India needs its own Green New Deal

There’s no storm that Mother Nature can throw at us that we can’t make 10x worse through poor planning and bad actions. Every year, we see multiple stories of flooding in the newspapers. Unprecedented rains and the climate crisis are often listed as a cause. And, while certainly, the climate crisis is making storms more severe, it would be a mistake to blame that alone. If we’re not planning (or enforcing) properly — cities paving over storm water drains, for instance — flooding is inevitable. And it’s not just poor planning — the abysmal non-cleaning of drains and accumulation of plastic waste don’t help either.
What India needs is its own version of a Green New Deal. This intersects “green” with a New Deal, the socially-driven economic stimulus that focused on demand after the Great Depression in the United States (US).
As we design our Green New Deal, human development cannot be stymied in the name of the climate crisis. But this also means we must ask ourselves: Whose development? Development has disproportionally been top-heavy; the poorest have been the last to develop. To illustrate, discussions on development in Bengaluru seem to understand urban development as getting from Electronic City at one end of the city to the airport without hitting traffic lights — the solution proposed was lots of bridges/overpasses. What about pedestrians? Cyclists? Local communities? We lack participatory design, which doesn’t just mean involving stakeholders in choosing solutions but also having them help frame the questions. This should be the way to design our Green New Deal.
Second, we must focus on more than just the climate crisis. There are many other pressing issues, all fitting under a general rubric of sustainability or a circular economy, including clean air, clean water, and natural resources. There are also other dimensions that urgently need attention, including social welfare, equity, and choice. While adding more goals may appear harder, we can tackle all these issues together more easily than trying to solve them one by one. As former US president Dwight D Eisenhower said, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger”.
Lastly, any Indian Green New Deal must contend with uniquely Indian characteristics and priorities. As a developing nation, we don’t have the funds to subsidise or support massive industrial policy at the scale the US did under its recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). China operates on a different scale — its 14th five-year investment outlay for tackling the climate crisis and expanding the digital economy is reported to be $6 trillion.
India is notorious for jugaad, and doing things on the cheap. Certainly, we shouldn’t overpay, but the right lens for investments and development shouldn’t be today’s L1 (selecting the cheapest bid). Instead, seeking the highest value for stakeholders should be the compass. Value can and should go far beyond just rupees and factor in aspects like safety, resilience, the environment, and jobs.
We may cite a lack of money as a bottleneck, but the money required can be found elsewhere. The bigger problem is one of the milquetoast ambitions and the inability to go beyond incremental changes. We’re not striving for the long-term, partly because we’re distracted by immediate problems. Everywhere, we end up doing what’s urgent, but are we doing what is important?
A common phrase in the climate action space is co-benefits, where non-climate crisis aspects that align are viewed as a secondary or parallel win. These other aspects shouldn’t be viewed as extra but as part of a larger puzzle. This will help bring together diverse stakeholders and create the political capital for change. This won’t be easy, and there will be both winners and losers. But, overall, we should be better off.
Alignment means overcoming our silo-based approach marked by various, and sometimes conflicting, ministries as well as poor coordination between the Centre, the states, and local bodies. Energy is directly spread across five ministries (power, renewables, coal, oil and gas, and atomic energy), but energy transition also spans other ministries such as environment, heavy industry, mining, commerce, road transport, urban development, rural development, science and technology, foreign policy, and finance. Add NITI Aayog as well.
While government coordination and alignment of stakeholders are critical, we also have to make it easy for people to do the right thing. The government shouldn’t choose for us but help make better choices available to us — soft paternalism.
Many improvements will come at a premium, especially initially, so we need to support early adopters, innovators, and risk-takers through tax breaks, research and development funds, and, where necessary, temporary subsidies. Standards can help, but we also need bottom-up buy-in.
Many problems ultimately boil down to bad processes. Simpler rules, transparency, and consistency can make development fairer. This starts with targeting the root cause of each problem. We see videos of local bodies bulldozing homes encroaching upon lakes that have violated environmental norms, often in reaction to flooding. While punishing violators is important, which violators are we targeting? Homeowners are an easy target, but they’ve often spent their life savings on a home they didn’t know was violating some zoning law. Instead, we must go up the chain and catch the builders and local officials who give sanctions or certifications for such homes.
The government’s role in an Indian Green New Deal will need to span the spectrum of enabler, goal setter, implementer, and enforcer. Mandates and targets can sometimes help, but stakeholders will figure out new solutions if we get our frameworks right and regulate well. In just three years, China cleaned up its air dramatically through a combination of incentives, enforcement, and innovation (and fuel switching). Not only can we improve the environment and address the climate crisis, but a well-designed Green New Deal can improve our quality of life, biodiversity, and economic growth. Surely this is better than just decarbonising.
Rahul Tongia is a senior fellow with the Centre for Social and Economic Progress. The views expressed are personal