India’s announcement of its 2070 net-zero emissions goal in 2021 has led to a substantial uptick in the development of policies and tools to assess the impacts of macro-level energy transition strategies across different sectors.
As India balances its need for sustained economic development and the well-being of its citizens, energy transition efforts must address the intersecting energy, health and socio-economic inequalities experienced by individuals and communities.
These complexities play out distinctly in the coal sector, with far-reaching consequences for human health and the changing lives and livelihoods of local communities. A persistent scarcity of information about the inclusivity, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA) of net zero efforts cuts across these issues.
As India’s reliance on coal evolves, research and policy explicitly grounded in an IDEA framework is urgently needed to address the complex relationships between economic activity, community well-being and resource management.
Coal mining provides employment opportunities, contributes to local economies and spurs infrastructure development in remote and underdeveloped regions. However, it often makes communities reliant on a single livelihood source and vulnerable to global and domestic energy markets and policy dynamics.
Measuring the socio-economic impacts of India’s energy transition, particularly following coal mine closure, remains under-investigated. Efforts such as the Ashoka Centre for a People-Centric Energy Transition’s (ACPET) Transmine Project study the impact of mine closure on the life and livelihoods of local communities in Rajhara, Jharkhand.
Interventions such as water repurposing of open-cast mines and the formation of a Farmer Produced Organization were spearheaded using a participatory approach along with community, government and industry stakeholders. The research was conducted in discontinued coal mines in Rajhara, where these pilot demonstrations are currently being comprehensively evaluated, to enhance the well-being of communities in the region.
About 56 percent of Indian households meet their energy needs through highly polluting fuels such as coal, kerosene and wood. They consequently suffer respiratory illnesses associated with indoor cooking, with women, the elderly and children being disproportionately affected.
Communities reliant on coal mining, such as those in Rajhara, have developed cooking practices centered around the use of goliyas made from a mixture of cow dung and coal dust remnants. While estimates vary, household burning of solid fuels and kerosene for cooking, heating and lighting caused the premature death of approximately 2.3 million people in India in 2019.
Progress is being made, however. From 1990 to 2016, there was a 23.6 percent reduction in household air pollution stemming from solid fuel use. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) scheme led to a further 15 percent increase in liquified petroleum gas use from 2016 to 2019. Meanwhile, piped natural gas connections are expected to grow tenfold to 12.5 crore by 2032.
Nevertheless, the specter of growing air pollution looms but from a new source: rapid industrialization and urbanization. In 2021, transport and industry emissions associated with household consumption alone contributed almost twice as much to ambient PM2.5 concentrations as direct emissions from biomass cook stoves. Despite significant benefits for human health and energy equality, clean cooking initiatives only have a modest impact on ambient air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
A dearth of information on how India’s energy transition policies and pathways will differentially — and unevenly — impact communities and regions remains a critical barrier to a just transition.
For instance, while existing coal mine closure legislation pays extensive attention to technical outcomes such as decommissioning machinery, there is an acknowledged lack of focus on socio-economic and cultural factors, including transitioning communities to post-mining livelihoods and assessing the resulting outward migration of people and resources.
Similarly, research on the health impacts of India’s energy transition efforts is relatively scarce and mainly produced by non-Indian institutions using out-of-date or international climate targets rather than India’s 2070 net zero goals. Despite most of India’s population being exposed to very high levels of air pollution, relatively little research links long-term PM2.5 exposure to mortality domestically. International studies, which disproportionately influence research on Indian public health, are based on data from countries with lower baseline air pollution levels than India.
Even successful interventions such as increased electrification of transport — projected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a total of 7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) between 2020 and 2070 — can result in disparate health improvements. However, without a shift to clean energy sources, India’s coal-producing regions will bear the health damages of meeting the EV energy needs of urban centers, which in turn will experience significant benefits from a reduction in transportation emissions.
Exploring IDEA concerns across socio-economic groups and regions in coal transition research (and energy transition more generally) is uncommon in India, where the impacts are unevenly distributed among rural and tribal populations. There is an urgent need to develop research and policy using community-led approaches and research tools such as participatory rural appraisal that explicitly account for IDEA and other socio-cultural issues related to the phase-out of coal and other fossil fuels.
Such collaborations can focus on producing data, policies and proofs of concept that are region, community and demographic-specific. Doing so will unearth, and ideally mitigate, the uneven costs and benefits of an energy transition process in a country as geographically and socio-economically heterogeneous as India.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.
