Climate Justice in India: Resource Extraction and Energy Equity
Time: 10:00am - 11:30am
Webinar registration required (see below)
At a time when India is increasing both its reliance on renewables and coal mining to meet energy demand, it faces deep challenges in ensuring its transition is equitable and just. On March 1, please join us for “Resource Extraction and Energy Equity,” an event where we will explore the current situation in India, what policies are being proposed, and the future of marginalized coal-communities.
This event is the latest installment of a series examining social and economic justice issues related to climate change and the energy transition in India. It is co-sponsored by the India Program at the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia SIPA, the Ambedkar Initiative at the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society, the SIPA Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Climate & Engagement (DEICE) Committee, Columbia Climate School, and South Asia Institute.
This session will feature two experts whose research and reporting in the coal heartlands of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh bring attention to the importance of bottom-up engagement in shaping just transitions. Scholar Dr. Vasudha Chhotray and award-winning journalist Ankur Paliwal will be in a conversation moderated by Dr. Kaushik Deb, senior research scholar and the lead of the India Program at CGEP.
Prof. Melissa Lott, senior director of research at CGEP and a professor of practice at Columbia’s Climate School, will deliver welcome remarks. Deepali Srivastava, editor of CGEP’s Energy Explained, is the convenor of this series that honors the legacy of Columbia University alum and India’s civil rights icon, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956), an economist and an environmental rights leader, whose vision builds a bridge from past to present.
Speaker Biographies:
Vasudha Chhotray is a political scientist specializing in two distinct but interrelated areas of research: the politics and governance of natural resource use and extraction, and the larger politics of development in the Indian state.
Dr. Chhotray has worked extensively on the relationship between natural resources and politics, both at the micro and macro levels, mostly in India and the south Asian context, although not exclusively so. She brings a novel, critical perspective to these areas through an interdisciplinary research approach that is informed by development studies, comparative politics and political ecology. Dr. Chhotray specializes in the study of extractive regimes, disaster politics and citizenship controversies.
She is part of the Global Environmental Justice research group at the School of Global Development. In her ongoing research, she engages with questions of social, environmental and climate justice in two selected areas: long-term disaster recovery, and the future of coal mining peoples and areas given the imperative of a just energy transition.
She has a PhD in development studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Ankur Paliwal is an independent queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.org — a new collaborative journalism venture focused on accurately covering LGBTQIA+ communities in India.
In his thirteen years of journalism career so far, he has primarily reported about science, inequity and LGBTQIA+ communities from India, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Germany and the United States for publications such as Nature, Scientific American, the Guardian and FiftyTwo. He has been awarded reporting grants by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Alfred Friendly Press Partners, GroundTruth Project, and Medicines Sans Frontiers, among others.
He has won multiple journalism awards including One World Media Award in 2023, AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in 2022, South Asian Journalists Association Award in 2022, and World Health Assembly Award in 2016.
Ankur is also a consulting editor with CNN’s As Equals project, editing a series on non-binary people in the global south.
He has a master’s degree in Science Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. In 2021, he was a fellow at the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at The City University of New York.
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This webinar will be hosted via Zoom. Advance registration is required. Upon registration, you will receive a confirmation email with access details. The event will be recorded and the video recording will be added to our website following the event.
This event is open to press, and registration is required to attend. For media inquiries or requests for interviews, please contact CGEP Communications ([email protected]). For more information about the event, please contact [email protected].
