importing truckloads of water from the plains. The hill region of
Cherrapunji, which has been heavily deforested, received 363 inches of
rain in 2001—about what it got in just 1 month of 1861.
The drought caused major crop loss and starvation, killing ten
children in Rajasthan alone. Of forty-five districts in Madhya Pradesh,
only three had normal rainfall and seven had no rain at all. In Uttar
Pradesh, twenty-one districts were severely affected. Singers toured
parched villages and offered songs in praise of the Hindu rain gods.
“This heat wave is a signal to global warming,” warns M. Lal of the
Centre for Atmospheric Sciences. “India is simply following the global
trend of higher temperatures.” Lal predicted that India could heat up
dramatically by the end of the century, with “a major impact on the
country’s food production and water reserves.”
THECLIMATESUMMIT
For much of India, the heat is already on. In late 2002, New Delhi
hosted a United Nations conference on climate change, attracting
bureaucrats and political leaders from around the world. Left out of the
air-conditioned event, however, were the voices of average Indians
already affected by global warming. Those people were heard at an alto-
gether different but simultaneous forum, the Climate Justice Summit,
organized by the Indian Climate Justice Forum.
“It is the poor and the marginalized who are, and will continue to
be, the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change,” says Rita Nahata
of the Forum. “The biggest injustice is that the hardest-hit communi-
ties are the least responsible for creating the problem.” As if to illus-
trate her words, the Forum displayed such low-impact tools as a bicy-
cle-driven water pump and a hand-operated food processor.
The Summit was quite a bit more boisterous than the United
Nations conference taking place just a few miles away, and included
people chanting “water, land, forests are ours” and “multinationals go
home,” punctuated by the rhythms of a drumming contingent.
The grassroots event attracted an estimated five thousand people,
including labor organizers, farmers, fish workers, one hundred rick-
shaw drivers, indigenous people, and street children. The latter, organ-
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