Evaluate the nature and scope of anthropogenic influence on climate in India and also analyse the environmental movements arising out of it. (2020)
“Anthropogenic” names climate change as a social fact — produced by patterned human activity, unequally caused and unequally borne. The question is therefore twofold: how far human action has altered India’s climate, and what collective action that alteration has generated.
Nature of the anthropogenic influence
Four mechanisms operate distinctively in India: fossil-fuelled industrialisation and transport; land-use change and deforestation; heavy aerosol loading from biomass burning and industry, which both masks warming and weakens the monsoon circulation; and irrigation-driven land-surface change, with black carbon deposition accelerating Himalayan melt.
Scope of the influence
- Surface air temperature over India rose about 0.7°C during 1901–2018; summer monsoon rainfall fell about 6% (1951–2015) while heavy-rainfall days over central India rose roughly 75% (Ministry of Earth Sciences, 2020).
- Hindu Kush Himalayan glaciers lost ice about 65% faster in 2011–2020 than in the preceding decade (ICIMOD, 2023), threatening the river flows on which irrigation depends.
Evaluation: the warming signal is unequivocal and confidently attributed; the monsoon signal is real but its causation remains contested between greenhouse forcing and aerosols, and the scope must be stated with that honesty. Sociologically, scope also means social reach. Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) held that manufactured risk cuts across classes; India qualifies him — risk here follows existing inequality, falling on outdoor workers, rainfed cultivators, coastal fishers and slum residents, while emissions concentrate among the “omnivores” of Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha.
Movements arising out of it
India’s climate-relevant movements are rarely framed as climate movements; they are livelihood struggles over the same resources — the environmentalism of the poor of Guha and Joan Martínez-Alier (Varieties of Environmentalism, 1997), against Ronald Inglehart’s post-materialist reading of Western environmentalism.
- Forest and commons defence: Chipko (1973) and Appiko (1983), conservation claimed as subsistence.
- Anti-displacement: the Narmada Bachao Andolan from 1985 under Medha Patkar, which forced the World Bank’s withdrawal in 1993 but lost in the Supreme Court in 2000.
- Anti-extraction: Niyamgiri, where twelve village assemblies unanimously refused bauxite mining after the Supreme Court’s 2013 order — the Forest Rights Act, 2006 working as designed.
- Pollution and energy siting: the Bhopal survivors (1984), Delhi’s judicially driven CNG transition, and coastal fishers against the Koodankulam nuclear plant.
Analysis: these movements are locally effective and nationally inconclusive. They have democratised environmental decision-making through consent provisions and judicial review, yet none has altered India’s energy trajectory; litigation has increasingly substituted for mass mobilisation; and the 2023 law narrowing what counts as forest, restrained by the Supreme Court in February 2024, shows how reversible the gains are. In Alain Touraine’s sense they contest the direction of development without capturing it.
Conclusion
India’s climate crisis is anthropogenic in origin but stratified in incidence, which is why its politics appears as scattered livelihood struggles rather than one climate movement. That fragmentation anchors ecology in justice, but leaves mitigation at the scale the net-zero-2070 pledge demands to the state — as the crossing of 50% non-fossil installed capacity in June 2025 confirms.