India’s IT fix for climate adaptation could be the upgrade its global image needs

India can play a useful role, converting these climate refugees into skilled talent in demand, rather than a burden and objects of charity. Skills training, including in software development and IT-enabled services, would be a relatively low-cost, high-value form of aid that people appreciate for those fleeing the islands disappearing into the ocean’s maw and potential employers in the host nations that take in the refugees.

It would also, at a time when China seeks to mobilize India’s neighbours into an anti-India front, muddy the waters for China’s diplomatic offensive in the Southern Pacific, where it has been showering Belt-and-Road Initiative goodies, such as bridges, hospitals, and roads, to win friends and influence people against Taiwan. 

Australia and the US have been remiss, taking their presumed backyard for granted, and are now trying to counter China’s soft power offensive among the island nations.

A move into active diplomacy in the region that goes beyond invoking India’s kinship ties with nearly two-fifths of the population of Fiji, whose ancestors were indentured labourers from India taken to the island nation by the British colonial masters, would raise India’s profile not just in the region but also in the Quad and beyond. 

Irreversible damage 

The distinction of being the hottest year in the modern era goes to 2024, with the average global temperature going up to 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. The Paris Climate Accord, concluded in the closing days of 2015 and brought into force in 2016, set a goal of limiting the rise in average global temperature within 2°C above pre-industrial levels—preferably within 1.5°C. However, thanks to El Niño, the temperature has exceeded the 1.5°C threshold over the past two years.

This is accelerating the pace of global warming, killing people in heatwaves and other extreme weather events, increasing the sale of ceiling fans in countries and regions that have never felt the need for them, and bringing the fate of submergence ever closer to the small island nations of the South Pacific. 

No amount of climate action, whether substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy or even removing carbon dioxide from the air, can prevent the melting of ice in the North and South Poles, which is pushing up the sea level. Some low-lying islands will go underwater, and the people there will have to be resettled in other countries.

Although Tuvalu has a population of only 11,500, it exports tourism, fish, and its top-level domain name .tv, which television companies cherish for their internet addresses and are happy to pay for. Its per capita income is over $5,000, and English is widely spoken. The people of Tuvalu are literate and should be amenable to skill development.

India’s IT proficiency 

India’s business software services company Zoho, founded by Sridhar Vembu, pioneered spotting raw talent in rural areas, training it right where the people live, and integrating it into the workforce. If Vembu can spare a team from his company to replicate this conversion of untrained rural folk into providers of sophisticated IT services, he could advance India’s interests abroad, and while serving as an instrumentality of benign diplomacy, even expand his business in Oceania.

Get the National Skill Development Corporation to figure out the skills Australia needs. Get Indian companies to do the training, treating the money they spend on it as part of mandated corporate social responsibility. This is a game India can play far better than China can hope to, thanks to the shared colonial legacy of English and India’s reputation as an IT services superpower, even while its per capita income is quite low.

Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services have well-developed training centres, given the quality of the recruits they get to hire in India. They can modify and extend their training programmes to start from lower levels of skill. Given the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), it should be possible to get more out of workers without much formal training but enough intelligence and savvy to make use of AI tools.

Once the model is tried and tested in Tuvalu, its success can be replicated in other island nations. India can pioneer a model of climate adaptation in which climate refugees are welcomed rather than shunned by the countries to which they flee.