are ranked first, second and third in the list of countries dealing with the worst water stress. India, as we earlier said, is ranked 13th, while neighbouring Pakistan stands at 14th, according to the study which uses data from 1960 to 2014, excluding anomaly events.
 

Source: Water Stress Rankings: World Resource Institute, Annual Rainfall: World Bank
Note: Annual Rainfall figures have been added by the correspondent to analyze the aridity of the countries. San Marino’s rainfall figures have been taken from this source.

Indian States Facing Extreme to Low Level of Water Stress

 Source: World Resource Institute

 
In India, nine states and union territories (UTs) have been categorised as regions of “extremely high” water stress. Chandigarh tops the list that also includes Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

Crisis-ridden states mismanage water
Except for Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, other water-stressed Indian states have mismanaged their water, according to the Niti Aayog report.

Water Management Scores, By State

Source: Composite Water Management Index, NITI Aayog

The Aayog analysed and scored 24 states on nine broad sectors and 28 indicators, including groundwater, irrigation, farm practices and drinking water. Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand scored below 60% on all the indicators.

The Aayog report did not have scores for Jammu and Kashmir, Puducherry and Chandigarh.

Irrigation is a critical factor
The historic exploitation of water for agriculture is responsible for the crisis in the states in the Indo-Gangetic plain, as we said earlier.

Punjab, Haryana and West-Uttar Pradesh are the worst-affected Indo-Gangetic states in terms of water stress and the main reason for this is their 40-year-old cropping pattern in which paddy, sugarcane, and wheat dominate — all water-guzzlers, as per Shekhar.

Since the government ensures the procurement of these water-intensive crops, their acreage grew in the past decades. But so did the depletion rate of level of groundwater, the primary source of irrigation.

All these states have alluvial soil (known to absorb the water), receive sufficient rainfall and have a number of rivers crisscrossing the region — factors that should have protected them from water stress, Shekhar pointed out. But the groundwater in these regions has reached a level that it will now take decades to recharge, he added, and that too only if no extraction takes place.

Govt research is flawed: expert
Shekhar also has reservations about the WRI study, because it uses historical government data along with other indicators. In India, the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) collects data with just one question in mind: is the extraction of water faster than its percolation? This, Shekhar said, presents an incorrect picture as CGWB data does not reflect water stress faced by states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

“In fact, the government data has not been updated for the last five to 10 years, because there is a lot of pressure on the CGWB not to update any new region as water-stressed,” Shekhar said.

The government data also take averages for very large areas, which does not yield a granular picture. “There are 30 million pump sets in this country, we don’t know how much water are these pumps exploiting. So, we don’t really know how much groundwater we are extracting,” said Shekhar.

Climate change is exacerbating the situation by causing longer dry spells and impacting the intensity of rainfall in India. Over 110 years to 2010, the number of heavy rainfall events in India has increased by 6% per decade. This is attributed to rising temperatures caused by climate change, as IndiaSpend reported on August 24, 2018. During heavy rainfall events, water does not percolate into the ground to recharge the aquifer and quickly runs off.

(Tripathi is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Why India, With Plentiful Rains & Rivers, Is On List Of World’s Most Water-Stressed Countries appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“24×7 power” is the government’s priority, India’s new power minister Raj Kumar Singh said on May 30, 2019. His predecessor, Piyush Goyal, declared India “power surplus” two years ago, and a government dashboard says 99.99% of rural homes–which account for nearly 7 in 10 Indian homes–now have grid power.

At the root of the contradictions between almost-universal electrification, “surplus” electricity and the inability to supply it around-the-clock to Indian homes is a debt that burdens state-owned electricity distribution companies (DISCOMs) nationwide, impairing their ability to build and maintain power grids and equipment.

The inability or refusal of state governments to increase power bills, as we explain later, has led to more borrowing and power shortages and made DISCOMs reluctant to buy available electricity, which means continuing blackouts and erratic power supply.  

This debt will reach Rs 2.6 lakh crore ($37 billion) by 2020, according to a May 2019 study by Crisil, a market research agency. When that happens, the debt will be the same as in 2015, which is when the Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY), the government’s bailout programme for DISCOMs, began.

“The much bigger need [other than DISCOM inefficiencies] is to address the large amount of free power that is distributed for irrigation and for rural households in the country,” Vibhav Nuwal, director, REconnect, a Bangalore-based energy solutions company, told IndiaSpend. Only if this electricity is metered and billed will DISCOM losses reduce, he said.

We sought comment from Vishal Kapoor, director, UDAY, at India’s power ministry over email and followed up with phone calls over two weeks, but there was no response. His office declined a request for an appointment. If and when there is a response, we will update this story.

The looming DISCOM debt of Rs 2.6 lakh crore will be more than the Centre’s combined 2017-18 spending on: highways; national railways; metro-rail systems; national food subsidies; cash transfers for national social-security schemes (direct benefit transfers); cooking-gas subsidies; capital expenditure for the defence services; space technology, applications and satellites.

India’s “traditional model” of managing the electricity distribution sector, warned a May 2018 paper by Prayas, a nonprofit that advises government, “is on the verge of collapse”, which means much of India’s electricity gains are threatened.

“Crucially, it is not just the fate of DISCOMs that is at stake—as electrification accelerates and millions of newly electrified households join the grid, also at stake is the fate of all the small, rural, and agricultural consumers,” said the Prayas paper.

The return of DISCOM debt to pre-UDAY levels does indicate the failure of UDAY, but this borrowed money, said experts, also allowed India to build more power plants and expand India’s electricity network, which is why many states now have “surpluses”.

The expansion costs could have been offset, if UDAY had kept to its other aims, such as getting states to increase power bills by 6% a year for four years till 2019. But the average increase over the period was half that, and supply losses by October 2018 were 25% instead of 15% as they were supposed to be by March 2019.

We sought comments from Aparna U, managing director, Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited, an amalgam of seven state-owned DISCOMs, over email and followed up with phone calls over two weeks. There was no response. Other officers from UP DISCOMs refused comment. We will update this story as and when we receive a response.

Does India have surplus power?

By the end of March 2019, India would have a 4.6% electricity surplus and a “peak power”–the maximum electricity demands–surplus of 2.5%, India’s Central Electricity Authority (CEA) predicted in July 2018.

Despite surpluses in some states and Goyal’s 2017 claims, India is not a power-surplus nation officially, although it has hoped to be one for three years since 2016.   

India’s “power deficit”–the difference between the demand and supply of electricity–is not zero. India’s electricity deficit in the financial year ending March 2019 was 0.6%, and the “peak power deficit”–shortfall from the maximum electricity demand in a year–was 0.8%.

“Power deficit is primarily due to the reluctance of debt-laden states’ DISCOMS in buying more power,” said Prateek Aggarwal, an expert on the power sector at the Council on Energy Environment and Water (CEEW), a Delhi-based think-tank.

India currently has around 356 gigawatts (GW) of installed generation capacity against a peak demand of about 177 gigawatts.

The nub of the issue: Power generation cannot be increased unless DISCOMs pay their dues.

It is also difficult to calculate how much electricity India needs for the 24×7 promise, said Aggarwal, “because most of rural and agricultural connections are not metered, and India does not really know how much power it needs to supply 24×7 electricity to all its connected homes”.

Despite UDAY, darkness

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his first term in 2014, 70% of India’s homes had been connected to the grid. His government accelerated that programme and connected 26 million more homes over 16 months to December 2018.

But thousands of Indian villages receive 12 hours or less electricity a day–because of DISCOM inefficiencies, as we said–and India’s per capita electricity consumption was 14% of the average per capita consumption of the rich countries that comprise the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), IndiaSpend reported on November 3, 2018.

In 2015, India’s DISCOMs collectively recovered less than 80% of their operational costs, we reported. On March 2015, DISCOMs had accumulated losses of about Rs 4.3 lakh crore.

So, DISCOMs borrowed money from banks (with interest rates as high as 14-15%) to cover their costs, their cycle of losses cancelling out India’s other gains: more coal, more power plants and more transmission lines, IndiaSpend reported on April 13, 2017.

Under UDAY, the power ministry, state governments and DISCOMs signed memoranda of understanding that said state governments would take over 75% of DISCOM debts–outstanding as on September 2015–through bonds with a maturity period of 10-15 years.

DISCOMs were given goals: reduce power and interest costs, monitor and reduce transmission losses and power theft, and fix faulty meters. By charging more, DISCOMs were to wipe out the difference between the cost of supply and average revenue by 2018-19.

In 15 states that account for 85% of national aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses, despite the debt takeover, UDAY failed, said the Crisil report we cited earlier.

National AT&C losses were 25.41% on October 2018, or more than 10 percentage points more than they were to be by March 2019, and instead of hiking tariffs by 5-6% every year, the 15 states increased bills by 3%, said the Crisil study.

How success drove failure

Why could UDAY not help DISCOMs be more profitable?

The answer, said experts, lies in the success of India’s electrification drive.

In 2016, a year after UDAY began, the Indian government launched another flagship programme to connect all the villages and households to the grid and to provide them with around-the-clock power.

“The time-bound objectives [of electrification drives] and UDAY were converging and diverging on certain aspects, which resulted in a haywire situation for the implementation agencies, such as the DISCOMs,” said Aggarwal of CEEW.

The government electrified 26.30 million rural households to achieve 99.93% electrification over 16 months to January 2019, a  “mammoth exercise” whose implementation created problems for DISCOMs: higher costs and reduced revenues from the newly connected households, mostly rural, paying low or no bills, said Aggarwal.

The blackouts continue primarily because DISCOMs are reluctant to buy more power, either because they do not have the money or are afraid consumers will not pay, said Aggarwal.

Your bills don’t reflect costs

Another reason why UDAY could not bailout DISCOMs is infrequent tariff hikes.

“Consumer tariffs are still not cost reflective,” said Vibhuti Garg, a senior energy specialist with the Global Subsidies Initiative at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think-tank.

India’s electricity regulatory agency allows DISCOMs to recover “regulatory assets” (the cost of power consumption) at a “later stage” from the consumer through higher bills.

Due to sporadic tariff hikes, India’s consumers owed DISCOMs Rs 76,963 crore by March 31, 2019, since DISCOMs were not allowed to raise tariff.

DISCOMs in three BJP-ruled states—Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Maharashtra—are responsible for 87% of the outstanding amount, said a May 20, 2019 study, by the India Ratings and Research, a market research agency.

The inability of DISCOMs to recover unpaid bills has been a long-standing concern for the government, which blames state regulators for not raising tariffs to cut losses, The Indian Express reported on May 27, 2019.

The DISCOM mess is often caused by populist measures. In many states, successive governments have kept electricity prices low for political gain, keeping DISCOMs in the red, IndiaSpend reported on April 2, 2018.

Better meters will also help, said Garg.

“The poor levels of metering across various electricity categories [mostly domestic and agricultural consumer], the lower billing and collection efficiencies resulting in limited fund inflow for DISCOMs will have to be fixed, if DISCOMs are to progress towards financially stable balance sheets,” said Aggarwal.

What can the government do?

If the government wants to fulfil its promise of “24×7 power”, said experts, it must accelerate the process of installing electricity meters in all homes, replace defective meters, ensure unpaid bills are paid and end electricity theft–which is easier said than done, as one UP police officer found on June 9, 2019.

The government will also need to address the problem of ensuring power stations are profitable before building more, or reducing “stranded assets” and “low utilisation”, as Aggarwal put it.

Since 2010, India has seen the cancellation of proposals to build power plants worth 573 gigawatts—1.5 times current national capacity—according to a 2018 report by Global Coal Plant Tracker, the End Coal advocacy group’s global repository of information on coal.

The lack of “long-term power-purchase agreements” was cited as one of the  leading causes for this “financial stress”, said the report.

(Tripathi is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Why India Fails To Supply 24×7 Electricity To All Homes appeared first on SabrangIndia.