The Indian heat wave is in many ways a socially produced crisis. Although it is difficult to ascribe to climate change any single weather event – a heat wave, a flood, a hurricane – all of the major climate models have for 30 years predicted an increase in extreme weather events. The heat wave in India fits the pattern that has been predicted for the region. Responsible for more than 2,000 deaths, this terrestrial inferno is just the latest, headline-grabbing example of the dangerously destabilizing impacts of climate change.
The social impacts of climate change are continually shaped and reshaped by class politics. The Indian rich escape to second homes in cooler climes. The middle class, retreats into air-conditioned homes and malls. But the poor live, labor, and die amidst the intolerable heat. Keep in mind that, according to the United Nations’ multidimensional poverty index, more poor people live in eight Indian states than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
In other words the great masses of people have very few resources to help them cope with the searing heat.
Some of the hardest hit areas in the current inferno are Telangana and Andra Pradesh. Both have suffered years of on and off drought.
Making things worse for farmers have been the neoliberal policies pursued with greater or lesser vigor by most of India’s national and regional governments since the early 1990s.
Starting in 1991 the Indian government began a process of economic liberalization. Efficiency became the watchword; the state cut power subsidies to farmers.
The neoliberal withdrawal of developmentalist support for farmers meant that local irrigation systems fell into dilapidation.
With bad irrigation works soon the norm, farmers turned to drilling privately-funded wells and taking groundwater. This was typically done on an ad hoc and individual or village-by village basis, with little planning or proper water management. As a result, the aquifers are increasingly over exploited.
These private coping strategies require private capital. To drill wells, farmers had to borrow from local moneylenders—often at exorbitant rates. Now, when crops fail or wells run dry, which is becoming more common due to climate change, farmers cannot repay their debts.
Under increasing economic pressure, many farmers in Teleangan and Andra Pradesh have taken to cultivating genetically modified Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton, a product of the agricultural giant Monsanto. The new cotton became widely available only a few years back.
Although advertised as not needing pesticides, Bt cotton does. At first it boosted output and incomes, but after a few years, incomes fell and the new cotton became a curse. Its roots penetrate deep into the soil, sucking up all the nutrients. Before long the farmers need large amounts of artificial fertilizer—and that means taking loans. Scholars call this the “vicious cycle of chemical agriculture.”
By the late 1990s, many farmers had run out of options—they were too far in arrears to borrow more, too broke to produce crops. For thousands, the only escape from this debt trap came in the form of suicide—often by swallowing pesticides. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, 150,000 Indian farmers killed themselves between 1997 and 2005. The actual number is greater. Other farmers joined the Maoist inspired Naxalite rebels.
When the links between drought, irrigation, debt, suicide and war were becoming clear a dozen years ago, the Political and Economic Weekly investigated. “A study of 50 deceased farmers in Warangal District [near Adilabad] shows that well [water] is the largest source of irrigation for about three-fourths of the farmers. Only about one-third of the wells were dug under the subsidy schemes of the government. In the rest of the cases farmers themselves have borne the expenses for digging of wells.”
And as drought becomes more common, more ground water is drawn. That, in turn, necessitates deeper wells and that means spending more money.
For many farmers, digging wells means going deeper into debt. As a World Bank study on drought and climate change in Andhra Pradesh found, “Household responses to drought have been largely reactive and do little to build longterm drought resilience. Credit remains the most common coping response to drought.” In fact, 68 percent of households in the study took loans due to drought, with large landholders borrowing “from formal sources (such as banks), while the landless and small farmers borrow from moneylenders at inflated interest rates.” Not only are the rates usurious, but these more informal contracts rely on brutal and humiliating enforcement mechanisms.
Farmers are thus forced by market pressure to “mine” the soil of its nutrients and aquifers of water. While their crops decline, their debts increase. The current heat wave is only making the downward spiral worse.
Because there is a lag between cause and effect in the global climate system, we are locked in for much more extreme weather. Even in the best-case scenario -- a rapid reduction and then elimination of fossil fuel emissions over the next two decades – the impact of already accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere will play out for many decades in the form of extreme weather. There will be many more such heat waves.
If the great rank and file of rural India are to adapt to the new climate of extreme weather they will need new and creative assistance from government. They will need: drip irrigation, the introduction of new drought resistant crops, and agricultural experimentation of all sorts to develop new coping strategies and technologies. That sort of public investment will require taking and redistributing some of the wealth of India’s famously selfish billionaire class.
If India and its increasingly powerful regional governments do not abandon neoliberalism – that myth-loving faith in the omnipotence of the market – to chart a path toward a more equitable and sustainable form of economic development, class polarization and social breakdown will only increase.
Christian Parenti is a professor at NYU's Global Liberal Studies Program. His latest book,Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011), explores how climate change is already causing violence as it interacts with the legacies of economic neoliberalism and cold-war militarism.