Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director, CSE, set the stage for the day's discussions by sharing some key data points that highlight the need to decarbonise the transport sector and the possible pathways for India to build a sustainable mobility network.
Without interventions, private trasport will overtake public transport mode share by 2040.
The transport sector is one of the biggest contributors to India's greenhouse gas emissions. To decarbonise this sector, it is not enough to focus on electric vehicles but also explore how the public transport network can be stregthened and designed better.
To plan pathways to reduce the carbon footprint of transport, thereby significantly reducing air pollution, mobility specialists tried to find answers to the following questions:
1. What is the role of e-mobility in transport sector's decarbonisation pathway?
2. What should be India's e-mobility strategy for bus & mass transit?
3. What should be the strategy for e-para-transit and e-heavy duty vehicles?
4. What should be the strategy for infrastructure & circularity for e-mobility?
Sayan Roy, programme manager, sustainable transport, CSE, looked at the opportunities for the country's bus networks to go electric. He highlighted that for a country-wide transition to happen in this regard, small and medium cities need to be supported. Capacity building initiatives that focus on this are the need of the hour.
Vehicular emission is a major health hazard. The toxic gases released by cars, buses and trucks have been associated with a host of ailments, ranging from respiratory to cardiovascular, and even cancer.
Swagata Dey, policy specialist, policy development and outreach, air quality, Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, focused on the dangers of black carbon, a vehicle exhaust particulate matter, that is carcinogenic as well as a contributor to global warming.
Diesel particulate matter (PM), a rich source of black carbon, is only 8 per cent of outdoor PM but 70 per cent of known cancer risk attributable to toxic air contaminants, she said, citing a report by the California Air Resources Board.
Air pollution exposure is much worse near highways than urban background concentration due to proximity to diesel buses and trucks.
In order to green the transport sector, data transparency will be vital, said Amegh Gopinath, lead, electric mobility and NDC-TIA, GIZ.
Emerging national strategy for transport sector decarbonisation in India aims to align with the country's NDCs.
While buses are a major component of public transport, ridership has been sliding in India. The discussants explored the reasons for this and how to improve the bus service in the country. Laghu Parasar, senior transport specialist, World Bank, spoke about the financial backing needed for this.
Globally, electric mobility is identified as one of the most viable ways of decarbonising the transport sector. But India has faced challenges in scaling electric vehicle adoption.
Marshall Abramczyk, manager, India Programme, RMI India and one of the panelists of today's roundtable, shed light on ways to improve sales penetration of electric trucks.
Listen to his perspective on EV policy and market penetration in this interview:
In discussions on India's electric vehicle policy design, building a viable supply chain for battery materials has emerged as a key aspect. What can be the pathways for India and how can it be made more equitable? In a stimulating discussion today, experts shared their experiences with procuring materials for EVs.
The Centre for Science and Environment is conducting its first Climate Week to bring under one roof some of India’s leading researchers, experts and grassroots activists.
Over four days, subjects ranging from climate-resilient agriculture and energy transition to decarbonising hard-to-abate industrial sectors and transport and building heat-resilient cities will be discussed.
Stay tuned for live updates.
S Naresh Kumar, head and principal scientist, environment science, Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), explains why diversifying minimum support price for crops is the need of the hour.
Crop diversification without MSP diversification is a pipe dream.S Naresh Kumar
N Raghuram, professor and head, Centre for Sustainable Nitrogen and Nutrient Management, Guru Govind Singh Indraprastha University, stressed that India needs to bring back legumes. This will not only help diversify our diet but also reduce the country's urea dependence.
In the world's diabetic capital we are growing starch.N Raghuram
Kiran Pandey, director, Environment Resources Unit, CSE, drew attention to the poor state of farmers in climate vulnerable India. With data, she showed how extreme weather events affected the country in the first half of 2024.
“On 255 out of 274 days of 2024 India experienced extreme weather events," shared Kiran Panday.
CSE Director-General Sunita Narain starts off the session by talking about what sustainability means for the agriculture sector.
"Who grows, how we grow, what we grow and what we eat defines sustainability," she said.
The country needs a food system transformation not only to make the sector more sustainable but also more efficient.
In the face of global warming and extreme weather events, it is critical to improve responses to help farmers become resilient, Narain highlighted.
“Agriculture is not the problem but a solution for climate change," she added.
Niranjan Karade, team leader, innovation and project management cell, National Dairy Development Board, Gujarat, talks about the challenges of the dairy industry in becoming sustainable for the environment as well as the farmers.
Dairy, he pointed out, is more important for Indian farmers; it is more equitable than the crop production.
"We have a long-term challenge of continuation of dairy being practicised as livelihood."Niranjan Karade
Solutions for reducing emissions from the dairy sector must be beneficial for the farmer as well as the environment, said Nitin Tyagi, principal scientist, Animal Nutrition Division and In-charge, Livestock Research Centre, ICAR-NDRI, Karnal, Haryana.
The scientist talked about how eneteric methane emissions can be reduced:
He also highlighted that local solutions must be included to ensure success. One-solution-fits-all approach will not work. He shared the following guidelines:
Among his suggestions, one he stressed on was that India has to think of other farm-based income sources for the dairy farmers. These could include income from biogas, manure and carbon credits.
Conservation agriculture can help Indian states, where residue burning is a concern, with time management, said Pardeep Kumar, agronomist and station manager, BISA-CIMMYT, (Borlaug Institute of South Asia-International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre), Ludhiana, Punjab.
Practicing conservation agriculture can result in yield gains, resource management, farm profitability and carbon sequestration, while also reducing farm fires.
He also talked about how India has made strides in straw management using technological intervention.
India is now exporting innovative and efficient seeder machines to 40 countries.
Parimal Singh, project director, Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture (POCRA), Maharashtra, discusses the challenges and achievements of the Maharashtra government-World Bank programme.
From 2018-2024, the project covered 5,220 villages in Maharashtra region where there were high rates of farmer suicide as well as flood incidents.
Under POCRA, 37,184 farm field schools were set up in 4,800 villages of Maharashtra to promote climate resilient technologies. These technologies include:
What are the gaps in climate-resilient agriculture approach? Prachi Patil, Senior Programme Officer, Watershed Support Services and Activities Network, Odisha, sheds light on the limitations of India's strategy.
First and foremost, a unified strategy is missing, she noted.
When we talk about climate-resilient agriculture, the problem is that the narrative revolves around seed varieties and machinery which may not be suitable for small farmers.
Moreover, data for climate resilient agriculture is missing at the most local level like Gram Panchayat.
Agriculture paradigms with holistic solutions are absent. And so is the intentionality of addressing the problem in the paradigms to find a solution, said Kavitha Kuruganti, founder-convenor, Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture, Bengaluru, Karnataka.
Samaj, sarkar, bazaar — all need to come together in building resilient agriculture.
She added that we need diversity-based farming but our agriculture insurance products are not ready for that. Financing tools also are not aligned for this, Kuruganti shared.
"We need deep discussions in climate resilient agriculture and those cannot just be done with a technocratic approach," she said.
The spread of modern agricultural practices and increasing market intrusion have led to degradation of tribal lands, Kuruganti highlighted.
The issues and practices of Adivasi communities need to be looked into urgently and their traditional knowledge can even provide solutions for the rest of the country.
Dantewada is a good example of how tribal land can be protected. It became the first district in India to be conferred organic certification under the ‘Large Area Certification Scheme’ due to community efforts.
Food price inflation has become an epidemic in India and it is here to stay, said Richard Mahapatra, managing editor of Down To Earth, quoting the Reserve Bank of India's august bulletin, setting the tone for the day's discussions on why the country needs climate-resilient agricultural systems.
Climate change is a problem for all. It is a problem for producers, consumers and policymakers alike.
The Andhra Pradesh Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming programme is the largest natural farming experiment in the country. T Vijaykumar, executive vice chairperson, Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, Andhra Pradesh, talks about the scale of the project and the scientific reasons for its success.
The current agriculture-food system is the greatest cause for the degradation of our planetary health.
To illustrate the scale of the project, Vijaykumar talked about how the programme has expanded over the years.
"When the Andhra Pradesh natural farming programme began 7 years ago, it involved some 40,000 farmers in 704 villages. Today, it covers 12,50,000 farmers in 4,400 villages & 620,000 hectares of land," he added.
Preserving and nurturing the soil microbiome is at the core of natural farming. "When we improve the soil biology, we change the plant physiology. This helps makes them sturdier."
He presented the nine principles of natural farming:
"Soil carbon management will be an increasingly important strategy during the coming decades because of its multiple co-benefits as a natural fix to climate change," NK Lenka, principal scientist and head, soil physics division, ICAR-Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
The scientist talked about how prolonged use of nitrogen can degrade farmland completely. He also illustrated how fertiliser response has decreased over the decades.
Gagnesh Sharma, director, National Centre for Organic and Natural Farming, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, spoke about how the support of central and state governments has helped many farmers practice natural farming across India. "About 30 lakh farmers in India are involved in organic or natural farming through state programmes," he said.
Hopefully Mission on Natural Farming will get launched this year.Gagnesh Sharma
The final panelist, Rohit Parakh, government engagement lead of National Coalition for Natural Farming, Chennai, shared his experience with scaling natural farming.
Easy availability of bio-inputs is critical to transition to agro-ecology based farming, he said. He also shared a framework for natural farming with natural resource management & commons, on-farm transition and support systems as the core aspects.
The second session of the day is on how carbon markets can incentivise farmers. "We need to not just focus on emission reduction but also emission removal," said Siddhartha Dabhi, co-founder, Centre for Grower-centric Eco-value Mechanisms, Gujarat.
The current process for farmers to leverage carbon markets is costly, not scale friendly, opaque and therefore prohibitive, he added.
Farmers looked at merely beneficiaries rather than producers of carbon credits. Long value chain of carbon markets reduces farmers' share.
“We need to create community principles for carbon projects, so we create projects that communities want,” he added.
Niroj Kumar Mohanty, managing director and CEO, CoreCarbonX, Hyderabad, Telangana, shared his experience of carbon incentives through alternate wetting and drying in rice.
Carbon markets are not perfect and we shouldn't aim for perfection right away, he said. Interventions need to be defined and groups or clusters must be formed for better outcomes.
Farha Naz Qureshi, subject matter specialist (forestry), Centre for Advanced Research and Development, Madhya Pradesh, presented findings from her work on afforestation and carbon offset in central India.
Through our plantation activities, we have involved 10,000 women and improved ecosystem services, in addition to sequestering 15-20 kilogrammes of CO2 per sapling annually.
India currently has some 26,000 farmer producer organisations (FPOs), and this number has the potential to go up to 30,000, said Sukhpal Singh, professor, Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Gujarat. However, it is more important that we have more efficient FPOs than a larger number of them, the professor added.
Value chain mapping of operating sectors vital for building scalable producer companies.
The expert also shared findings from studies done on producer companies. Member awareness, he shared, was low in producer companies (PC): Only 27 per cent member farmers knew PC was owned by them. 18 per cent thought it was owned by PC employees."
Moreover, only have the members attended the PC meetings and 15 per cent never attended any meeting, Singh noted.
The number of FPOs is not important; we have to focus on the efficiency of these organisations, said MK De, general manager, NABARD, Mumbai, Maharashtra.
FPOs are led by farmers who need to be trained on the various aspects of business to run producer companies successfully.
Talking about the challenges these organisations face, De pointed out that FPOs often lack clear-cut business strategies & market linkages. "They also experience compliance issues due to lack of awareness, resulting in hefty penalties."
Rajashekhar Reddy Seelam, founder and managing director, Sresta Natural Bioproducts Pvt Ltd (24 Mantra), Hyderabad, Telangana, explored the opportunities and challenges of leveraging FPOs for better market integration.
FPOs can be leveraged if they perform the functions of extension, facilitation, value addition and market access well.
He also reminded that it is unrealistic to expect FPOs to work like corporates. FPOs, however, have a good reach today and we must exploit that advantage.
Lalit Kharbanda, general manager, Agriculture Insurance Company of India, explained how crop insurers measure yield.
Crop insurers measure yield using two methods: Crop cutting & remote sensing. Ground truthing is done to corroborate the values from both.
How granular can weather forecasts be and what should be the periodicity? Anand Sharma, president, Indian Meteorological Society and former additional director-general / scientist-G, India Meteorological Department (IMD) talks about the latest practices.
For seasonal forecasts, farmers now want a projection of rainfall distribution rather than the total volume estimate, so that they can adapt better.
Right now, there is no model to give 10mx10m forecasts, he added. "Such a model doesnt exist. We can only extrapolate."
CK Vishnu Das, director, Hume Centre for Ecology and WIldlife Biology, Kerala, talked about the importance hyper-local weather forecasts and advisories.
We need to invest more on preparedness and early warning than disaster management.
Ajay Shelke, thematic lead, information technology, watershed organisation trust, Maharashtra, talked about the importance of weather advisories based on his experience with his application 'FarmPrecise app'. "The app is participatory because farmers can also contribute."
Through the app, he added, they are able to connect individual farmers to FPOs.
Shagun, senior reporter, Down To Earth, shed light on the shifting crop calendars due to climate change.
Sunita Narain set the context in her opening address, reminding the community of scientists and civil society organisation that while India needs to reduce emissions, it also has to develop in a sustainable way.
India needs to chart its own decarbonisation pathway. As a community, we need to identify research & action gaps to make this happen.
Parth Kumar, programme manager, Industrial Pollution, CSE, highlighted the possibilites and struggles to reduce dependence on coal and scale up renewable energy.
Long-term goal setting and planning vital in reducing dependence on coal.
To scale up renewable energy, diversifying energy sources as well as looking at hybrid systems and storage mechanisms will be imperative, he added.
Talking about subsidy for transition, Kumar noted that it will be beneficial to have targeted benefit subsidies. "Support for vulnerable consumers is the need of the hour."
Amit Garg, professor, Public Systems Group, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, Gujarat, shared a reminder for the scientific and policymaking community developing a decarbonisation plan. He said, "We can adopt new technologies, and try new ways, but we in India cannot eradicate coal just yet."
Transition should encompass growth and development, ensuring inclusivity at every step, the expert added.
While developing and implementing decarbonisation pathways, taking stock of the projects and their impacts are important. Kaveri K Iychettira, assistant professor, School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, weighed in on the mechanisms for doing this.
We need methodological tools on how to factor in shifting development pathways and track and simulate impact on emissions.
Raghav Pachouri, associate director, Low Carbon Pathways and Modelling, Vasudha Foundation, highlighted how storage can play an important role in making energy transition successful.
The success of energy transition to renewable energy lies with integration of storage. Current capacities are limited & quantum of requirement is huge.
Swasti Raizada, Policy Advisor (Energy), International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Bengaluru, Karnataka, said, "We need to bring co-benefits approach for energy and development outcomes."
Ann Josey, Fellow, Prayas (Energy Group), Pune, pointed out that states need a comprehensive vision document; so that they can take better investment decisions.
Simran Grover, founder and chief executive, Centre for Energy, Environment and People (CEEP), Jaipur, Rajasthan, shed light on the best practices for energy modelling. It is a scientific process but can also become political, he warned.
We have different assumptions and this will impact scenarios. We need to disclose so that we can understand models better.
In the short video below, Grover talks about the importance of energy modelling and how it should be done.
Bhaskar Natarajan, senior fellow, Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE), raised a concern regarding the current status of energy modelling in the country. We need a collective contribution to the national power planning exercise, he said.
The modelling exercises are seeming like a blackbox if a pathway / results focus is exclusively shown while many assumptions on the modelling are not disclosed.
Manish Kumar Shrivastava, associate director, Earth Science and Climate Change, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), flagged another limitation in this regard.
Anjan Kumar Sinha, technical director, Intertek, said energy security in India is currently dependent on coal. "In phasing it out, we have to improve flexible operations of coal-based plants for electricity dispatch, especially with increasing levels of renewable energy."
How can hard-to-abate sectors such as iron and steel, cement, aluminium and fertiliser in India decarbonise? The following are some suggestions that came up during today's deliberations by industry insiders and scientists:
1. There has to be mandated demand creation for greener production.
2. India needs to invest in R&D to lead the green transition.
3. Blended and public financing is the necessary first step.
4. Ambitious decarbonisation targets of these sectors is a positive sign and the start of the change journey.
5. Material efficiency is the Indian way to lower emissions but the country needs to do more on this.
The day ended with a riveting conversation under the moonlit night sky in Nimli, Rajasthan on climate finance.