‘Need to assess challenges to India’s economy from climate change’

Climate change, leveraging the demographic dividend, and maximising human capital will be the key challenges that need to be navigated by the country in the coming years, said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chairperson of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and former Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), on Sunday.

Speaking on the final day of the Nilgiris Economic Dialogue in Udhagamandalam during the session “Growth that Endures: Building Human Capacity at Scale,” Dr. Swaminathan pointed out that the World Economic Forum brings out a list annually of projected threats to the global economy over the next 2-10 years.

Apart from environmental and concerns over Artificial Intelligence, “the growing mistrust being fuelled by the prevailing geopolitical situation, with people becoming more and more nationalistic and looking inwards” was another concern that puts the whole multi-lateral system under which the world functions under threat. “The belief that the UN could solve the world’s problems is gone and people are looking inwards and every country is looking to see how they can protect themselves,” she said. The CII can do threat assessments similar to the World Economic Forum to understand the threats and challenges to the Indian economy.

She said that she believes that climate change was one major threat. “Both minimum and maximum temperatures are increasing. This has huge implications for human health as well as for agriculture and labour productivity from an industry viewpoint.” The toll of climate change was already being felt on human health. “We always focused on the impacts of climate change on agriculture… but today, it’s impacting everyone in urban, rural, coastal and hilly areas,” she said.

India had a very small window of opportunity to take advantage of its young population and by 2050, that advantage would be reduced as birth rates continue to decline. “We have to consider what happens when you have less of a working age population,” she said.

Health and nutrition indicators showed that stunting rate figures for children under the age of five stood at 35% a few years ago. “It could have come down since then, but we’re still between 25% and 30%.” This translates to children not being able to attain their full potential for physical or mental growth.

Dr. Swaminathan spoke about the need for social equity and addressing economic inequality.