The Asymmetry of Climate Change: How Industries are Protected and Farmers Marginalised in India
By Rainy Maheshkar and Khushi Chaudhary, 4th-year law students at Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur
Farmer suicide in India is a three-decade-old crisis, and it is still killing people today. Between January and March 2025, around 767 farmers died by suicide in epicentres like Maharashtra. This number has been in the thousands for the previous years, like 10,546 suicides in 2024 for the whole of India. One of the many reasons for these suicides is changing rainfall patterns due to climate change, which have led to a higher risk of crop failure, eventually leading to indebtedness. These deaths illustrate how climate change plays out when governments and powerful industries refuse to put community interests and the future ahead of short-term profit, thereby privatizing climate risk onto those who have negligible contribution to it.
The government does have schemes meant for the farmers and agricultural labourers. The flagship PM-KISAN scheme provides ₹6,000 a year to eligible farmers, which is only around ₹16.4, or about seventeen US cents, a day. That is not enough to offset the rising cost of growing food, let alone absorb a bad season. Crop insurance hasn't been any better. Private insurers under the PMFBY (a government scheme) retained an estimated ₹9,500 crore[*] of public premium money as profit across two kharif seasons (monsoon cropping season), while farmers have faced long delays in getting claims settled. By 2019, coverage had fallen to less than 26%. So when the rains fail, these farmers are left to fend for themselves.
This crisis is the worse in western/southern India (specifically the Vidharbha region of Maharashtra). Interestingly, this region sits second in terms of value and number of ongoing coal mining in India, and the companies located in this region are mining and burning coal that is responsible for 3.9% of global fossil CO₂ emissions, with the state-owned giant Coal India alone ranking among the world's top five state-owned emitters. The farmers suffering from failed monsoons are, quite literally, farming on top of the industry that is making the monsoons less predictable by contributing significantly to climate change.
So it is hardly surprising that a 2019 CAG audit of Coal India Limited, which produces roughly 80% of India's coal, found that only 60% of the required air-quality monitoring stations were in place across the sampled mines, and that 16 mining units were operating without valid environmental documents, nine of them operating without clearance altogether with little sign of corrective action taken. The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change took no effective action in most of these cases. This is despite the fact that pollutants exceeded prescribed limits in the mines audited and discharged 6.2 million kilolitres of untreated water into nearby water bodies, with several subsidiaries of Coal India drawing groundwater for their operations without the no-objection certificate required from the Central Ground Water Authority. When the rules are not enforced in such cases, violations become more normalised.
For example, in 2017, the Union Environment Ministry started letting developers apply for environmental clearance after construction had already begun, legalising the damage after the fact instead of preventing it. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) ruled in 2016 that this was illegal. The Supreme Court agreed in 2020. The Ministry's response was to issue fresh executive orders in 2021 to keep doing exactly what the courts had already told it was illegal. It took until May 2025 for the Supreme Court to finally strike that down for good, and within months, the Court rolled back its own ruling. In the meantime, the Ministry had already used the window to clear over 100 more projects and kick off the process for at least 150 others.
Legal institutions in India, consisting of the courts, the practicing lawyers, and the law firms, have, on many occasions, upheld and represented corporate interests.
Take, for example, the Koradi Thermal Power Plant. In 2019, it was found that the plant, run by the state-owned utility MAHAGENCO, was dumping toxic effluent straight into a local drainage canal instead of its ash pond, a direct violation of its clearance. The pollution from Koradi and its neighbour Khaparkheda was "pervasive and uncontrolled, affecting air, surface water, ground water, and soils," and regulators had shown "a complete indifference to the representations made by the concerned citizens." That indifference is what put ash sludge in three villages in 2022, and on fifteen farms in 2023.
Despite all of this, MAHAGENCO went on to win environmental clearance in 2024 to build two more 660 MW units at Koradi worth a 106.25 billion expansion. Residents filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Bombay High Court's Nagpur bench in 2023 to stop it. The court issued a warning. The clearance was granted anyway.
Similarly, Chandrapur Super Thermal Power Station, at over 2,920 MW, is one of India's largest power stations, and it was found to have flouted pollution control laws for over three years. A local NGO, the Green Plant Society, complained to Maharashtra's pollution board back in 2013. The pollution board found the Power station responsible for polluting its environment, but even then, no action was taken against the power station. By 2025, the NGT had found even more violations by the plant and imposed a ₹5 crore fine, plus ₹1 crore per month until it cleaned up its act, but the Supreme Court has stayed that order for now.
Law firms and legal practitioners in India have been consistently representing these corporate interests. In instances when NGT imposed environmental compensation against thermal power plants because they were unable to ensure 100 percent utilisation of fly ash, the case was brought to the Supreme Court by a law firm representing the Association of Power Producers comprising Adani Power, whereby the Supreme Court stayed recovery of that environmental compensation.
Similarly, Vedanta's Sterlite copper smelter (a natural resources company) in Thoothukudi was defended for over a decade by Senior Advocates through multiple rounds of litigation arguing the plant's slag disposal was non-hazardous. Its pollution violations didn't justify closure even after the Madras High Court found the company had been a “chronic defaulter” and also after the Supreme Court itself later acknowledged Vedanta's misrepresentation and material suppression of facts in its filings. The company kept operating for years past its consent renewal deadline.
These instances demonstrate that corporate bodies, who have, by and large, produced significant emissions contributing to climate change, are systematically released from accountability for the harm they cause to the environment; instead, they are permitted to expand. On the other hand, frontline communities, like farmers, are left to bear the consequences of the changing climate without an effective remedy. Moreover, corporations have access to litigation, law firms, and legal practitioners, readily available to protect them from environmental liability, but the same is rarely true for vulnerable populations, who are most exposed to climate risk.
Legal institutions in India and around the world, including courts, legal practitioners, and law firms, must do more to effectively reduce individual and community climate risk, rather than continuing to shield the industries fueling the crisis by privatising the risk.
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[*]In the Indian numbering system, “crore” is a quantity of ten million.
