India's solar energy boom fuels local struggle for green justice https://longreads.trust.org/item/India-solar-parks-leave-workers-out-jobs-green-transition BY ANURADHA NAGARAJ AND ROLI SRIVASTAVA 15 FEBRUARY 2022
Two cases Jayaram Reddy and Hira Bano live on the edge of India's two largest solar parks - their villages separated by barbed-wire fences and walls from the miles of gleaming blue solar panels. they wonder if their future will ever be as bright as the growth of solar energy - a key source as India switches to green energy to wean its economy off climate-heating coal.
Reddy and Bano are among the hundreds of local pastoralists and farmers who were asked to weigh up the potential benefits a solar park would bring - jobs, hospitals, schools, roads and water - in exchange for the land they had used all their lives.
"We were told we should be grateful the government had chosen our area to build the solar park," farmer Reddy, 65, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, sitting with his friends in Vollur village, near the Pavagada solar park.
But India's biggest solar parks have fallen short on those promises, resulting in protests and push-back from communities trying to protect their jobs, land and future, researchers say.
parks serve as a cautionary tale for the 50 other such solar projects that have been approved by the Indian authorities, which will add combined capacity of about 38 gigawatts. But as state governments draw up ambitious solar policies, and private firms invest millions in setting up plants, both are ignoring the needs of marginalised communities, including livestock herders and small farmers, according to researchers.
Farmers unite in push for share of India's solar power bonanza by Anuradha Nagaraj https://news.trust.org/item/20220215111647-3ftxu
Tuesday, 15 February 2022
Since 2012, Environment Support Group (ESG) has worked to highlight the long term implications of uncritically embracing utility scale solar power projects, offered as a panacea for walking away from fossil fuels & as a “just transition” choice to redress climate change. In the 26th COP of Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, PMO India Narendra Modi made the pitch for further boosting India’s investment in such mega projects: which now has about 60-70 GW of installed capacity and proposed to be scaled out to over 450 GW in the next decade or so. (See: https://tinyurl.com/ESGsolarresearch)
From the time ESG secured an order to the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change, Government of India from NGT (2014) in the Challakere Kavals diversion case, that prevailing exemption to review social and environmental impacts of solar parks has to be revisited based on verifiable evidence we presented to court, a decision later upheld by the SC, there have been efforts to get the Ministry to comply with the directions. But the violations of court orders continue with impunity. (See: https://tinyurl.com/ESGPILChallakere)