Fellow Spotlight: Abhayraj Naik

Our Fellow Spotlight series showcases the work of our Fellows. This time, I spoke with Abhayraj Naik, a Fellow in Subak’s latest global Fellowship group. Abhayraj’s project is focused on creating a data-driven decision-support tool for energy policymakers in India, which emphasises contextual policy opportunities for Indian states to transition away from coal-based electricity through the identification, collection and effective synthesis of relevant state-level electricity data.

Abhayraj Naik is a Bengaluru-based activist-educator, community builder, and systemic practitioner focused on art, ecology, education, technology, and transformation. Abhayraj has over 15 years of cumulative experience relating to citizen and community empowerment, design for transformation, environmental and climate justice, and systems transitions. Abhayraj is a Visiting Faculty at Azim Premji University and several other learning institutions, and is also the co-founder of a nonprofit organisation called the Initiative for Climate Action, which develops a wide range of programmes and projects in the climate action space in India.

Hello Abhayraj! Thanks for joining me for this Fellow Spotlight. Could you please introduce yourself and tell me about what you’re doing with the Subak Fellowship?

Thanks. I’m Abhayraj and I live in Bangalore, India and I describe myself as an activist educator who’s interested in working on systems transformation. I really come from a background of teaching environmental and climate activism and I'm formally trained as a lawyer. My Subak Fellowship is focused on energy - more particularly the electricity space in the context of India. What I'm hoping to do is to build a decision support tool - a data driven dashboard that empowers and allows decision makers to make the right choices in the context of energy and electricity at the state or subnational level in India. It’s really filling a void that has been perceived by many for a long time. The hope is that in some sense, this will also be the start of a much more expansive set of conversations around data and policy opportunities around transition and collaboration in the Indian context.

You describe your advisory work as bringing together communication, design, evaluation, innovation, monitoring, learning, research, strategy, and implementation. How did you get into working at this intersection? 

The quick response is that where I am today is a result of appreciating how limited and reductionist certain approaches are in terms of the overall change or impact that is being sought. As a teacher, I have realised that the education process is long-term, slow-moving, and quite often beyond one's predictable control in terms of changing the system. The university system itself is quite limited to its sphere of things in terms of the larger context of policy and governance and how things play out on the ground. As a lawyer, I realised that quite often, courts, legal processes, even policy processes are not accessible to the general public - you require a certain degree of expertise to get into, or understand that space. Finally, as an activist, I have realised that while activism certainly has an important role in bringing an issue to light, activism without constructive creation of processes and structures that work, quite often leads to bitterness and resentment rather than an improved change in the situation.

In summary, given that my motivation for working in the environmental and climate spaces comes from the desire for a perceivable improvement in the quality of life of people, safeguarding of landscapes, and so on, I was keen to really focus my work at an intersection of areas that took lived experience seriously. The messy world of making change quite often requires a little bit of research, a little bit of advocacy, lots and lots of education, some systems thinking and engineering, a whole world of possibility with technology….. And, though I don't necessarily claim to have a grasp on all of those areas, over the years I have built up my own repertoire to include enough to diagnose a problem, identify what might be pathways to respond or solve for that problem, and to create a process and bring the right people together to think about and hopefully work on solving the problem. 

You have 15 years of experience. Could you tell me about your most interesting project in your work to date?

Starting off with what I'm really sitting with now, which is building the Initiative for Climate Action, a nonprofit that I established along with a couple of co-founders in 2020. This is undoubtedly the most challenging thing I've attempted in my life, but this has also been the most satisfying so far. It’s still a work in progress. The organisation itself is involved in a whole host of activities, ranging from cities-based work, to climate education, to advocacy in the law and policy space.

Why I find this both challenging and exhilarating is because I totally underestimated the complexity and difficulty involved in creating an organisation that holds on to a vision for transformation. I've really had to dig deep into areas that don't come naturally to me; holding space in a very patient way, allowing for tensions to surface, folding those tensions into the organisational vision, being okay with mistakes, just allowing for things to unfold  through a sort of common rhythm rather than be obsessed with my own rhythm. Now, I'm very mindful of the fact that there's an entire set of people with experiences, and communities that we are tied to, and so we are really moving together. There's this African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. The lesson of that proverb has really landed as I’ve built up the organisation.

Why did you see a particular need for your Fellowship project, and what problem do you hope to solve by creating a data-driven decision-support tool for energy policymakers in India?

So, I chose to focus on a data driven dashboard for energy transition in India for two very specific reasons.

Number one is of course the centrality of energy, and especially of coal-based electricity, to the overall climate story in India. Energy constitutes a massive chunk of India's overall emissions - it's by far the largest contributor. Keep in mind that India is the third-largest carbon emitter globally at this moment in time. The nuanced political story would be that if you think of per capita emissions, India doesn't feature in the top emitters, because obviously they're supporting a very large population. If you think of the historical emissions, again, India is not responsible in the way that Western economies are. But leaving that aside and taking the problem squarely as our current predicament, other than the USA and China, there's no other single country emitting as much as India right now in terms of overall carbon emissions. So what might one do to ameliorate the situation and find a space for India to be a part of the solution, rather than bullishly suggesting that things just aren’t going to change with the electricity sector in India? 

Estimates say around 75% of India’s electricity generation is coming via coal. The discourse around coal in India is in some sense, a tired discourse. In my opinion, there's not been serious deliberation about what policy moves will actually allow for a transition away from coal in ways that are radical or that are truly leapfrogging over the old pathways in a manner that is truly responsive to the severity of the current climate emergency.

I believe the reasons for that are, one - lack of credible data, and two - lack of guidance for decision makers in terms of what the feasible policy opportunities are. I just haven’t seen any existing data-driven support for decision makers to make bold policy moves. So my project is about recognising that this is really at the heart of India's climate story, that there's an entire space of possibilities that is not being adequately explored. My project aims to build, in some sense, a solution, that even if it doesn't immediately lead to a transition, would at least catalyse a serious conversation around what's at stake here. 

The second big reason that I got attracted to this project was because the Subak Fellowship opportunity became a logical progression in my own journey. As someone working in this space, I've seen many parts of the picture, but I've usually worked with collaborators or data experts when I needed to bring data insights into my own work. Terrified as I was by the idea, I felt that it's time for me to build something myself and really take ownership of the design questions. And of course it goes without saying that the overall vision of Subak really resonated with me - I’ve always been an advocate of collaborative frameworks around open data. Subak really clearly recognises the need for urgent action - so it just felt like this overall framing really resonated with me.

To really drill down on what my Fellowship project is solving for, it is the absence of actionable policy pathways for a state-level transition away from coal powered electricity in India. There’s some discourse, but the actual pathways and underlying data are entirely missing. I hope that my project will in some sense be foundational as this gets built up over the next few years. 

Could you tell me a little more about the need for contextual policy opportunities? 

This goes to the heart of the project’s focus on states in India. India is a federal country, we have 28 states and 8 union territories. Now, the context of each of these states or union territories is tremendously different from that of the next state or union territory. Energy is very much something that state policy has a determinative role over, so by virtue of India being a federal country, a lot of important matters have laws and policies, both from the national legislature and central government, and from state legislatures and subnational governments . 

Now, take the example of a state like Jharkhand, which is a really coal rich state, it is heavily forested, and it is seriously underperforming on development indicators with a largely tribal population. That context is very different from the context of a state such as Karnataka where I live, of which Bangalore is the capital, which is an elite cosmopolitan city in a fairly affluent state with not too many developmental challenges and an overall fairly good standard of living compared to many other parts of India.

Whether a state chooses to transition away from relatively inexpensive coal powered electricity to relatively more complex systems of renewable energy depends on this local context. I won't say that renewable energy is more expensive than India. The numbers are more or less head on head and in some cases, solar energy is more affordable, and India is a huge proponent of solar energy.

So that's the paradox overall. Even though the energy cost may be proven, transitioning to renewable energy is going to be costly for most states, especially if a large percentage of your population is dependent on, let's say coal mining or coal powered electricity generation. Each state is going to have different reasons to embrace renewable energy, to decommission existing coal power plants, and so on. It’s a very complex, tricky terrain that my Fellowship dashboard wants to go into.

I’m not interested in producing catch-all narratives of “we must transition to renewable energy”. That is more or less understood and accepted by everyone. More important for me is what does it take for a state like Jharkhand or New Delhi to make that transition? Where might a policymaker find useful levers that will allow them to make the transition and not lose their political popularity as well? 

I'm hoping to present a picture (that so far has been obscured by largely rhetorical discussions) by using data which will hopefully give policymakers the evidence and courage to introduce bold policies that are currently unheard of in the Indian context. 

Could you tell me a little about how Subak has assisted you in your research efforts thus far? 

Subak has been tremendously influential in the work. They have really provided the wings for me to begin to fly on something which was for the longest time just a desire or a fantasy. The movement and confidence that has flowed into this project through Subak has been tremendously important for everything that has happened in the project so far. 

It was helpful for me to both ideate and also arrive at tangible milestones for my work with Subak. It enabled me to take calls on these questions of what is desirable, what is possible, what is required, and using the experiences of others in the cohort too. My first coach Dan has been a fantastic coach, he has really been a source of quiet strength and has opened up several doors and connections to others in the Subak ecosystem that have been very important to me. My current coach Pranuthi has been wonderfully supportive and encouraging of the project and its potential. I’d like to also highlight some very generative discussions with colleagues at Ember, conversations with whom were only made possible through the connections set up by Subak. Colleagues at Ember have introduced me to a treasure trove of work on Indian energy policy. Now, we’re exploring possibilities of collaboration on subnational data dashboards for electricity in India with Ember as well. 

I don’t think that this project would have been at all possible without these areas of support and connections from Subak. The visibility has also been useful - there’s a lot of noise in the climate space, which is coming from politically intense and controversial starting points, so having a credible international presence such as Subak behind a project means that it garners attention in a space which is intensely competitive. For example, collaborators have reached out and have said that they're quite keen to join this effort or are happy to support. It’s saved me days, if not years, of emails and networking! I remain constantly grateful that the Subak fellowship has provided an opportunity for sustained work on this project with my wonderful team that includes Ambar Nag, Aiswarya Murali, Ashwin Murthy, Shefali Deshmukh and others.  

How can people with similar interests get involved with or stay up to date with your project? 

LinkedIn, and Instagram are the best ways right now. I’m also open to conversations over email (abhayrajnaik@gmail.com) and phone (+91-98868316390) especially for folks who are interested in these areas that my project focuses upon and would possibly like to collaborate.