Climate change is threatening to derail India’s fast-growing economy, a top aide to Prime Minister Narendra Modi said this week. Erratic monsoon rain patterns have left crops parched, jeopardizing India’s nearly $370 billion agricultural sector and hundreds of millions of jobs.
“The No. 1 risk we face is global climate change, because we are still very dependent on the monsoon,” Jayant Sinha, the country’s junior finance minister and a Harvard Business School graduate, told Bloomberg News. “The age-old patterns are changing, which is affecting our farming and creating a lot of agricultural distress.”