Introduction

In India, as in many other countries, the climate change debate has firmly been joined. In the years since 2007 the Indian Parliament has witnessed several, and heated, debates over what India’s role should be in the global climate negotiations. The government has set up major policy and expert processes, notably a Prime Minister’s Advisory Council to prepare a national action plan on climate change. Media attention, too, has ballooned. A rough-and-ready internet search for media articles on climate change reveals that from tens of hits a year in each major newspaper between 2000 and 2006, this number had increased to tens of hits a day by 2009-2010.1 A reading of opinion and editorial pages shows that opinions on climate change have become part of the necessary repertoire of the economic and political commentariat (for example Shourie, 2009; Subramanian, 2009). And civil society groups active on a range of environment and development issues - water, forests, and energy in particular - have scrambled to identify substantive and political linkages between the issues they work on and national and global climate debates.