Alternative technologies for a climate change resilient India.

Engineering a Resilient India

In the high desert of Ladakh, where winter water is locked in ice and spring fields go dry, an engineer named Sonam Wangchuk built towering cones of ice that slowly melt into the fields just when farmers need water. Before him, Chewang Norphel had built artificial glaciers for the same purpose. These ice stupas are not high technology in the usual sense; they rest on gravity, shade and an understanding of local winters. Yet they capture the spirit of what India needs in an age of climate change. Resilience will not come from one grand invention but from a portfolio of alternative technologies, modern and traditional, that lower emissions while helping people absorb the shocks that are already here. For a country that is both a large emitter and among the most exposed to heat, floods and cyclones, the choice of technology is a choice about survival.

India's case for alternative technologies begins with fairness and vulnerability. As the Economic Survey 2023-24 notes, India, with over 17 per cent of the world's population, contributed only about 4 per cent of global cumulative greenhouse gas emissions between 1850 and 2019. Its per capita emissions, about 2.9 tonnes in 2024 according to Our World in Data, are well below the global average of about 6.7 tonnes. Yet India faces rising sea levels along a long coastline, retreating Himalayan glaciers, erratic monsoons and lethal heatwaves. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities gives India room to grow, but the climate does not negotiate. India therefore needs technologies that serve two masters at once: mitigation, which cuts emissions, and adaptation, which reduces harm.

Energy is the first frontier. Solar power, once a costly novelty, has become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in India. Installed solar capacity reached 82.64 gigawatts by April 2024, according to the Economic Survey 2023-24, and India met its target of 40 per cent non-fossil installed power capacity in 2021, nine years ahead of its 2030 goal. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, India pledged 500 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity by 2030 and net zero by 2070. Rooftop solar, solar pumps under PM-KUSUM and the National Green Hydrogen Mission of 2023 can decentralise energy, so that a village or a farm is not crippled when a distant grid fails. India's leadership of the International Solar Alliance, launched with France in 2015, carries this vision abroad.

Agriculture is where climate change will strike the most people. Over half of India's net sown area still depends on rain. The National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture project, launched by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in 2011, tests and spreads climate-resilient practices and varieties, such as submergence-tolerant rice that can survive under water for about two weeks. Micro-irrigation under the Per Drop More Crop component saves water and energy, while Andhra Pradesh's community-managed natural farming reduces dependence on chemical inputs and rebuilds soil carbon. Weather-based agro-advisories sent by mobile phone help farmers decide when to sow and when to harvest. These are alternative technologies in the fullest sense: they change how food is grown, not merely how much.

Water and the built environment form the third front. India's traditional water wisdom offers proven tools: the johads revived by Rajendra Singh's Tarun Bharat Sangh in Alwar helped bring dry rivers back to life, and stepwells and tanks once stored monsoon rain for the dry months. In Odisha, community water bodies called Pani Panchayats manage irrigation locally. Cities face a different threat, the urban heat island. Ahmedabad's Heat Action Plan of 2013, the first of its kind in South Asia, combined early warnings with simple measures such as cool roofs painted with reflective coatings, which can lower indoor temperatures in poor homes. Green buildings, passive cooling and better urban drainage are modest technologies with large protective returns.

The fourth front is information. The deadliest disasters are often those that strike without warning. When Cyclone Phailin hit Odisha in 2013, accurate forecasts by the India Meteorological Department and the evacuation of about a million people kept the death toll very low, a stark contrast with the super cyclone of 1999, which killed about ten thousand. Satellites, Doppler radars, flood forecasting models and mobile alerts are therefore among the most cost-effective climate technologies India possesses. India's initiative of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, launched in 2019, extends this logic to bridges, power lines and hospitals that must keep working through a storm.

Nature itself can be the most elegant technology. Mangroves break storm surges, wetlands absorb floods and forests cool the land. The MISHTI programme aims to restore about 540 square kilometres of mangroves across nine coastal states and four Union Territories between 2023 and 2028, according to the Press Information Bureau, creating both a carbon sink and a natural sea wall. Such nature-based solutions are often cheaper than concrete, and they support livelihoods in fishing, honey collection and tourism. Mission LiFE, which India launched in 2022, adds the behavioural dimension: technology works best when citizens adopt mindful consumption rather than wasteful habits.

Transport and industry complete the picture, because a resilient economy is also a lean one. The UJALA programme, launched in 2015, distributed over 36 crore LED bulbs and showed how a cheap, mass-produced technology can cut household bills and peak power demand at once. The Perform, Achieve and Trade scheme rewards energy-intensive industries such as steel and cement for beating efficiency targets. Electric buses and two-wheelers, supported since 2015 by the FAME scheme, and the near-complete electrification of the broad-gauge railway network shift transport away from imported oil. Such shifts improve energy security, so that a spike in global oil prices hurts less, and they cut the urban air pollution that already shortens Indian lives.

Yet alternative technologies are no magic wand, and their limits must be acknowledged. Solar panels and batteries depend on critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt, whose supply chains are concentrated in a few countries, creating new strategic dependencies. Solar waste and spent batteries will pose a disposal challenge in the coming decades. Large solar parks need land and can collide with pastoral or forest communities. High upfront costs keep many technologies out of reach of small farmers and poor households without finance. Developed countries have repeatedly fallen short of their promises on climate finance and technology transfer under the UNFCCC. A technology imposed without local ownership, moreover, often rusts unused; the lesson of failed biogas plants and abandoned hand pumps is that people, not machines, decide whether resilience takes root.

India's path to climate resilience lies in blending the solar panel with the stepwell and the satellite with the village council. Alternative technologies will succeed if they are affordable, locally owned, backed by finance and research, and woven into planning at every level, from the State Action Plans on Climate Change to the gram panchayat. India's adaptation and resilience spending already rose from 3.7 per cent of GDP in 2015-16 to 5.6 per cent in 2021-22, according to its Third National Communication to the UNFCCC, showing that the commitment exists. The ice stupas of Ladakh remind us that ingenuity often lies close to the ground. If India pairs that grounded wisdom with the best of modern science, it can grow without warming the planet further and weather the storms it can no longer avoid, offering a model for the whole Global South.