Covid, Climate and the Countryside...
Rural communities are a critical piece of India’s climate and energy challenge. They’re also part of the solution.
India’s Covid crisis has moved from the subcontinent’s megacities to the countryside — that is, from where India’s future will play out to where its past lives on to shape its present.
I will explain. And also what this has to do with climate and energy.
Before that, an update on my plans to get to India, the point at which things will get a lot more interesting. I continue to be held at bay by the waves of Covid infection closing down large swathes of the country, including many areas to which I hope to travel to for my project. Even as the situation has improved slightly in the biggest cities, particularly Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore — Covid infections have spread to a much wider area, thrusting whole states such as West Bengal and Odisha in eastern India into full shutdowns. These have dimmed any prospect for me to work productively there for now. Indians are still scrambling to care for sick relatives, when they’re not sheltering to prevent themselves from becoming sick or, when it’s too late for that, isolating themselves to recover from Covid infections. So today I offer another column from outside India. I hope it provides some more helpful context for when I eventually begin filing reports from the ground.
Covid’s retreat in the big cities marks the beginning of the end of major international attention devoted to India’s crisis. Major international publications have noted this shift and, to some extent, its significance. But from here the coronavirus, in its increasingly variant forms, will do its destruction largely beyond the view of the world, even of Indian elites who live their lives in urban centers.
The risks to all of us that arise from these hidden hinterland clusters of infection won’t diminish for any of this.
If megacities are the tip of the Indian iceberg — visible, indicating the direction of the country — India’s many thousands of villages and rural hamlets are the iceberg. More than two-thirds of Indians (some 900 million people, almost three times the population of the United States) live in rural areas, a place where almost one-fifth of India’s economic output takes place and half the country’s livelihoods are earned. Farmers, exalted by Mahatma Gandhi in the heyday of the India’s independence movement during the first half of the 20th century, in many ways remain the political center of gravity for the country, as was demonstrated last year when millions of farmers descended on the capital to protest new laws governing the sale of agricultural output, paralyzing the government and transfixing the country.
Just as with Covid, when we talk about climate impacts in India and the country’s critical energy transition, we’re often as focused on urban, elite India. That makes some sense. Most of India’s energy future consumption growth — likely to be the fastest of any country on the planet over the coming decades — will be in its cities as manufacturing and services expand, and the burgeoning middle class purchases appliances, air conditioners and cars. Many of the worst climate impacts also will come to roost in the cities, including more frequent devastating cyclones (two of which have hit India’s west and east coasts in recent weeks), rising sea levels in megalopolises like Mumbai and Chennai, and heat waves in cities where scorching summer heat builds disproportionately.
But none of that diminishes the climate threat to environs where the majority of Indians will live for many years to come, or the threats to the rest of the world from emissions that arise from there.
To take the latter first, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are often overlooked. But they’re considerable.
Globally, agricultural food production accounts for at least one fifth of global emissions, mostly from beef and dairy cattle. These come in the form of cows belching (though their farts get all the press) methane and processing their manure. Fertilizer production to grow their feed releases nitrous oxide, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. It turns out that if cows were a country, they would rank as the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet after China.
India, with the largest cattle herd in the world, is no exception. Rice paddy cultivation, a major crop in India, is another major contributor. The overview slide below comes from a presentation I received from Omnivore, an agricultural technology venture capital firm in India run by Mark Kahn, one of the smartest investors in India’s highly complex agriculture sector I know.
Omnivore invests in start-up companies striving to make the country’s insanely inefficient agriculture industry more efficient by using technology. That process is also likely to make Indian agriculture more climate friendly, as well as more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
Those impacts are already considerable and likely to grow worse. The all-important annual monsoon rains have become more erratic in recent years, at times dumping too much precipitation to cause floods then at other times disappearing altogether in prolonged drought. Research by the global consultancy McKinsey, suggests outdoor temperature-humidity combination (known as the “wet bulb” temperature) could regularly approach or exceed fatal levels in northern India by 2050. That would rule out a significant portion of the workday for the 380 some million outdoor workers, most of them farm laborers (again, a population larger than the entire U.S.). By 2030, diminished labor productivity could reduce GDP by between 2.5 and 4.5 percent, according to McKinsey. Farm laborers, more than farm owners, are among the most vulnerable as they make up a huge population of the poorest Indians.
Aside from emitting greenhouse gasses of its own, agriculture is one of the largest consumers of energy, especially to pump groundwater for irrigation. The pumps are often powered by electricity provided at a steep discount or even free — reflecting the social and political clout of farmers in India. The giveaways encourage massively inefficient use of both water and electricity, as well as the carbon emissions that result when the electricity is produced by the coal-fired plants that provide three-quarters of India’s power.
The irony is this: the free electricity is often provided only after dark, and is so unreliable that many farmers simply turn on their well pumps and leave them to run all night. This makes the system doubly inefficient, as far too much water gets pumped out of the ground some nights while not nearly enough makes it out and into the fields on others.
Solar power — free and plentiful during the day — is taking on a big role in changing these dynamics. The state of Andhra Pradesh, which has both sun and farmers aplenty, has a plan to build a giant solar plant to give farmers enough electricity each year for a generation to power several million homes in the United States.
An even more clever scheme is getting underway in the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, big agricultural centers both, with plans to expand nationwide. Smaller solar arrays are set up in villages and connected to the main power grid. Villagers are paid for the land on which the array is built — giving them an incentive to embrace the projects — and then paid for any excess electricity they don’t use and that gets fed back into the grid for use elsewhere.
Watch this cool animation to understand how it works.
Solutions like this, a win for farmers as well as for the climate, will be critical to to India’s energy transition going forward.