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This paper is an analysis of the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Even prior to the pandemic, the Indian economy was marked by a slowdown of economic growth and record increases in unemployment and poverty. Thus, India’s capacity to deal with a new crisis was weak when the pandemic hit in March 2020. The economic crisis after March 2020 affected all the sectors of the Indian economy. In agriculture, farmers were faced with broken supply chains, lack of market outlets, poor demand and falling output prices. In industry, micro and small enterprises were the most acutely affected. The crisis led to a loss of employment to the tune of at least 15 million. Using an Input-Output (I-O) framework, we create four scenarios of losses to the Indian economy. We estimate that India’s gdp growth rate in 2020-2021 may range from −4.3% to −15%. The government’s economic response till October 2020 was seriously deficient on demand side interventions. The government was hesitant to expand budgetary spending because it feared a rise in fiscal deficit. Given this fiscal stance of policy, the chances of an early revival in the Indian economy appear dismal. Analizamos el impacto económico de la pandemia Covid-19 en la India. Antes de la pandemia, hubo una desaceleración del crecimiento económico y un aumento récord del desempleo y la pobreza. Por lo tanto, la capacidad para hacer frente a una nueva crisis era débil cuando la pandemia golpeó en marzo de 2020. La crisis económica posterior afectó a todos los sectores económicos. Los agricultores se enfrentaron a cadenas de suministro rotas, falta de mercados, escasa demanda y caída de los precios de producción. En la indus­tria, las microempresas y las pequeñas empresas fueron las más afectadas. La crisis provocó una pérdida de empleo de al menos 15 millones. Usando una matriz de insumo-producto (I-O), creamos cuatro escenarios de pérdidas. Estimamos que la tasa de crecimiento del producto interno bruto (pib) de la India en 2020-2021 puede oscilar entre el −4.3% y el −15%. La respuesta del gobierno hasta octubre de 2020 fue muy deficiente en las intervenciones del lado de la demanda. Dudaba en expandir el gasto presupuestario porque temía un aumento del déficit fiscal. Dada esta orientación fiscal, las posibilidades de una pronta reactivación económica parecen desalentadoras.

Providing knowledge inputs to farmers is critical to reduce their vulnerability and enhance resilience against climate change. In developing countries such as India, where small holdings and rain-fed agriculture are predominant, knowledge inputs become even more critical. The India Meteorological Department has provided integrated agrometeorological advisory services (AAS) to farmers since 2008. In this paper, we estimate the scale of access to AAS and its impact on crop yields in 1000 households across 10 villages in two agroclimatic zones in India. We find evidence suggesting that access to AAS can have a significant impact on crop yields in the kharif (June–September) season, whereas other inputs are more important in the case of rabi (winter) crops. Specifically, the yields of pigeon pea, soybean, and pearl millet are higher by 233, 98, and 318 kg ha−1, respectively, for AAS beneficiaries. For the entire study area, this translates to a value addition of $9.66 million for these three crops in one season. Our results show that AAS can be an important contributor to meeting the developmental goals of enhancing food security in dry-land agriculture and building resilience against climate change.

[...]the analysis shows the pledges of Annex-I parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be highly inadequate to limit the temperature rise to below 1.5°C. In this context, this paper reviews India’s climate change mitigation efforts and policies over the last decade and assesses the recently declared net-zero emissions pledge against a range of illustrative emissions pathways and the implied cumulative emissions of these pathways. The report of the working group-I to the sixth assessment report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2021) has clearly laid out the challenge before the world, which is already experiencing warming of about 1.07 degrees Celsius (°C) (a likely range of 0.8°C–1.3°C) as compared to the pre-industrial period (1850–1900). According to the IPCC (2021), about 2,390 (±240) gigatonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) have been emitted cumulatively by the world between 1850 and 2019. Emissions and Carbon Budgets: Determining Fair Share From 1850 to 1990 (around the time when the UNFCCC was ratified and anthropogenic climate change was officially recognised by governments), India, home to 16.6% of the global population then, accounted for only 3.89% of the global cumulative emissions.

According to the World Bank, the provision of subsidies, operational inefficiencies, and technical and commercial losses in the sector were a result of state ownership and consequent political interference (World Bank 1991). [...]costs have continuously risen because of the misplaced agenda of introducing markets in a sector where they would not work. On the one hand, generators (both conventional and renewable) are rapidly becoming non-performing assets of public sector banks, and on the other, the DISCOMs are being systematically weakened in order to save private power generators and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) from losses. RE and Financial Health While the authors take an optimistic and benign view of renewable energy (RE), they neglect to discuss the role that RE has played in dwindling state finances, especially in the southern states, three of which are covered in the book.

In this article we have studied a scheme of partitioning the global carbon budget using an equity principle. In contrast to earlier approaches, this article carefully distinguishes between the two quantities – 'entitlements to carbon space' and 'physically available carbon space'. A positive feature of the carbon budgets approach to allocation of mitigation burdens discussed here is that a single framework for mitigation can be applied to all countries. The method offers a concrete operationalization of the principle of achieving the climate goals 'on the basis of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities'.

This paper presents a method for reliability assessment of the electric grid with distributed generation providing support to the system. Evaluation of customer controlled distributed generation contribution is done for two cases; the first case analyses distributed generation wherein generation units export power to the grid. The second case analyses onsite generation wherein units handle loads at individual customer sites, thus relieving grid congestion. Reliability parameters for the distributed generation systems were obtained from data collected from existing systems that have been in operation for an extended period of time. Calculations are performed on the IEEE-Reliability Test System. The state duration sampling approach using Monte Carlo simulations is employed to evaluate the ability of the system to meet demand requirements. The impact of distributed generation on the utility controlled grid as well as on individual customer reliability is evaluated. The significance of the results obtained is discussed.

Wilful Neglect of Climate Science One of the striking results of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the conclusion that cumulative emissions are the key indicator in determining how emissions are related to the maximum increase acceptable in global average temperatures due to warming of anthropogenic origins over a specified period. [...]if the global average temperature rise above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100 is to be below 2C, with a probability of 50%, then the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide from 2012 to 2100 cannot cross 1,300 billion tonnes. [...]by 2025, it would be clearly impossible to maintain a 50% chance of not crossing 1.5C, and by 2030, only 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would be available for the next 70 years to maintain even a 33% chance of not crossing this temperature limit. [...]the Paris Agreement wilfully ignores the imperatives of climate science, with the addition of the statement on 1.5C being something of a cruel joke. [...]since greenhouse gas emissions are also a short- to medium-term necessity for developing countries, the nub of the issue of equity is an equitable distribution of the available cumulative emissions among different countries.

In an earlier era, the responsibility to create electricity infrastructure and expand access to energy was with the state electricity boards, entities which were arms of state governments. [...]the task of ensuring affordability, reliability, and growth were those of the state government. The centre provided the broad contours of policy and also played a role in ensuring access to natural resources which are not equitably distributed across states. Since the structural reforms of the 1990s, almost all state electricity boards were “unbundled” into generation, transmission, and distribution companies (referred as DISCOMs for the sake of simplicity). [...]we discuss the envisaged centralisation of the power sector in contravention of the provisions of the Constitution, which have placed the electricity sector in the concurrent list. India’s Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has held that the central government’s imposition of the cess constitutes a “change of law” in all PPAs entered into by central power producers under the Electricity Act (CERC 2018). [...]all thermal power plants have raised their tariffs to pass on the cost of this cess to consumers.

The Paris Agreement has set targets for limiting temperature rise due to global warming which will be virtually impossible (1.5°c) or very difficult (well below 2°c) to realise. It ignores the fact that these targets require a strict limit on global cumulative emissions in the future. Allowing all countries, especially developed ones, to do what they feel able to, rather than what is necessary, sets the world on a dangerous and inequitable path to the future.