The Cost of Coal

THE COST OF COAL

A coal mine in Central India is set to become one of Asia’s largest. At the heart of this aspiration lies the largest democracy’s disregard for consent. Power grids are the umbilical cords linking urban lifestyle to indigenous displacement.

ARUNA CHANDRASEKHAR   

Peering into the depths of the Kusmunda coal mine in Korba, Chhattisgarh, is like staring into an abyss. From the edge, the mine extends endlessly – like a vast city that’s bigger than Central Delhi. And just like a city, the activity and the traffic never cease. Tippers, excavators, and dumpers ply for miles beneath us into the grayscale, queuing up to carry vast burdens of dark earth scooped up from the deepening void.

Kusmunda, operated by a Coal India Limited subsidiary company, is on its way to becoming one of Asia’s biggest coal mines. At peak expansion, Kusmunda, a single mine, would leave a cavity the size of Central Delhi on Chhattisgarh’s map. Twenty-six million tonnes of coal will be mined from its folds every year.

Kusmunda’s expansion is an integral part of the Indian government’s plan to increase its coal production to a whopping one billion tons a year by 2020, to meet growing energy requirements. In the balance are tens of thousands of Adivasi and Dalit families likely to be displaced by the mine, while thousands more stand to be affected.

The four of us — director, film crew, Nirupabai and I — crouch amidst the ruins of demolished homes in the village of Barkuta , in Korba, when the blasting from the mine begins, sending earth and rock from flattened fields and forests into the air. We are asked by those whose houses tremble why the story of India ramping up its coal production at their expense is not explosive enough. 

Stripping Ratio [stripping . rey-shoh, -shee-oh] The stripping ratio, in open-cast mining, is the volume of land used by the mine to the volume of ore extracted.

India is the world’s third largest producer and consumer of coal. Last year, around 550 million tonnes were extracted to power our ravenous cities, (some) villages and our fabled economic growth. The WiFi, the smartphone, the air-conditioner, the local train, the factory floor, the stock exchange, the 100W bulb to study under – coal makes most of it possible. Around two-thirds of India’s energy is drawn from this dark mineral, and yet many of us fail to acknowledge its origins.

Unlike many other minerals extracted through mining, coal is physically invisible to us in the everyday. Its impact only presents itself markedly when there is talk of the windfall profit made by a company, or through a gargantuan corruption scandal. The impact of its extraction on native citizens’ lives, however, is obscured out of sight.

Nirupabai Kawar, from Barkuta, has had to learn the true cost of coal. Nirupa is what the government calls a PAP, or a project-affected-person. She is a Kawar Adivasi and the sole earner in her family of six. Barely nine days after I first met her in January 2014, Nirupa’s home was bulldozed along with sixteen others for the expansion of the Kusmunda mine, without adequate notice or consultation.

“I understand that some people must make sacrifices for the nation, but why must it always be us?”

The next time we met, in April 2014, there was no trace of the large house overflowing with grain I had seen. Only a squat structure rebuilt from the rubble remained, with a signboard salvaged from a school next door that had pictures of former Prime Ministers pinned on it. The grain, she showed me, was mixed with the rubble. “It rained for a week afterwards, nobody came. I understand that some people must make sacrifices for the nation, but why must it always be us?”

Fifth Schedule [th uh . fifth .shed-yool]
The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution lists certain districts and territories where Adivasi communities live as protected ‘Scheduled Areas’, where these communities have special customary rights over their land.

In interviews with Coal India officials, the standard state justification for the Adivasi displacement seems firmly rooted in karmic geology. “Why would God have put coal in these places if we were not meant to mine?” a senior mining official operating the Kusmunda mines once enquired.

 And so to tell you a story about people, we must peel away the sediment and begin with where coal comes from. In India, coal runs as part of a rich seam of sandstone and shale called the Gondwana Supergroup, which extends across the Southern Hemisphere. The seam draws its name from the Gonds, India’s second most populous indigenous Adivasi community, who live across the central Indian plateau, including the villages around Kusmunda.

Some of India’s biggest coalfields are located in densely forested pockets of the country, protected by the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, which recognizes the historic and systemic oppression that India’s indigenous Adivasi communities have faced. About 70 per cent of India’s coal is located in the central and eastern states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha, that are also the sites of a decade-long conflict between security forces and Maoist armed groups.

Whether it was settlers from the plains or the British and their demand for timber, the Forest Department or large mining companies, India’s Adivasi communities have had to grapple for centuries with outsiders who had their eye on resources. Adivasis are estimated to comprise about eight per cent of India’s population, but make up about 40 per cent of the people displaced by development projects in India since 1951. That number is around 24 million people, roughly the current population of Australia.

Korba is a case of stark contradictions. A protected Adivasi district, Korba is home to some of the country’s densest Sal forests, and some of its biggest mines that contribute to over a fourth of India’s coal. It has over a dozen thermal power plants, supplying power to the Western grid, including the city of Mumbai and its glistening skyline, and yet is home to some of India’s most disempowered communities.

“In Korba, you’ll find villages that don’t have a single light bulb. Imagine the level of development in a place that provides so much of India’s coal and power,” says Laxmi Chauhan, an environmental activist who has been working with mining-affected communities in Korba for the last decade.

Laxmi parks his car at the edge of a small hill, which we learn is a fly-ash pond. For fun, we try moonwalking on this strange, chalk-like sand that feels like it’s part of a gigantic ashtray. We take turns to count the thermal power chimneys that pulse through the haze like modern minarets. Hills of ‘overburden’ earth dominate the topography, shifting as excavators sift the earth for coal. Pipes criss-cross the landscape like industrial entrails, carrying fly-ash over miles to waste ponds that may some day rival these chimneys in height.

Laxmi laughs at our disbelief. “It’s hard to breathe here, isn’t it? Imagine, in such a critically polluted area, there have been no health impact assessments. Look for yourself,” he says, beckoning us to turn the cameras behind him. Monsoon clouds the colour of slate have gathered above the ash dike. The wind has whipped up a blizzard of ash that heads straight for the city below. He tells us of his plan to start a toxic tourism company for gawping researchers and journalists like myself who want to see how ‘development’ can manifest itself in rural India.

Standing where we are, it’s hard to believe that Korba is still home to the Korwa tribe, from which it draws its name, just as it is home to the Kawar, the Binjhwar, the Gond, the Agaria and Rathia.

“This entire place was a jungle. Deer used to walk here, amidst our gods,” said Ramadhar Shrivas, an elder from the village of Pali, as he walked through the deserted, tree-less streets one blazing summer afternoon. “You could not step out here in the evening alone, because of the fear of being trampled by elephants in mast. All of this changed after they found coal here.”

Industrial corridors have replaced elephant corridors, and Korba today is a haphazard collection of townships that have grown and coalesced around its mines, power plants and aluminium smelters. There’s even a Domino’s Pizza outlet.

But in between are vast patches of villages like Pali that lie in a state of suspended acquisition. In the villages here, yellow signposts signal that this land is now the sovereign property of the Ministry of Coal. There is no telling when people in these villages will be adequately compensated or rehabilitated, or when the villages will fall into the dark.

Overburden [oh-ver-bur-dn] Overburden is the rock, soil and everything that lies over the coal deposit, including fields, streams, habitations and forests.

Say coal mining, and the imagination takes the average urbanite down a dark, underground shaft. But most Indian coal is harvested from large swathes of land. In 2014-15, over 90% of coal production was from “open cast mining” — a practice which involves literally cutting and stripping minerals from the surface of the earth, after trees, vegetation and habitations are removed and broken up by explosives.

For every million tonnes of coal mined, land equivalent to over 564 Olympic swimming pools is dug up and has to be removed. Open cast mines are very land intensive, and can spread over thousands of hectares, depending on the extent of the coal deposit and the availability of cheap land. This kind of mining is done when coal lies close to the surface and where the land that lies over it is relatively thin or easy to remove. The dug up land is referred to as “overburden” in mining parlance.

“You cannot move the deposit, but you can definitely remove the people,” remarked a Coal India official.

One half of Barkuta lay flattened, festooned with explosive wires, the ground perforated in places where dynamite would be placed. Image Credits: Aruna Chandrasekhar / Amnesty International India

In March 2015, I went back to look for Nirupa’s house in Barkuta. A tyre mark of an excavator marked where we had first met. One half of Barkuta lay flattened, festooned with explosive wires, the ground perforated in places where dynamite would be placed.

In Barkuta today, only three families remain. Families live amidst the ruins, as they wait for Godot — in this case, jobs, compensation and rehabilitation that they haven’t yet received, decades after their lands were acquired without their consent. Nirupa has rebuilt a tiny hut on the edge of the mine, to stake her last claim on her father’s land, as the mine edge draws nearer.

Public Purpose [puhb-lik . pur-pus]
Land acquisition for mining under the Coal Bearing Areas Act allows for companies to acquire people’s land without their consent.

Coal India Limited (CIL) – the world’s largest coal producer (which all Indians are in a way shareholders of) produces about 82 per cent of India’s coal. This coal is supplied at discounted prices to nearly every thermal power plant in India. Coal India, and other public sector companies, such as the National Thermal Power Corporation, can acquire land in the ‘national interest’ using an archaic law that dates back to 1957 called the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act. 

“We’ve gone from being masters of our land to being slaves at the mercy of Coal India,” says Abhiram Singh, whose home was bulldozed in the evictions in Barkuta. In the blazing summer of 2014, I found him working in a make-shift brick kiln, forging bricks to build a new home in the neighbouring village of Padaniya. The bricks under our feet were being fired from the coal that he had to steal from the Kusmunda mine that displaced him. Irony, in these parts, runs dark and unforgiving. Abhiram has never seen a copy of the notification under the Coal Bearing Areas Act from 1979, which said that his land had been acquired by the Ministry of Coal. He asks me how much it would cost to rent a place as big as his in Bangalore.

Abhiram Singh had to forge bricks in a make-shift brick kiln after his home was bulldozed.
Image Credits: Aruna Chandrasekhar / Amnesty International India

The fact that this would never play out in the life of the average urban India weighs down like a thousand bricks as I walked through villages around Kusmunda, trying to understand how India’s protective laws around land are failing Adivasis.

What is it that scares so many from looking at consumption in the eye, and the displacement being carried out in their names? What is it about the consent of the disenfranchised that has some people stick their fingers in their ears, and mutter ‘anti-national’ under their breaths?

Instead, in India, the most vulnerable communities are pushed to the brink. In the last two years, the Indian government has repeatedly shut down many of the legally available platforms for Deepak and Nirupa to speak their minds about decisions that could irreversibly impact their lands, lives and environment. Public hearings, required under Indian law for development projects to get a green nod, have been done away with for many kinds of coal mine expansions. The government, in response to the World Bank’s environmental and social safeguards policy, has said that it was not ‘comfortable’ with the idea of indigenous consent.

“I did an MBA in HR and worked with ICICI bank, ma’am. But when I found out that my family was losing so much land, and people were not being given jobs, I had to come back and get involved,” says Deepak Sahu as we sit in a meeting in the village of Raliya. We are surrounded by hundreds of displaced villagers, who want to learn about what legal choices they have left.

26-year old Deepak led a strike in May in Korba this year, where over five thousand people at risk of being forcibly evicted by Coal India’s four expanding mines blocked the dispatch of coal from the mines to the railhead. “We spam the Coal Minister’s Twitter  everyday. But other than stopping production, there is no other way anyone will listen to us.”

International energy agencies predict that India will account for nearly half the increase in world coal consumption from 2012 to 2040, even as major economies like China and the United States move away from coal. The government alone estimates that 50,000 hectares of Adivasi land in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha will be affected by India’s coal expansion plans.

You’d think that these ambitions would be rooted in an assessment of how much coal India actually needs. And yet, at the time of writing, around 40 million tonnes of coal lie piled in Coal India’s stockyards, with no takers. In a recent development, even India’s Central Electricity Authority, stated in its draft National Electricity Plan1 that India didn’t need any new coal-based power plants till 2022 , and that there was sufficient coal from existing mines to supply them.

India’s dependency on coal cannot be denied. But as fellow shareholders in this nation’s energy security, all Indians must push for equal opportunities and rights for those who lose the most from coal mining. Their lands make our lifestyle possible. Their consent must be sought, and their right to refuse the greater common good, respected.

India is officially out of a power crisis. But it has a long way to go before the overburden has been reclaimed, and the playing field leveled for Adivasis and Dalits to truly speak truth to power and be heard.

Fair Play: Why a Sports Coach is Fighting Big Coal for Chennai’s Right to Breathe

It is dawn in Kattukuppam, an inland fishing village by the Kosasthalaiyar river in North Chennai. As the sky lightens, the river remains the colour of night, streaked with an industrial palette of diesel, raw sewage and ash. Boats drift in with the day’s catch on this modern-day Styx, power plant chimneys smoking in the background. As nets are emptied into straw baskets and the women gut fish in the streets, coach RL Srinivasan is already out the door. Two streets away, a drowsy legion of boys pace in their Ennore Kabbadi jerseys in front of the municipal school’s playground. “This one has slept till 6 am,” says coach, rolling his eyes and ruffling the six year old’s hair, before giving him a swift thump on the back. “Go swim in the river and come!” It’s a threat enough to wake anyone up. 

 Kabbadi comes from kai pidi (catch my hand if you can) and is believed to have its roots in Tamil Nadu. It is a high contact sport unlike any other, where lone raider from each team of seven must cross enemy lines, make contact and make a run for it. Chanting ‘kabbadi’ is mandatory to demonstrate to the referee that you’re not holding your breath. 

 Chennai residents had best be holding theirs. Last Diwali, the city’s air quality gave Delhi a run for it, with monitors recording particulate matter levels maxing out in both genteel Besant Nagar (which recorded 1017 μg/m3) and North Chennai’s Manali industrial area (recording 999.99 μg/m3) alike. Last week, on 6th November, Ennore recorded PM 2.5 levels of 916 μg/m3 between 5:55 pm and 7:55 pm. 

Coach Srini watches the younger children on this tiny court struggle to keep pace. “Kids here are born with a permanent shelli (cold),” he says, before breaking them up into groups of two to practice escaping each other’s grip.

From someone who once sold insurance on the streets of Chennai, Srini has come a long way. He has been the head of the fisherfolk cooperative society that has been taking on big polluters,  filing complaints with the National Green Tribunal, organising fishermen against illegal industrialisation and educating villagers on the health and livelihood impacts of air pollution.

He has been instrumental in getting other fishing villages to find their voices, even as they found an articulate and educated voice in him. “Srini was one of the first people we got in touch with in Ennore,” says Pooja Kumar of the Coastal Resource Centre that organises toxic tours of Ennore in an effort to bridge both worlds and restore the city’s commons. In December 2017, based on a petition filed by a six-village committee he brought together, the National Green Tribunal ordered for health studies to be conducted in villages around Ennore. “He realised that one village cannot fight alone and insisted that everyone has to be represented. From calling meetings to explaining what impacts are- he has the knowledge of the river, and is the voice of the public.”

 Walking through the tiny lanes of Kattupakkam, toddlers who can barely walk rush to be swung from his muscular arms, just as the fisher men crowd around him to check on the status of diesel subsidies and compensation for pollution.

The heaviness in Ennore’s air is hard to escape as an outsider: every breath is like swilling a potent, grey amalgam that smells of ammonia, coal, raw sewage and diesel, mingling with the sea. The thermal ash spewed by Ennore’s power plants- measured by monitors set up with Srini’s help- makes it unbreathable, even on its best days. Fly ash contains trace quantities of toxic heavy metals and silica that get accumulated in the respiratory tracts and lungs, and forms the major contributor to fine particulate matter that Chennai’s residents inhale.

As we drive along the coast, past miles of shipping containers, Pooja opens up a map on the minibus. An hour’s drive from Marina beach, North Chennai is a dystopian landscape of fishing villages wedged between industry and the sea. On the east lie two thermal power plants, one which serves the Ennore SEZ, which is being built on a fly ash pond. There’s the Kamaraj port and the Kattupalli port, recently acquired by the Adani group. To the west, inland, are a coal terminal and a petroleum refinery. Natural gas pipelines run alongside rusted ash pipelines, leaking slurry at the slightest provocation into the river, along with hot water. 

What were once salt pans have been replaced by a 1000-acre coal ash pond that currently serves the North Chennai power station. The leaking pond, filled beyond its capacity, has contaminated nearly 340 hectares of land and waterbodies outside its banks. 

Seppakkam is a village that has turned ghostly white. Children run out of houses ankle-deep in grey slurry, playing hide-and-seek between laundry lines flecked with grey, their arms covered in rashes, eyes reddened and voices made breathless from inhaling the fine, oily excesses of Tamil Nadu’s power generation. The ash costing them their youth is also making it impossible for their families to afford living here, given that the closest clinic that can treat them is 6 km away.  “We all have bank accounts but they’re empty. Every visit, we spend around 700 to 800 rupees for scans, fees and medicine, and another 200 rupees for petrol. Sometimes, we keep our jewellery in the pawn shop to get money for medical expenses,” said a 28-year old woman from Sepakkam. “Either TANGEDCO (the power company) has to leave this place, or we have to leave this place.” 

 It’s a demand that’s found little support. “Sepakkam has 60 houses, it is not enough of a votebank enough to get them rehabilitated,” sighs Dr. Vishvaja Sambath, a public health researcher. Families here have been helping her document their lived experience of pollution and impacts of radioactive coal ash on their health. This work has not been in vain: until November this year, development projects didn’t need to assess health risks for getting a green clearance. This month, as a result of reports that looked at Ennore as a case study, India’s environment ministry has mandated that new coal plants must conduct community health assessments and periodic health monitoring.

 What does that mean for people in Sepakkam dealing with existing pollution? 

“Rehabilitation here is only possible through court case,”Coach Srini admits. In 2017, two ships collided off the coast of Chennai, spewing 196 tonnes of fuel oil along the coast. The fishing villages of Ennore were among the worst hit. While the state Fisheries department pegged the livelihood loss to Rs 203.22 crore, fishermen are yet to be paid full compensation, a process that had been further delayed by the closure of the Chennai bench of the National Green Tribunal. 

As head of the fisherfolk’s society, Srini has been instrumental in liasing with the Fisheries department to ensure those who were worst impacted receive their due for damaged nets and boats. Clean-up measures have been widely criticised as inadequate, with volunteers and fishermen like Srini doing most of the heavy lifting in and out of court.  “Imagine, in this Digital India, they were using a bucket to clean out an oil spill, with nothing to remove the ash or coal dust.” A little over a week ago, another oil spill took place off the coast of Ennore.

South Chennai’s lungs seem to have a different threshold. In 2011, the Madras High Court directed the Union Shipping Ministry to relocate a highly-polluting coal yard from the Chennai port to Ennore.  “It, naturally sends shocking waves through the nerves and makes one to think as to what we are breathing in- oxygen or these black particles?” said the judges in their verdict.

Out on the river, Subhash, Srini’s older son, has his eyes transfixed on the coal wagons passing on the bridge above. “I bet I can tell you the name of every train that passes through the city,” says Subhash. Kabbadi champions used to get recruited in the railways or the police, as part of a sports reservation. Despite the school trophies lined up in the house, Subhash and Srini both know he doesn’t have the stamina to keep up with the city kids.

 His talents are limited in other ways. “Nehru stadium caters to only children in a 10 km radius, our kids can’t go there all the way,” says Srini. “This maybe Chennai’s first ward but there are no parks here for four wards.” In this neck of ward number one, most streets have only one tap. Women queue up with bright plastic buckets, and keep track of the kids playing. “Four days, we get corporation water, but everybody is drinking from cans,” says Srinivasan. ​​ ​

​ What Digital India forgets is that Ennore is part of a delicate buffer of ecosystems of rivers, estuaries, mud flats and mangroves that include the Pulicat lake and form the city’s drainage. These waters and marshes that sustain biodiversity and livelihoods have since been bridged, built over, drainedand poisoned to serve the city’s power needs to disastrous consequences. “During the Chennai floods, water went where it wasn’t supposed to be- in the sea. No firemen could help, only fishermen,” says Srinivasan, who lead a group of a hundred boats that rescued nearly thirty thousand people in Chennai’s floods in 2015. Srini also won a case in the National Green Tribunal, preventing a road for a coal conveyor system from being built over the mouth of the Kosasthalaiyar river where it drains into the Ennore Creek, because it increased the flood vulnerability of the city andaffected livelihoods.

After the fisherfolk society complained, the Madras High Court issued an order preventing any dumping of ash or construction material in 10 hectares of mangroves, given the irreparable damage to health and environmental degradation it would cause.

“Fish catches have dwindled by nearly seventy percent, which is why even I have to rely on contract work. We have gone from relying on the river to provide us everything, to relying on industry that has taken our independence away from us,” he says.

“We provide Chennai with its power. But during the floods, some people didn’t even offer fishermen food. Can we expect them to join in our fight?” 

One way that Srini is convinced this can happen is through the arts, an endeavour in which he found an unexpected ally in the neo-classical singer-activist TM Krishna. Krishna’s masked ode to Ennore and the city’s commons, titled Poromboke, was thought of, shot and first performed in this very landscape, with the fisherfolk society’s blessing. 

Together, they’re the forces behind Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha, an arts festival that brings the sabha (culture) to the beach, and folk to spaces perceived as high-art or niche, as a means of questioning inequality in the arts and as a means of reclaiming public spaces. Bureaucrats were moved by what they saw and heard and the festival got Ennore got its first water treatment plant. 

Kaattukuppam could teach South Chennai a thing or two about community, a connection with the commons and what it takes to fight for public spaces. As the sun sets, the old boys gathers for another round of kabaddi- this time, the competition is fierce. In another corner of the school ground, grandmothers sit back-to-back in a circle, shooting marbles and catching up with gossip in the open-air. 

 Coach Srini is wistful. “We’re supplying power to all of the city. But here, fishermen’s kids don’t know how to swim. What do we have to offer the next generation?”

SIGN PETITION HERE, Ask NGT to Save Ennore Creek ! http://www.thenewsminute.com/save-ennore-creek Poromboke is an old Tamil word meaning shared-use community resources like waterbodies, seashore and grazing lands that are not assessed for tax purposes. Today, it has become a bad word used to describe worthless people or places.

This story first appeared in The Hindu Magazine https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/meet-the-kabaddi-coach-whos-fighting-for-clean-air-in-ennore/article25790301.ece

New York Times: How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades

This story that I collaborated with Somini Sengupta and Jacqui Williams to report appeared on the front page of the New York Times on 16th, August 2019. Read the piece here.

SYDNEY, Australia — The vast, untapped coal reserve in northeastern Australia had for years been the object of desire for the Indian industrial giant Adani.

In June, when the Australian authorities granted the company approval to extract coal from the reserve, they weren’t just rewarding its lobbying and politicking, they were also opening the door for Adani to realize its grand plan for a coal supply chain that stretches across three countries.

Coal from the Australian operation, known as the Carmichael project, would be transported to India, where the company is building a new power plant for nearly $2 billion to produce electricity. That power would be sold next door in Bangladesh.

Adani’s victory in Australia helped to ensure that coal will remain woven into the economy and lives of those three countries, which together have a quarter of the planet’s population, for years, if not decades. This, despite warnings by scientists that reducing coal burning is key to staving off the most disastrous effects of climate change.

The story of Adani and its Australian project illustrates why the world keeps burning coal despite its profound danger — and despite falling prices for options like natural gas, wind and solar.

Coal is in steep decline in wealthier countries, including the United States and across Western Europe, mostly because of competition from those alternative energy sources. But in Asia, demand for coal, the main source of energy, is growing. That’s because it is plentiful, the appetite is huge and the alternatives are fewer.

Government support is also key to coal’s survival. Subsidies for coal-fired power plants have nearly tripled in recent years in the Group of 20 countries, according to a study by the Overseas Development Institute and two other groups. In rich countries, that’s helped to keep coal on life support. In developing countries, it means coal continues to thrive.

The $14 billion Adani Group — a sprawling conglomerate with interests in energy, agribusiness, real estate and defense, among other sectors — leveraged both business acumen and politics to realize its plan, securing generous support from the Indian government to build its latest coal-fired power plant.

The company’s founder, Gautam Adani, says criticism of coal use is unfair. “India doesn’t have a choice,” he said in a recent interview at company headquarters in Ahmedabad, India. Citing the affordability and reliability of coal, he said it was indispensable to feeding the energy demands of big developing countries.

Moreover, Mr. Adani said, “nation building” was part of his business philosophy. At the heart of that, he said, was the question of “how to make India energy secure.”

Regardless of whether India has a choice about coal, Mr. Adani’s empire of mines, cargo ships, ports and power plants depends heavily on it. And he has invested enormous effort to make sure coal will not go away anytime soon.

“This is the last gasp of the fossil fuel industry and they’re taking advantage of all the political capital they have to dig in,” said Rachel Cleetus, public policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Meanwhile, we are seeing climate impacts now.”

A ‘tremendous opportunity’ for Australia

From his headquarters in Ahmedabad, Mr. Adani schooled himself in the politics of Queensland, Australia’s second-largest state, 6,000 miles away. Then, when a national election was called in Australia for May this year, his team went into action.

Company representatives made the case to rural Queenslanders that they could gain from opening up the Galilee Basin, the vast coal seam that the Adani Group wanted to exploit.

Adani’s people held public meetings to explain how India’s thirst for coal could lift the area’s fortunes. They donated to community organizations, gave money to a basketball arena, made campaign contributions to politicians and hired former political aides to lobby on the company’s behalf.

“Opening up the Galilee is a tremendous opportunity for the region,” said Lucas Dow, chief executive of Adani’s Australia division. “The reality is that, if the coal doesn’t come from Australia or Queensland or the Galilee, it’s going to come from other jurisdictions.”

Coal mining has enriched Australia for decades. Ready markets in the fast-growing, energy-hungry economies of Asia have made it one of Australia’s biggest exports and it has traditionally enjoyed the backing of most major political parties.

Rising concern about climate change, though, has made coal a contentious issue in Australian politics over the last decade.

In the run-up to these elections, the country was battered by heat waves, drought and bush fires increasingly linked to climate change, and public opinion polls found that a majority of voters wanted tougher government action. Conservative politicians, in response, repeatedly warned that turning away from coal too abruptly would cost the Australian economy dearly — and that coal country, in Australia’s northeast, would hemorrhage jobs.

The Carmichael project became a symbol of that divide.

Yet before the election was called in April, the federal governmentsent a signal to those on the side of coal. It approved Adani’s groundwater plan for the Carmichael site, even though Australia’s national science agency had described the proposal as “not sufficiently robust.” The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the government had leaned on the science agency to hasten its review of the plan.

When the vote came on May 18, it was not, as some had predicted, a watershed climate change election. Australians, especially in coal country, voted to keep the incumbent conservative coalition in power.

Within days, the Carmichael mine had new momentum.

First, Queensland settled a case that had accused the Adani-controlled port at Abbot Point of dumping excess amounts of suspended solids, a category that includes coal, around the Great Barrier Reef. (The company denied wrongdoing and agreed to better water monitoring in the settlement.) Then, the state issued a regulatory clearance that had long been held up over the fate of a threatened bird.

A last hurdle was Queensland’s approval for the company’s plan to monitor the fragile ecosystems that depend on multiple aquifers near the coal seam. Independent experts warned state officials that the mine could permanently dry one natural spring, the Doongmabulla, held sacred by the area’s Indigenous people. As recently as June 6, they had urged the state not to rush into a decision. The impact, they said, could be “irreversible.”

But a week later, Queensland approved the plan. The Carmichael mine could now be built.

Mr. Adani used Twitter to thank lawmakers in Australia “for believing in Adani’s vision to fortify India’s energy security & create opportunities for Australians.”

‘Throw enough subsidies and anything can be viable’

At the global level, coal faces powerful headwinds. Renewable energy is getting cheaper as it expands. Private investors around the world are shying away from new projects. At the same time, public health officials are increasingly alarmed that air pollution, including the dangerous particles that come from coal plants, is shaving years off people’s lives.

“If you just looked at the social costs of air pollution, coal is so bad that, if those are added in as a tax, no coal plant would make economic sense,” said Anant Sudarshan, an economist at the University of Chicago who studies energy policy.

While Mr. Adani leveraged local politics to beat those headwinds in Australia, the key to success in India was different. There, his company has demonstrated an unusual ability to extract good deals for itself and has thrived with the help of generous state backing.

On many levels, those good deals have come at the expense of some of the poorest people in the world, who inhale the pollution that coal-fired power plants produce, drink water tainted by ash, and, often, support those coal projects with their tax money.

Mr. Adani, a native of Gujarat State, began business there nearly 40 years ago as an importer and exporter, including of coal for state-owned power plants.

It wasn’t long before coal became central to his enterprise. India’s hunger to extend electricity to its people helped.

With land from the Gujarat government, the company built the country’s largest private port in the western city of Mundra and next to it, the country’s largest private coal-fired power plant.

It also built a close relationship to Narendra Modi, the man who, in 2001, became the top elected official in Gujarat, and, in 2014, the prime minister of India.

The Adani Group went on to build a necklace of ports along the Indian coastline, enabling it to deliver coal to virtually any part of the country. The company bought an Indonesian coal mine, and, in India, it acquired coal mining contracts across thousands of hectares in a vast and previously off-limits forest.

When coal prices rose a few years ago, causing deep pain for power producers, the company secured an unusual reprieve from Indian regulators: the ability to charge its electricity customers more than it had originally contracted with the government.

The company, for its part, argued that without the higher tariff, it could not operate the plant.

Separately, the Indian Directorate of Revenue Intelligence has accused the company of overcharging taxpayers for imported equipment and coal. The agency lost its case in a customs tribunal and is now appealing in a higher court, where it accuses the company of impeding the case.

One of the biggest boons for the company has been the government benefits associated with the huge new coal-fired power plant under construction in India, near the town of Godda. The coal from the Carmichael mine could be burned there, company executives say.

The land for the plant, acquired by the government from a swath of lush paddy fields, was home to some of India’s poorest farmers.

The earthmovers arrived to begin construction during the last monsoon, accompanied by the police. Coconut palms were uprooted. Paddy fields and a mango orchard were removed. A cellphone video taken at the time shows local women screaming, pulling their saris over their heads in deference and falling at the feet of a company representative, begging him to spare their land.

Soon, a concrete boundary wall went up. Then, makeshift offices. Then, a chilling message went out to locals who dared protest: The police charged five men, who did not want to give up their land, with criminal trespassing.

“They’ve got the plot surrounded,” said Balis Pandit, one of the accused, who has migrated to another part of the country to find work. “There’s no way we can enter the land.”

The Godda power plant is unique because it will be built as part of a special economic zone. But unlike other such zones, where factories make duty-free goods for export, this one would generate electricity for export. It would be the country’s sole special economic zone with only a power plant. And it was made possible only after a change in Indian regulations in early 2019, to allow the Adani project to go forward.

For the company, that brings significant gains. It would be exempt from several levies, including on imported coal and equipment.

The project has also been approved for a roughly $700 million loan from the state-owned lender that funds power plants and for another $700 million loan from a second state-owned company designed to help electrify Indian villages.

This plant, though, is not meant to electrify a single Indian village. As the Indian news site Scroll first reported last year, power generated in Godda would be exported to Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation threatened by a rising sea.

The people who live near the site would receive none of the electricity, just the pollution.

The power export deal was announced by Mr. Modi on a visit to Bangladesh in 2015. Mr. Adani was part of his business delegation.

It was the final link in a long, sooty — and, for Adani, lucrative — chain, one that critics say could only be made possible by government assistance.

“Throw enough subsidies and anything can be viable,” said Tim Buckley, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “If they did not have special treatment back in India they wouldn’t be able to use expensive Australian sourced coal viably.”

Somini Sengupta reported from Sydney, Australia, and Ahmedabad, India; Jacqueline Williams from Sydney and Clermont, Australia; and Aruna Chandrasekhar from Bangalore, India.

Rs 7,410-crore question: Jharkhand amended energy policy to buy power from Adani at higher price →

Located on the easternmost tip of Jharkhand near the border of West Bengal, Godda is a district of rolling grasslands and thick forests, punctuated with palm trees and paddy fields, underneath which runs a rich coal seam. The district is home to one of India’s oldest coal mines. But it has one of the lowest electrification rates in the country.

Adani Power Limited, which is part of the Adani Group, is constructing a 1,600 megawatts coal-fired thermal power project here. But the electricity won’t be for local use: it will be supplied across the border to Bangladesh.

Under state policy, Jharkhand is legally entitled to buying 25% of the electricity generated by thermal power projects built within the state. Adani Power Limited has said it will meet this requirement, but from another source, which it has not specified.

The power won’t come cheap. Government documents accessed by Scroll.in show that Jharkhand has amended its energy policy in 2016 to allow the company to charge a higher price than what other thermal projects bill the state.

Older agreements signed with existing thermal power projects allow Jharkhand to buy 12% of the electricity at a price that covers only variable costs – mostly the cost of fuel. The remaining 13% comes at a price that covers both fixed and variable costs – the cost of fuel plus the cost of building and running the project – with the actual tariff determined by the state electricity regulatory commission.

The first stage agreement signed with Adani Power Limited in February 2016 was on similar lines – it said Jharkhand could buy 25% of the electricity based on existing regulations. But the company asked for a change in the terms in the second stage agreement. It wanted the availability of 12% electricity at purely variable costs to be made conditional on the state providing concessional coal for the project. In other words, Jharkhand would have to pay both fixed and variable costs for the entire 25% of the electricity, or supply concessional coal for the Adani project.

Until 2014, many state governments in India, including Jharkhand, enabled thermal power projects within their states to get cheap coal by recommending them to the Centre for the allotment of a captive coal mine – a mine that they could use strictly for their project. But in August 2014, the Supreme Court cancelled such discretionary allotments of coal mines, describing them as arbitrary and non-transparent. In 2015, the Centre amended the law to make auctions mandatory for coal mine allocations.

In its correspondence with Jharkhand government in 2016, Adani Power Limited cited this change in India’s coal mining law as the reason for seeking amendments in the agreement for the Godda project.

Jharkhand’s Bharatiya Janata Party government amended the state’s energy policy on October 6, 2016, in keeping with the changes proposed by the company. The changes were also reflected in the second stage agreement that was prepared the next day itself, and formally signed by both the parties on October 21.

A confidential government audit report, of which Scroll.in has a copy, calculates that the revised terms could cost the state an additional Rs 296.40 crore every year. Over the course of 25 years – the duration of Adani’s power purchase agreement with Bangladesh – Jharkhand could end up paying the company an additional Rs 7,410 crore.

The office of the state accountant general, which reports to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, raised queries about the agreement with Jharkhand’s energy department on May 12, 2017. It said the agreement with Adani amounted to “preferential treatment” and would result in “undue benefits” to the company. It pointed out that older thermal power projects were selling electricity to Jharkhand at a lower price based on the earlier formula. The amended energy policy did not retrospectively apply to them, even though they had been stripped of their captive coal mines following the Supreme Court’s 2014 judgement.

“It is desirable that there should be consistency and uniformity in the clauses of MoUs between the parties identically situated,” the audit report said.

Jharkhand energy department’s response to the audit enquiry is not in the public domain. Neither the energy department nor the Chief Minister’s Office responded to questions emailed by Scroll.in. This story will be updated if they respond.

Adani Power Limited did not answer specific questions emailed by Scroll.in. A company spokesperson said since the Godda project “will not have connectivity with Indian Grid, the 25% power to Jharkhand Govt. will be supplied from alternate source but at the tariff of Godda Project; and the said tariff will be determined by State Regulatory Commission.”

“The Godda Power Project is conceived based on imported coal,” the spokesperson added.

At the time of signing agreements with Bangladesh, the Adani Group had not disclosed the coal source for the Godda plant. To India’s environment ministry, Adani Power Limited furnished an agreement in April 2017 with a coal trading firm in Indonesia, PT Limas Tunggal, for the supply of nine million tonnes of coal, while also citing mines in Australia, Indonesia and South Africa as possible sources. In March 2018, the chief executive of Adani Enterprises in Australia, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, announced that coal from its Carmichael mine in Queensland state, which is still facing roadblocks, would be used to produce electricity in the Godda project for Bangladesh.

Coal shipped from Australia would raise the costs of producing electricity in Godda, said a report published in April 2018 by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an international non-profit research organisation.

“The idea of importing coal at great expense into India’s biggest coal mining state makes no strategic sense,” said Simon Nicholas, an energy finance analyst at IEEFA.

The agreement with Bangladesh

The Godda power project took shape in June 2015, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Dhaka to meet his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina and made a pitch for Indian power companies.

Bangladesh is power-starved. With barely any hydro-power potential or fossil-fuel deposits, the country needs to import electricity from its neighbours, or seek technical and financial support to build power-generating projects of its own.

In 2010, India extended a billion-dollar line of credit to Bangladesh to set up infrastructure projects. The same year, India’s National Thermal Power Corporation and Bangladesh Power Development Board signed an MoU to build two coal-fired power plants of 1,320 megawatts each in Bangladesh.

For the next four years, India’s contribution to Bangladesh’s grid was state-driven. But the dynamic changed in 2014, when India elected the Modi-led National Democratic Alliance to power.

On June 6, 2015, on his first visit to Dhaka, Prime Minister Modi said India could be a major partner in helping Bangladesh achieve its goals of having 24,000 MW of power by 2021. He sought Prime Minister Hasina’s help for “facilitating the entry of Indian companies in the power generation, transmission and distribution sector of Bangladesh.”

The same day, Bangladesh Power Development Board announced separate agreement to buy electricity from thermal power projects to be built by Adani Power Limited and Reliance Power Limited.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina exchanging the memorabilia, in Dhaka, Bangladesh on June 6, 2015. Photo: IANS/PIB

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Adani and Bangladesh two months later, on August 11, 2015, while the implementation agreement was inked two years later, during Hasina’s visit to New Delhi on Modi’s invitation in April 2017. The tariff was left to be determined during the negotiation of the power purchase agreement, which was signed in early November at an event that most of the Bangladesh Power Division’s officials were unable to attend, according to this report in The Daily Sun.

Power-purchase agreements essentially spell out how much power will be supplied and at what rate. They should ideally have short lock-in periods, to account for the fluctuation in energy markets, with firms picked through competitive auctions to keep power prices low, rule out corruption and encourage competition, experts say. Adani’s agreement with Bangladesh has a 25-year lock-in period.

Estimates on the price under the power purchase agreement signed with Bangladesh vary. “The Bangladesh Power Development Board has stated that the agreed tariff is 8.6127 US cents per unit, equal to Rs 5.82 per unit although no details over what is and isn’t included in this cost have been made available,” said Simon Nichols of IEEFA.

In recent months, Bangladesh has chosen to use the competitive bidding route to purchase power from Indian power companies. In February 2018, the National Thermal Power Corporation won a bid to supply Bangladesh 300 MW of power at Rs. 3.42 per kilowatt hour, much lower than Adani.

The cost of power

Despite hosting the largest reserves of coal in India, Jharkhand is power-starved. Only 59% of its households have electricity connections, against the national average of 82%. The average per capita consumption of electricity in the state is 552 units, nearly half the national average.

The state’s energy policy, formulated in 2012, offered several incentives to thermal power companies to set up projects in Jharkhand, on the condition that they offer up to 25% of the electricity generated to the state, which has the first right to buy or refuse this power.

There are chiefly two kinds of costs that power producers bill to governments: fixed costs and variable costs. Fixed costs typically cover land and capital infrastructure. Variable costs include fuel, labour and maintenance expenses.

IEEFA’s report pointed out the Godda project has already seen significant delays, which could lead to a rise in fixed costs.

The variable costs of coal plants are extremely price-sensitive, since fossil-fuel prices are constantly fluctuating. If coal prices spike – such as in the case of imported coal from Australia or Indonesia – this would mean high fixed and high variable costs, making power prohibitively expensive for governments to buy.

A tale of two MoUs

On February 17, 2016, during the government’s Make In India week in Mumbai, Adani Power Limited signed the first stage Memorandum of Understanding with Jharkhand government for the Godda power project. It states that power from the project would be wholly supplied to Bangladesh, while the company would give Jharkhand its 25% share from “other sources”, with the price determined as per existing policies.

This is a departure from the normal practice of power companies supplying the host state’s share of electricity from the project itself.

Energy researchers say this could have serious power-pricing implications. “For instance, if Adani were to supply power from an old plant, such as the Korba (West) plant in Chhattisgarh it is in the process of acquiring, it would have markedly lower fixed costs than what setting up a new plant like Godda would cost, and a much lower cost of coal,” said Tim Buckley of IEEFA. “Billing the cost of power from such a plant as equivalent to Godda would again result in a huge benefit for Adani, and possibly subsidise another loss-making power plant.”

Soon after the first stage MoU was signed, on April 21, 2016, Adani Power Limited wrote a letter to Jharkhand’s energy department, expressing its reservations over the terms of the second stage MoU, and seeking a meeting to discuss possible amendments. A month later, the Business Standard and the Telegraph reported that SKG Rahate, then the state’s energy secretary, went on long leave after flagging concerns over the changes Adani was suggesting to the MoU. Rahate, who is now the home secretary of Jharkhand, declined comment when contacted by Scroll.in.

On July 13, Adani wrote to the energy department again, seeking discussions “so that MoU draft can be amended appropriately”, because “it is noticed that it is not aligned with the current rules and regulations of Government”.

On August 10, Adani sent a third letter to the department – this time spelling out a specific set of amendments, with a column citing their rationale.

The key amendment it asked for:

 “Out of said 25%, under first right of refusal to the State, the rate of 13% share will be as approved by JSERC [Jharkhand State Electricity Regulatory Commission], and 12% variable cost will also be approved by JSERC, subject to allocation of suitable coal source by Govt. of Jharkhand at concessional price…”  

The rationale Adani cited for this:

“With the enactment of the coal mines (special provision act 2015), allocation of coal blocks under the Government Dispensation route, based on the recommendations of State Government is not possible. In order to provide a level playing field, GOJ should provide suitable coal source at concessional price for meeting the entire requirement of the project.”  

In August 2014, the Supreme Court had cancelled discretionary allotments of coal mines, describing them as arbitrary and non-transparent. In 2015, the Centre amended the law to make auctions mandatory for coal mine allocations.

In the absence of coal mine allocation, thermal power companies turned to imported coal or sought coal linkages or contracts with the government-run Coal India Limited. In 2016, the government made electronic auctions mandatory for coal linkages.

In the first round of auctions of coal mines auctions held in March 2015, Adani Group won the bid for Jitpur coal mine. This mine is located in Godda district, but the company won the bid strictly for the supply of coal to its thermal power project in Mundra, Gujarat.

Months later, when it signed agreements with Bangladesh for the Godda power project, the company did not disclose the source of coal. In correspondence with Jharkhand government, however, the company asked for the supply of domestic concessional coal for its project, despite the fact that the electricity generated would not be used domestically but would be exported to another country.

A week after it sent a letter to Jharkhand energy department asking for amendments to the second stage MoU, on August 17, 2016, Adani Power Limited wrote to the government-run Jharkhand State Mineral Development Corporation, asking it to obtain a coal linkage for the Godda project. In its reply on August 2, the corporation turned down the request, stating that this could only be obtained from Coal India Limited through electronic auctions.

On October 6, 2016, the Jharkhand’s energy department issued a resolution amending the state energy policy, with the consent of the council of ministers secured in September. Even before the resolution could be notified in the state gazette, the next day itself, Adani Power and the state government prepared an amended draft of the second stage MoU.

Section 10.2 of this MoU cited the freshly inserted clause in the energy policy, word-for-word.

The amendments in Jharkhand’s energy policy and the terms under the second stage MoU have resulted in this: the state government will now have to buy electricity from the Adani project at fixed and variable costs, instead of 13% at fixed and variable costs, and 12% at purely variable costs. Essentially, this means that the state will pay nearly double the fixed cost compared to earlier, unless it allocates Adani a coal linkage, which it cannot legally.

According to calculations made by auditors in the office of the state accountant general, under the earlier arrangement, Jharkhand would be buying power at Rs 72.4 crores a month, but now it would have to pay Adani Power Limited Rs 97.1 crores a month. This comes to an extra Rs 24.7 crores every month, which translates into Rs 296.40 crores every year and Rs 7,410 crores for the 25 years of the power purchase agreement that Adani has signed with the Bangladesh government.

For the calculations, the auditors used estimates based on fuel and fixed costs in existing MoUs signed by Jharkhand with two private companies – Adhunik Power and Natural Resources Limited and Inland Power Limited. Together, these two projects supply nearly a third of Jharkhand’s electricity.

The table showing detailed calculations made by government auditors.

After the Supreme Court’s 2015 judgement, both the projects were stripped of their coal blocks and landed in an advanced stage of debt. Both have switched to buying coal from Coal India Limited in e-auctionsthrough the government’s SHAKTI scheme, launched in 2017.

Neither of the two companies – or any other thermal company supplying power to Jharkhand – has benefited from the state’s amended energy policy, since it solely applies only to MoUs signed after the amendment was made, not those signed earlier.

Jharkhand continues to buy power from the older projects on the basis of the earlier formula – 12% power at variable costs and 13% at fixed and variable costs – even though they no longer have access to concessional coal.

As of March 2018, Inland Power was still complying with the earlier tariff structure as stated in its MoU and receiving its coal supply via e-auctions. However, in February 2018, Adhunik Power cited the cancellation of its coal block as reason to relinquish its long-term bulk-power transmission agreement for the supply of 250 MW of power.

Larger questions

Jharkhand’s amendment of its energy policy raises a larger question: with thermal power projects no longer getting concessional coal, should they be freed of the obligation of providing electricity to state governments at lower rates?

Ashok Khurana, the director general of the Association of Power Producers, an organisation representing private power companies in India, certainly thinks so. He described Jharkhand’s decision to amend its policy as “correct”.

“No concession is being given [to thermal power projects] by the state government other than helping out,” he said.

But energy researchers point out coal is not the only concession that thermal power projects get from host states, and the absence of it should not be a reason to revise electricity prices upwards. In fact, Jharkhand’s changed policy sets a bad precedent, they argue.

“Power plants are already getting large numbers of concessions from governments, from land being made available and acquired on their behalf, and huge quantities of water allocated to them,” said Shripad Dharmadhikary, an energy researcher at the non-profit organisation Manthan.

Adani’s Godda project has been given permission to annually draw 36 million cubic metres of water from river Chir. This, after it had failed to submit details on the river’s flow pattern and catchment areas for four times in a row before the Environment Ministry’s expert panel.

“This project got stalled at the environment ministry specifically because of its enormous water consumption,” said Dharmadhikary.

Jharkhand government is also acquiring land for the project as well as the private rail line the company is building for the transport of coal.

The land acquisition is contentious under both state and central laws, and the company is facing stiff resistance from local residents, as the next story in this series reports.

Can America Live up to Washington's Paris Promises Without It?

Published in The Wire during COP23, made possible by a Climate Tracker reporting fellowship. https://thewire.in/environment/cop23-bonn-climate-talks-americas-pledge-fracking-donald-trump

12 November 207, Bonn: On a cold and rainy Saturday morning, a long queue snaked outside the US Climate Action Centre at the ongoing climate talks in Bonn, Germany, to witness ‘America’s Pledge‘ to the Paris Agreement – with or without Washington. The centre, an igloo-shaped inflatable dome, is located neither in the Bonn Zone, where all the other country pavilions are, nor in the Bula zone, where the negotiations take place. This physical positioning is idiomatic of America’s place in the climate talks. Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw from the Paris Agreement remains on the cards even as it still has a seat at the negotiations, leaving it up to American citizens, cities and corporations to pledge their own allegiance to Paris.

“Pittsburgh is still committed to Paris,” said Pittsburgh mayor Bob Peduto to a huge round of applause from the crowd, hitting back at Trump for using his city’s electorate as a justification for pulling out of the Paris Agreement. “I watched my city die, go through a depression. We exported people like we exported steel. Although federal governments can create regulations and rules, the implementation happens at the local level. Pittsburgh can show the model that if we can do it, you certainly can.” Peduto is part of a group of 367 mayors that have joined America’s Pledge, an act that the Nicaraguan delegation said had been inspiring enough for them to abandon their skepticism and join the Paris Agreement.

“We are going to meet and exceed our commitments,” said Al Gore, former US premier and renowned climate activist, while media magnate Michael Bloomberg pointed out that the 2,300 signatories to the pledge represent “a bigger economy than any nation outside the US and China”.

Anti-Trump and ‘people’s power’ sentiments aside, precisely how the US will meet its commitments to Paris is the question on top of everyone’s minds. On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that he would cease implementation of the US national pledge, cribbing that ”the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States”. However, a civil society assessment of the national pledge shows that it promises only a fifth of its “fair share” to keep global warming under 1.5º C. A UN Emissions Gap report states that current national pledges will also only cover a third of all that’s needed to keep temperature rise below 2º C.

Accountability is another big issue. “How are pledges by non-state actors sufficient?” asked Thiagarajan Jayaraman, climate policy expert and professor at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Mumbai. “The America’s Pledge on Climate may be a worthwhile initiative, but is it not ducking the real question that the US government is not answerable now for the commitment it promised in the Paris Agreement?”

Not only has the US let itself off the hook for what it does on climate action, its negotiators are still in the room, blocking progress on other fronts. “We thought after US hurricanes, its government would be far more empathetic to what is happening in developing countries, but we were wrong,” said Harjeet Singh, climate change lead at Action Aid. “The US is being as active and obstructive as it used to be, blocking progress on several items, while pulling others down.” African campaigners have been petitioning negotiators to eject the US delegation from the talks, stating that it had no right to ‘rock the boat’ on progress from within.

So far, the US has lead interventions against putting pre-2020 climate actions on the table and blocking any reference to public finance for victims of extreme weather events from developing countries. Bloomberg’s $50-million anti-coal fund is welcome, but whether private finance can fill the staggering gap for adaptation and the cost of its historical emissions also remains to be explored.

It was also clear that not everyone is “still in” when it comes to America’s Pledge. Indigenous activists and other protesters were shown the way out of the Climate Action Centre after they lead protests against Californian governor Jerry Brown for what they called “false solutions to climate change”. In shockingly bad form, Brown responded to their slogans by saying, “I agree with you, let’s keep you in the ground so we can continue the show.

”Brown’s reputation back home in California – the third largest oil-producing state – is not doing much to inspire confidence in his leadership either. A new report by the Center for Biological Diversity shows that California regulators issued more than 3,300 drilling permits for oil and gas wells in 2015 alone. “Real climate leaders don’t frack,” said Eva Malis, a 21-year-old environmentalist from California.

In another alarming move, the Trump government is bringing the coal industry to the party, with coal major Peabody Electric Corporation set to speak at a high-level event at the UN on Monday (November 13).

Skepticism around its leadership and enforceability aside, ‘America’s Pledge’ remains inspiring. It comes at a time when high-level negotiations are not moving fast enough to keep up with climate science’s alarming findings, and citizens realising that, bluster aside, they’re on their own. It underscores the need for more localised climate actions and developing resilience. It is more than just a little unfortunate that, despite their best intentions, the American government continues to block the progress of developing countries that are also, for better or worse, still in.

The Anatomy Of A Fake Surrender: A Movement Against Bauxite Mining In Odisha’s Niyamgiri Hills And The State’s Efforts To Circumvent It

This piece was first published in The Caravan's Vantage on 4 August 2017: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/odisha-bauxite-mining-fake-surrender-niyamgiri

It was the first week of May. The summer sun beat down on Lanjigarh, a town in the Kalahandi district of western Odisha, which appeared to have been reduced to an industrial wasteland. Beyond the stockpiles of toxic red mud and desert flats of fly ash, born from the refining of bauxite—the primary ore of aluminium— lay our destination: the thickly-forested Niyamgiri hills.

My companions, two Odia journalists, Maudi Barik and Venkateswar Padhi, picked a route that they were familiar with. Our walk through the forest was long, scattered with milestones I would have missed, had it not been for Barik and Padhi. “This is where the Maoists are said to have killed a police informer who wasn’t,” Padhi told me, pointing to a sunlit patch of forest by the side of the road. He added, “This is where they killed his brother who was.”

As we went deeper into the hills, leaving the dirt road behind, we ran into a group of boys bringing down mangoes from a giant tree, with an expert fling of a twig. Barik and Padhi recognised some of the older ones from a community college that the journalists had pooled in funds to start; they told me it is the one of the only colleges in the region. Among the fallen leaves and mango pits were hand-written posters in red and blue ink, issued by the Bansadhara-Ghumsar-Nagavali (BGM) division of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The posters called for the exit of Naveen Patnaik, the chief minister of Odisha; Prime Minister Narendra Modi; and Vedanta Aluminum, a subsidiary of the UK-headquartered mining firm, from Niyamgiri. Vedanta’s billboards in Lanjigarh, in contrast, advertised the development that the company claimed to have brought to the region and boasted of achieving a standard of zero discharge of pollutants in its refinery’s operations. The signposts were a testament to the disputes that have long engulfed the region we were in, and the divergent claims that have been laid upon its forests and bedrock.

For the Maoists, Niyamgiri’s thick forests—on the border of Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh—offer strategic cover for cadres on the run from fire up north. Its tactical importance for them has increased since the arrests of Maoist leaders such as Sabyasachi Panda and D Keshav Rao—who goes by the moniker Azad—in the past few years. For the Odisha Mining Corporation, the mining arm of the state government, the value of the hills lies in the region’s Lanjigarh-Niyamgiri deposit, which contains 88 million tonnes of bauxite. The OMC holds a claim over the deposit with a letter of intent towards a mining lease from the state government.  For the Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities, who live in the Niyamgiri hills, the hills are tied to their religion, their identity and their survival. They believe that Niyamraja—their god of universal law—rules the mountain.

In 2004, the OMC entered into a memorandum of understanding with Vedanta Aluminium, which operates a massive alumina refinery at the base of the Niyamgiri hills. The memorandum was renewed in 2007 and 2014, and the latest version mandates that the Odisha government would supply Vedanta’s refinery with 150 million tonnes of bauxite. In November 2015, the ministry of environment, forests and climate change granted the refinery a clearance for a four-fold expansion—from producing one million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of alumina to four million tonnes per annum—which would inevitably increase its requirement for bauxite as well. The clearance also allows Vedanta to expand to six million tonnes per annum by merely obtaining an amendment in its environment clearance, without having to go through a fresh assessment process or a public hearing, as long as it successfully acquires land needed for the first two phases of the expansion project.

The ministry approved Vedanta’s request despite the company’s failures to identify adequate sources of bauxite that had requisite environment clearances to justify its 4 MTPA expansion—a condition that the ministry itself prescribed in its Terms of Reference for the project. In 2011, a Special Rapporteur to the National Human Rights Commission observed that “Vedanta has not done anything tangible to mitigate the grievances of the displaced and the project affected persons” and recommended the setting up of a committee to systematically monitor and evaluate Vedanta’s pollution impacts and rehabilitation. As of 2017, this was yet to be done. Eight families I spoke to in the villages of Rengopali and Bandaguda, located right next to Vedanta’s red-mud ponds—waste deposits created during the production of aluminium—said they were yet to be rehabilitated. All of them spoke of health issues—trouble breathing, burning eyes—and said that the water was unfit to drink.

A fly ash pond located at the mouth of the Vamsadhara river near the village of Chhattarpur is set to grow even bigger, as a fall-out of powering Vedanta’s expanding alumina refinery.

The environment ministry’s clearance for the refinery’s expansion was also admitted despite prolonged resistance and a landmark referendum in 2013. For a decade-and-a-half now, the Niyamgiri hills have been at the centre of a conflict between the indigenous communities that inhabit the landscape, and Vedanta. Plans for the Lanjigarh refinery and Niyamgiri mine date as far back as April 1997, when the OMC signed over its rights to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills to Vedanta. Locals, however, told me that they only became aware about the project in 2002, when they received notices from district officials telling them their land was to be compulsorily acquired for the refinery, which was built in 2008.

This strife came to a head in 2013, when the Supreme Court directed that the villages affected by the mining would decide on the company’s contentious plans to mine the Niyamgiri hills for bauxite. The Odisha government identified 12 village assemblies or gram sabhas in Niyamgiri, all of which unanimously rejected the company’s proposal. Following this, the environment ministry rejected Vedanta’s application for a forest clearance to mine in Niyamgiri. The referendum seems to not have deterred the company in the slightest. Its efforts are underway to procure more bauxite to feed the refinery. The aluminium ore will arrive in trucks from places as far off as Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Australia and as near as the deposit of Kodingamali in Koraput, a neighbouring district in which the company has identified more deposits. Ore for the refinery is currently being sourced from mines in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.

In the four years since the referendum, the Odisha government has made several attempts to reintroduce mining in the Niyamgiri Hills in order to meet the requirements of the plant in Lanjigarh. In 2016, the state government filed a petition before the Supreme Court seeking that the results of the referendum be annulled and fresh village councils be convened. (The Supreme Court quashed the petition.) Recently, it reportedly sought the advice of the advocate general on whether it can put the mining block up for auction.

Meanwhile, the local opposition to this project has only fortified. At the forefront of this resistance since its inception, has been a local group called the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti (NSS)—which comprises people from tribal communities such as the Dongria and the Kutia Kondh. In April 2017, the union home ministry, in its annual report, made the widely-criticised claim that the NSS was acting on behalf of Maoists and had been using the “displacement of local communities” as its main plank.

“They are saying that the Maoists are the reason for our backwardness. For so many years, the Indian government has not stepped in to provide us any of this development that they speak of. But now that Vedanta is here, everybody is coming here and associating us and our resistance with the Maoists,” Ladda Sikaka, one of the senior-most leaders of the NSS, told me when I met him during my visit to Odisha in May. “The historic referendum [in 2013] would not have taken place if the Maoists had their way,” Prafulla Samantara, the state president of the Lok Shakti Abhiyaan—an Odisha based organisation—said. (In April 2017, Samantara won the Goldman Environmental Prize—popularly called the Green Nobel—for his work in support of the Niyamgiri movement.) He continued, “Instead it was the NSS who convinced people of the benefits of participating in this democratic exercise, and claiming their rights. The home ministry’s report is full of manufactured lies, because now they want to threaten the tribal community in Niyamgiri through this police repression.”

“It is unbearable in the evenings, when the wind whips up dust and sends it straight into our homes,” said S Majhi, a resident of Rengopali village located right next to stockpiles of toxic red mud generated by the alumina refinery. These ponds will span 783 hectares, at peak expansion.

Soon after news publications reported on the home ministry’s report, Ashish Kothari, an environmental activist, drafted a letter addressed to Pranab Mukherjee, the former president of India, and Modi, condemning the ministry’s position. The letter, to which over 70 organisations and 50 individuals were signatories, also noted the manner in which state authorities had been harassing Dongria Kondhs from the Niyamgiri hills. It said, “The continued targeting of the Dongria Kondh community in reports like these (and in continued state actions on the ground) raises serious doubts: Is this being purposely done to break their continued resolve to oppose the mining of the Niyamgiri hills, and fragment their movement?” Less than a month later, Kuni Sikaka—a 20-year-old Dongria Kondh woman—who is associated with the NSS and is also Ladda’s niece, was arrested and presented at a press conference as a Maoist who surrendered, all within a span of 36 hours.

We made our way to Lakhpadar, a village in the Niyamgiri hills, where Kuni emerged from her home. She was a young girl when the resistance started 14 years ago, and grew up in the movement that she later became the face of by playing a leading role in organising the village assemblies for the referendum in 2013 and travelling outside the region to talk about the Niyamgiri struggle. In 2017, she married Jagili Pusika, a vocal anti-Vedanta activist and the son of Dadhi Pusika, a senior NSS leader, and moved to their village, Gorata.

Kuni shook the hands of my male companions, but was wary. In these parts, even a handshake could cast suspicion on your leanings. She told me that late at night on 1 May 2017, she was jolted out of her sleep by the sounds of the police knocking on the doors of her father-in-law’s home in Gorata. She said that close to 50 personnel—including members of the Rayagada Special Operations Group, which is a paramilitary unit in Odisha, inspectors, and three women police officials—had arrived at Gorata to arrest her, and had cordoned off the village.

“I was asleep with my husband. When we opened the door, they searched the house. The police caught hold of my husband and led him outside. Then when I followed him, they arrested me,” Kuni said. The officials escorted her to the village of Sakota, where she said, three trucks and two Boleros were waiting to take her to the Rayagada police station. Kuni was not given a reason for her arrest. “When I asked them why they were taking me away, they said ‘We don’t know anything, but you can find out at the Rayagada SP’s office, where they want to put some case on you.’”

At the station, Kuni said, the superintendent of police of Rayagada, K Siva Subramani, and the deputy inspector general interrogated her. “There, the SP started asking me why I was roaming around with Naxals and that this is why they arrested me. He started naming Naxals who he said had confessed against me,” said Kuni. “I told him I am not a Maoist, I didn’t understand these things he was saying. I told him that I wasn’t with the Maoists when these incidents he accused me of happened, but he kept threatening me with 12 to 15 years in jail if I didn’t surrender.”

When I spoke to Subramani on 15 May, he claimed that Kuni was arrested on the morning of 2 May, “after taking all the legal measures” and that he got his orders from the state police headquarters. “After hearing all about our surrender policy, she was very, very happy and she surrendered before us and we are going to extend the surrender policy benefits to her also,” Subramani told me, “So accordingly, we showed her surrender before the media, and the same day, we have sent her with her family.”

But Kuni was not released the same day. It was only after her father-in-law Dadhi Pusika came looking for her on the morning of 3 May and spoke to the regional media in Odisha, that Subramani’s office came under fire. The same evening, a hurried press conference was called at the SP’s office. In their press release, the police officials stated that Kuni was “a hardcore cadre Maoist belonging to the Bansadhara-Ghumusara-Nagavali Division of the outlawed CPI (Maoist),” with a bounty of Rs 1,00,000 on her head, and charges of arson and murder to her name. But Kuni was not the only one paraded in front of cameras. The police officials also included Kuni’s husband Jagili, and relatives, Dadhi, Dama, Laxman Pusika and Kumari Rani Sikkoka in the press conference, declaring them “supporters of CPI (Maoist)” and falsely “surrendered” them, as part of a condition that only then would they release Kuni. Kuni and her family were finally released an hour after the press conference.

Kuni Sikaka, who played a leading role in getting women to participate in the historic palli sabhas, is not cowed down by charges against her. “I am not a Maoist, I’m an NSS activist and will continue to fight to Save Niyamgiri, however long I’m alive.”

Kuni faced a kinder fate than Manda Kadraka—a 20-year-old Dongria Kondh man—who, villagers told me, was killed in 2016 by members of police forces who claimed that he was a Maoist. Another member of the Dongria Kondh community, Dasru Kadraka, a 25-year-old member of the NSS, was arrested in April 2016 and continues to languish in the Bissam-Cuttack jail. He was charged with nine cases, including planting IEDs, killing a police informer, pasting Maoist posters and blockading roads. In an interview with a six-member fact-finding team that included activists Priya Pillai and Kavita Krishnan, who visited the region in May 2017 following Kuni’s surrender, Dasru said he was “tortured with my hands tied, electric wires attached to my ears and electric shock given to me, to force me to surrender as a Maoist and to make me leave the Save Niyamgiri movement. But I refused—I am not a Maoist, why should I say I am? The andolan [movement] is my life, I will never stop protecting the Niyamgiri hills and forests.”

Some do not survive the persistent persecution. In November 2015, Drika Kadraka, a vocal Dongria Kondh NSS activist, committed suicide. A few days before Drika took his own life, police officials had reportedly picked him up from Ambadhuni village. His family members alleged that his death was an outcome of the prolonged police harassment he was subjected to. “We used to live in peace before, now it feels like there is a constant threat that one of us will be picked up,” Ladda told me.

During a press conference in Bhubaneswar on 5 June 2017, members of the NSS also noted the arrest of Saiba Pusika, a 17-year old from the village of Gorata, who they said was picked up from the market in February and continues to be detained in the Berhampur juvenile jail. On 24 June, the NSS lost another leader, when Bari Pidikaka, a 67-year-old leader of the NSS, died at the Cuttack hospital. Pidikaka had spent almost two years in Rayagada district jail as an undertrial prisoner on allegations of rape. While serving his sentence, Pidikaka was said to have developed a serious illness, because of which he had to be taken to the hospital, where he died a few hours later. According to NSS activists such as Lingaraj Azad, he died under “suspicious circumstances” and that his family members were not informed of the severity of his illnesses. On 27 June, the Odisha Human Rights Commission accepted a complaint filed by his son Bata Pidikaka, who alleged that custodial torture was the cause of his father’s death.

In the same annual report in which it implicated the NSS, the home ministry also claimed that surrenders in anti-Left Wing Extremism (LWE)—the state’s official term for Maoist insurgency—operations went up by a staggering 411 percent in 2016, when compared to 2013. The so-called surrenders of activists, according to sociologist Nandini Sundar, provides more leverage than arrests would. “One is the legal reason—a surrender gives the police much more flexibility. You can play good cop and bad cop for as long as you like, since the cases don’t really go away. In an arrest, you have to produce them in front of a magistrate in 24 hours,” she said.

Another reason is the pressure it creates on those who are forced to surrender. In February 2012, the Odisha government notified the Scheme for Surrender and Rehabilitation of Left Wing Extremists, which includes that “every surrendered extremist” should make a “public statement/confession of his voluntary surrender through the media” to become eligible for assistance for rehabilitation. This confession by camera is required irrespective of the legal status of the cases against them. “It is part of [an] increasing psychological operation to keep people in a state of fear. Their public surrender additionally shows them as broken and discourages others from participating in resistance movements,” said Sundar. Eligibility for the rehabilitation scheme also requires a “surrendered extremist” to reveal the identity of the members and financiers of the organisation. Sundar also pointed to the financial incentive—the money that police stations in LWE-districts receive for the purpose of rehabilitation packages for those who surrender provide an opportunity for police officials to supplement their income and project high surrender statistics as well.

As part of the Odisha LWE surrender scheme, each “surenderee” is entitled to receive compensation for arms surrendered, the cash equivalent of a four decimal—a unit of land measurement where one decimal is approximately one hundredth of an acre—homestead land and a payment of Rs 2,50,000 or Rs 1,00,000, depending upon their position in the organisation. However, apart from police officers supplementing their income, several “surrenderees” have not received any compensation for other reasons as well. A story published in the Asian Age, in June 2016, reported that only 68 of the 171 Maoists who surrendered in Odisha between January 2014 and February 2016 had received the rehabilitation packages that were due to them. The story notes the rest were unable to provide the information to meet the eligibility criteria. A story in the Indian Express from Chhattisgarh, published in December 2014, similarly reported that not a single one of 136 Maoists believed to have surrendered in Chhattisgarh from January 2009 to May 2014 had received surrender benefits. In September 2016, the National Human Rights Commission confirmed allegations that Adivasi youths in Jharkhand had been persuaded by police officials to falsely surrender as Maoists between 2011 and 2012. As many as 514 individuals were reportedly persuaded to surrender under the promise of jobs in the paramilitary forces, with some young tribal men reportedly paying up to Rs 2 lakh to be recruited.

Surrender policies prevalent in the states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand do not guarantee the removal of charges for a confession. This is good, because a surrender should not guarantee amnesty for perpetrators on any side. “The scheme contains no safeguards to ensure that people are not coerced into confessions or surrenders,” said Shailesh Rai, law and policy advisor at Amnesty International India. “This can be easily abused, especially when these surrenders are non-voluntary.”

Kuni’s abduction fell into the latter category. Her trial was by night. The police officials did not seek her consent, nor did they provide her with a reason for taking her. She was marched through the forest and interrogated without being given access to a lawyer or produced in front of a magistrate. The public surrender of Kuni and her relatives, conducted before the media, also served as a warning to other members of the movement. She risks being picked up and jailed again, if the police so wishes, whether for her ostensible safety as someone who has surrendered or as an arrest.

There was wide-spread outrage over Kuni’s arrest. “How can they walk into a village leader’s home at night, abduct and illegally confine his daughter-in-law for over 36 hours?” said Samantara. “If the government proclaims that this is a Maoist-affected area, then why hasn’t it arrested any Maoists yet? Why is it continuing to target only members of the NSS?” asked Sudhir Pattnaik, a journalist from Samadrusti media, who has extensively documented the movement.

In response to observations around the targeting of NSS activists, Subramani, the SP of Rayagada police station, said, “Very few members of the NSS are very staunch sympathisers and supporters of Naxals.” When asked about combing operations intensifying, he defended his image by telling me that he was a literature student, and a lover of “primitive tribes” and their culture. “Because Naxals are there, we are bound to operate over there. So we ask the NSS to conduct all rallies in a democratic way and we would not bother about these things, we’d even support them. But in presence of Naxals, and in support of Naxals, we cannot allow them,” he told me.

On 25 April 2017—barely a week before Kuni was arrested—the NSS conducted a demonstration. It had procured permission from Kalahandi police to protest outside the alumina factory premises, against the expansion of Vendanta’s refinery in Lanjigarh and against the home ministry linkage of the NSS with Maoists. However, the rally was quickly dispersed when the angry protestors placed locks on the refinery complex gate. “You say we do not have the permission to lock the factory gate. But Vedanta does not have permission to mine here—then why don’t they pick up their factory and leave?” said Ladda.

The battle in Niyamgiri is far from over. The Dongria Kondh are wedged between two sets of guns, and an ever-widening refinery that threatens their way of life. Meanwhile, Niyamgiri still lies within Vedanta’s line of sight. “We have done everything. We conducted the palli sabhas, the Supreme Court ordered in our favour. Then why do we have to deal with this again and again?” said Ladda. “How many times do we have to say no?”

“We conducted the palli sabhas, the Supreme Court ordered in our favour. Then why do we have to deal with this again and again? How many times do we have to say no?” said Lada Sikaka, leader of the Niyamgiri Surakhya Samiti.

Hope At The End Of The World's Most Heartbreaking Climate Summit →

Conversations about the end of the world from the centre of the world.

Published on BuzzFeed, November 29, 2017.

It’s 5am on a Sunday inside a large, oval conference room in the United Nations Campus in Bonn, Germany. Around me are a dozen twentysomethings – journalists, students, and activists from around the world – sprawled lifeless across the cheap seats in the balcony, heads balanced on backpacks.

Downstairs, in the "pink and blue badge only" sections, diplomats from developing countries and woke onlookers huddle to verify if vulnerable millions have been screwed out of climate finance from rich countries by a "typo".

For over 10 days, world leaders have been delivering their statements on the urgency to act as if their day jobs depended on it. With a bang of the gavel, Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama brings the show to an end. Support for the worst-hit flood and hurricane victims has been postponed by another year.

In case you're wondering, this is what the finish line of a UN Conference of Parties (COP) on climate change looks like. This year's edition is the 23rd in a series of annual international meetings convened to figure out how to deal with biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.

It’s not easy to get 169 countries – many of whom hate each other’s guts – to agree to cut back on the grease that keeps the wheels running.

Despite the jet fuel expended towards discussions to “save the planet”, the outcomes of international climate talks like these are rarely earth-shattering, leaving it up to individual governments to decide how they want to tackle climate change. “When people back home ask me what we do here, I tell them it’s mostly navigating bullet points, headings, and subheadings,” says a senior negotiator from Southeast Asia. “I don’t think they're very impressed.”

Following a cascade of grim reports on the gathering pace of global warming, Fiji's prime minister made an open plea to the world for "urgent action" on climate change.

Given how long and how much diplomacy it takes to address the immediate, life-threatening impacts of climate change on the ground level, is there any point in following the COPs and keeping up with the entire political process?

“I think it’s extremely important because it helps you understand the world as it actually exists, how power is concentrated, in what hands, and how that concentration is protected and consolidated,” says Nathan Thanki, a 27-year-old activist from Belfast.

Thanki has been memefying and keeping tabs on the power plays for seven years now, and he's only too aware of how slow and ridiculous the process can be, and that it's not quite the place for solutions.

“Where science and political reality meet is always going to be a space of extreme dejection,” he says. “But anybody who says to you that the world is gone to hell in a handcart, they might be right; until it happens, they’re not. I think there’s a lot to be said about environmental talk, and this obsession with end-of-the-world thinking, while forgetting that for a lot of people the world has already ended, many times over.”

It’s 7am when I finally close my eyes and find myself thinking of my friend Babita Adiley, a 27-year-old Dalit schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh. “Whenever you’re low and think things can’t get any worse, remember me,” she said in our last phone call. In 2014, her house was razed, taking with it everything she ever owned – courtesy of the expansion of Gevra, one of Coal India’s largest mines.

As I try to fall asleep on my cold hostel bunk, my phone buzzes to life. I learn that the mine has just received a permit to expand even further, putting her at risk of being displaced again without the company even having to talk to her.

I think of Rathobai Rathia, who at age 17, fought and won a case allowing women to work in mines that swallow their lands and void their livelihoods, and wonder what a just energy transition would mean for her. I think of Deepak Sahu, the MBA graduate leading strikes stopping the coal dispatch because there is no other way youth in his community will be heard, and the company he’s helping form so solar panels can be installed on mine waste dumps.

In my backpack I carry their stories and struggles, but also the weight of knowing that the means that young, urban India chooses to power itself up with will not just have a major impact on the world, but also accentuate the impact we have historically had on our own people.

Adivasi and Dalit communities form a majority of those who’ve borne the burden of our energy choices while being robbed of any themselves. Between 1947 and 2000, nearly 24 million Adivasis in India – roughly equal to the present population of Australia – were turned into refugees of development, displaced by large projects.

But even if you continue to be wilfully caste-blind as long you can still fire up BookMyChotu, there’s no missing the smog that’s stealing from our futures – a Lancet health study estimates that in 2015 alone, air pollution was responsible for half a million premature deaths in India.

The smog blanket around our cities and the drought that brings farmers carrying skulls of their dead peers to our doors are signs that none of us are immune.

India is currently the world’s third-largest carbon emitter, coal producer, and consumer, and has “no plans to back down any time in the near future” because of our development imperatives and poverty alleviation goals.

It’s not easy to get 169 countries – many of which hate each other’s guts – to agree on an agenda that requires them to cut back on the grease that keeps the wheels running or to pay up for damages. Which is why an agreement struck in Paris in 2015 was historic and still remains to be so. Israel and Palestine signed it. War-torn Syria announced that it was signing up on the second day of this COP, leaving the United States out in the cold as the only country that wants out of the agreement by 2020.

I lie in the dark, thinking of villages in the shadow of power plant chimneys without an electricity connection to their name. It helps still my conscience that we’re nowhere close to being the biggest villains in the room, something we once again have the low-carbon footprint of our poor to thank for. No, the dubious honour of being the planet’s most toxic ex still belongs to the US, which is threatening to leave the Paris agreement but still has its foot in the door, stalling negotiations and support for the worst-hit communities in the developing world.

I certainly did not expect to have my faith in America restored at a Trump administration–led event that promoted coal and nuclear power as the answers to climate change. And yet that is exactly what happens.

Within minutes of the event starting, youth and indigenous activists walked out of the event, leaving it as empty as Donald Trump's hollow spiel on clean coal. Outside, there is inspired singing, a sharing of stories more honest and open than anything I’ve witnessed at the talks so far. And that is where I meet Jade Begay, on the sidelines.

Born Navajo and Tesuque Pueblo, Begay grew up in northern New Mexico and has witnessed the devastating effects of coal and uranium mining on her people first hand. A documentary filmmaker, she joined the Indigenous Environmental Network, after seeing how much media and storytelling was needed in indigenous movements.

“One of the things that made Standing Rock most powerful was the ability to livestream and for indigenous people to take charge of their own narratives,” says Begay. “The reason I got into filmmaking and digital storytelling is because I grew up yearning for stories of my people by my people, especially native women. For hundreds of years our story has either been told for us or there's been total erasure of our story.”

And while it’s easy for so many to become conference junkies, she makes it clear that it’s not what she’d rather be doing. “Ultimately, native people don’t want to be doing this work, burning jet fuel to have our voices heard when we want to be building sustainable communities on ground, but we have to show up at these sorts of meetings, or otherwise you’re just written off the map.”

For communities who’ve been historically tasked with protecting the world’s forests and resources, representation has still been a huge challenge. What was seen as one of the most positive outcomes from the 23rd COP is an Indigenous Peoples’ Platform that should finally bring more native voices to the forefront of the climate talks.

Begay, however, is cautious: “It’s just words at this point. We’re already seeing so many of our people becoming refugees across the world because of displacement by extractive industries. If countries wanted to reduce emissions, they would uphold indigenous rights, and if they did, people would be able to assert them.”

Instead, market-based solutions that turn forests into tradeable carbon offsets continue to be proffered as the solution: “If we’re the ones with the solutions, why are we seen as the radicals in the room?”

Even including a reference to accountability to future generations is a radical act, by the looks of it. René Kieselhorst, along with 40 other young people from over 30 countries, lobbied for almost two years to sneak the words “intergenerational equity” into the Paris agreement. “They almost left it out because of a copy-paste error!” he says. The principle points to the fact that inaction or nonaction now will have a serious bearing on generations to come.

“If you talk to a lot of diplomats, they see the urgency, but they are bound to that process and tend to forget what this is really about – entire cultures and histories vanishing,” he says. Kieselhorst has faith in the importance of the process, and that “justice can lie in the smallest of details”.

But he too believes that local actions will count, in the long run. “Most people don’t talk to their MPs. It’s their job to listen to you and do certain things. If only the big lobbyists are talking to them, who’s going tell them otherwise? If you ask them questions, they might ignore you the first few times, but the more times you do it and the more people you bring with you, they’ll be forced to listen.”

What should millennials in India be gearing up for? More heatwaves, more floods, and a crippling loss of life savings, if climate change is left unchecked.

So far, what’s been produced at this COP are notes for a rulebook for what countries must do after 2020. Which doesn't really mean much considering it took mass protests by developing countries to push rich, developed nations to acknowledge all the stuff they’re legally obligated to do before 2020.

All this left me wondering why I'd packed two weeks worth of formals for a process that yields so little. In the words of a diplomat from Nicaragua, one of the last countries to join the Paris agreement, because it was not ambitious enough, “the world is not waiting with bated breath for what comes out of Bonn”.

No, it’s clear that the world has other plans. The last three years have been the hottest on record. CO2 emissions, believed to have peaked, are rising again. Months before the climate talks, nature dispatched back-to-back Category 4 hurricanes to shell-shock even the most the privileged climate deniers. Floods killed 1200 people in South Asia alone, while even megacities like Mumbai were caught unprepared for the deluge. What we’re seeing now is the world at 1.1°C warmer – experts predict that this could go to 3.2 degrees higher in this century at the rate we’re going. And even if countries made nice noises about what they intend to start doing two years from now, it’s not even a third of what’s needed to keep warming under 1.5°C.

What should millennials in India be gearing up for? More heatwaves, more floods, and a crippling loss of life savings, if climate change is left unchecked.

“We are handing young people a planet where things are out of control. Scientists should be standing up and telling the negotiators that they should be doing something and they’re moving too slow,” said James Hansen, climate scientist, urging the scientific community to step out of its reticence and for countries to impose a carbon tax.

Over 50 civil society groups and individuals including writer Naomi Klein and journalist George Monbiot want big carbon polluters to pay a climate damages tax for the hell they wreak. “Despite their pledges at Paris, countries are going to keep burning cheap fossil fuels, without working in their costs to society – air pollution, water pollution, and climate change,” said Hansen. “If your child gets asthma, fossil fuels companies are not going to pay for your medical bills.”

I breathe out into the bitter German cold, think of the air back home in Delhi, and count the actual stars. Hope for now is a distant promise of central heating, and for a brief minute, I don't care what's burning to keep me warm at the break of dawn.

That’s not a luxury we have any more. For Lusia Feagaiga, an activist from the Pacific island of Samoa, Germany’s continued dependence on coal is deeply personal. “We especially wanted to welcome chancellor Angela Merkel, because we hear that Germany has not yet committed to a coal phase-out,” he says while rolling out a “Keep It in the Ground“ red carpet for the last leader of the free world.

Despite renewables rising to nearly 30% of its energy mix, Germany is still heavily reliant on coal – particularly brown lignite, which accounts for nearly 40% of its electricity. This is a reliance that experts say could persist as it phases out nuclear plants while renewable storage remains to be an issue. It is a reliance that could cost it politically, as the Greens draw a red linefor Merkel.

Lusia wanted to remind the chancellor of a rapidly shifting line in the sand. “We wanted to tell her that back home in Samoa, there’s salt in our fields and not enough fresh water to drink. Our ancestral homes are moving inward as the tides come in.”

Hope, for me, was not to be found in the negotiating rooms of the Bonn at all – even if this year saw several incremental wins for the third world. Much as I wanted to cheer harder for desi diplomats fighting the good fight on behalf of developing countries, no yoga stretch at the Indian pavilion could conceal that there’s much to be done at home, whether or not the historical debt for the mess we’re in is ever settled. The smog blanket around our cities and the drought that brings farmers carrying skulls of their dead peers to our doors are signs that none of us are immune.

Instead, I found hope in the teenagers taking on Trump, typhoon victims taking on carbon majors, and Swiss grannies challenging the mightiness of negotiators. It was in the nerds of the nightwatch, who stayed on long after I’d left to see what sneaky policy decisions had made the cut at this year’s COP and who’d influenced them.

Hope was in the volunteers who plied me with fair-trade chocolate and whispers on happenings from inside the rooms. Hope continues to lie in people’s movements resisting everywhere, building solidarity, capacity, and resilience and taking responsibility locally, nationally, and globally. But most of all, it anchored itself in young people reclaiming power as we try to reimagine a future at the end of the tunnel.

“Fuck the apocalypse and especially certain voices that position themselves as objective and pronounce the situation irredeemable the first time they’ve been threatened,” says Thanki. “If you can’t imagine something besides the end of the world, I think you have a very stunted imagination.”