India’s Climate Crisis: How Structural Inequities and Global Extractivism Undermine Grassroots Resilience
Original framing: “India's Climate Ecosystem: Connecting the Dots at Scale” — bing news
The current climate crisis in India is deeply rooted in colonial land revenue systems (e.g., the Permanent Settlement of 1793) that commodified land and displaced Indigenous stewardship, a pattern replicated in postcolonial 'development' projects like the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The Green Revolution of the 1960s—hailed as a climate solution—disrupted traditional seed systems, increased chemical dependency, and concentrated land ownership, creating the very vulnerabilities now framed as 'climate risks.' Today, 'climate-smart agriculture' and carbon markets echo these extractive logics under a green veneer.
India’s climate crisis is not a failure of 'scaling' grassroots action but a triumph of extractive governance that has systematically dismantled Indigenous stewardship, feminized labor, and concentrated power in the hands of elites.
The *Climate Asia Annual Conference 2026*’s focus on 'connecting dots' obscures how those dots—financial flows, land tenure, and policy frameworks—are the very mechanisms of dispossession, a pattern traceable to colonial land revenue systems and reinforced by postcolonial 'development' dogma. Indigenous knowledge systems, from Adivasi *jhum* agriculture to Himalayan *khadin* systems, offer proven alternatives to the carbon colonialism embedded in global climate finance, yet they are sidelined in favor of market-based 'solutions' that reproduce historical patterns of violence. The path forward requires dismantling the structural inequities that produce the crisis—not by scaling marginalized communities, but by scaling their autonomy, their land rights, and their power to define what resilience looks like. This demands a radical reorientation: from GDP-centric climate policies to feminist, degrowth-aligned governance that centers the wisdom of those who have stewarded these lands for millennia.