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The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also preparing for a four day Australia tour alongside attending G20, including addressing a joint sitting of federal Parliament. It will be the first official visit by an Indian head of state in nearly three decades, marking the beginning of a strong phase in Australia-India relations. This new cooperation might sound like good news to the Indian diaspora in Australia and make regional cooperation experts enthusiastic, but its basis in extracting and exporting dirty and dangerous forms of energy to India needs to be questioned.India is a densely populated country with many living in poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and a lack of government planning to deal with complex weather systems. This makes it ill-prepared to deal with the scale of impacts from unchecked climate change on humans and ecosystems as highlighted in the latest IPCC report – decreased river flows, increased food insecurity from fall in food production, increased tropical diseases, sea level rise and mass human displacement. Neither are its 22 running nuclear power plants managed to avoid future disasters of the scale of Fukushima or Chernobyl, as a scathing 2013 report by the Indian national auditor general on the lack of nuclear safety in India showed. As an Indian activist now working in Australian for a healthy environment, I have a personal interest in seeing a firm cooperation between both countries I call home based on clean technologies which combat climate change. Which is why I was very disappointed to hear Prime Minister Tony Abbott blithely say that “coal is good for humanity”.

If Australia’s largest coal mine becomes operational, it will extract and export 60 million tonnes of coal each year to India, producing four times the emission of New Zealand. Federal environment minister Greg Hunt approved the Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin in Queensland this July even as scientists, environmental groups, tourism operators and concerned Australians strongly opposed the sounding of the death knell for the Great Barrier Reef from the twin effects of transporting coal across the reef and burning it in a climate change threatened future.

Last month, Indian activist Debi Goenka made history when he appeared before the Land Court of Queensland to appeal against the Adani Enterprises owned Carmichael coal mine decision, making his organisation Conservation Advocacy Trust the first international party to object to a Queensland mine. Goenka reminded the Australian government that “coal is not the solution to energy poverty” and that “India’s people are best served by renewable energy sources like wind, solar and small-scale hydropower”India has nearly four hundred million rural poor. Rural India, even in coal rich states, remain largely unconnected to the central coal-fired power grid. Australia’s coal exports have been purported to benefit these rural poor, but that is far from the truth. According to the International Energy Agency, 147 million Indians will remain without electricity into 2030 under a business as usual scenario emphasising coal. Apart from aggravating global warming, coal also causes 80,000-115,000 premature deaths in India per year.