Description
The cryosphere accounts for almost 17-19% of the Indian Himalayan Region area-wise and plays a vital role in facilitating the biophysical components including geology, hydrology, biodiversity, and climatology as well as socio-cultural systems in the region. However, despite its ecological significance, the cryosphere (including the glaciers) has rarely been treated as a distinct subject of analysis in policy studies and social science research. This research is motivated by a significant gap that exists in our understanding of the political, legal, administrative and institutional dimensions of Himalayan cryosphere governance in context of the changing climate. It explores the Himalayan cryosphere—the melting of the glaciers and degradation of the overall landscape—as a policy problem through a single nation case study by delving into Indian environmental landscape. How does the existing and evolving Indian environmental framework regulate glaciers and glacier-related issues at the present and pre-empt future challenges? While it is clear that glaciers have become politically salient ecosystems in environmental politics, we still do not know how and in what ways does the nation-state regulates the landforms that have traditionally been considered ungovernable. While a myopic view would assume that glaciers are not regulated as distinct landforms in India’s environmental framework, this study takes a careful look into India’s environmental governance and shows that glaciers and other aspects of cryosphere are regulated under the country’s environmental framework, albeit under a heterogeneous set of institutions that mainly deal with three policy sub-systems, water, forest and climate. As the world is celebrating the International Year for Glacier’s Preservation (IYGP 2025), one of whose objectives is to strengthen policy frameworks that enable glacier preservation, this study introduces a timely discussion on the legal and institutional basis of glacier preservation.
