Breaking down the question
This question yokes two demands into a single frame. The first asks you to evaluate the nature and scope of anthropogenic — human-caused — influence on climate in India. The second asks you to analyse the environmental movements that have arisen in response. The connective phrase arising out of it is important: the examiner wants you to treat the movements as sociological responses to ecological degradation, not as isolated protests.
The command words are demanding. Evaluate requires you to weigh the extent and character of human impact rather than merely describe it. Analyse requires you to unpack the composition, ideology and strategies of India's environmental movements. Together they invite an argument about the relationship between a particular pattern of development and the resistance it provokes.
Sociologically, the anchor is the recognition that environmental degradation in India is not experienced equally. Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil's distinction between omnivores, ecosystem people and ecological refugees, and Guha's idea of an environmentalism of the poor, reframe green politics as a question of distribution and justice rather than of pristine nature.
How to approach it
Divide the answer into two integrated halves, held together by a common thesis: that India's environmental movements are best read as responses to a development model that concentrates ecological benefits and disperses ecological costs.
Begin with the anthropogenic influence. Establish its nature — deforestation, industrial and vehicular emissions, intensive fossil-fuel dependence, dam-building, mining, groundwater depletion and the ecological toll of the Green Revolution. Establish its scope — from local air and water pollution to India's position within global greenhouse-gas dynamics, and the disproportionate vulnerability of the poor, coastal populations and small farmers.
Then analyse the movements. Trace the major currents: the Chipko movement and its forest-conservation lineage, the Narmada Bachao Andolan against large dams, the anti-mining and anti-nuclear struggles, and newer urban and youth-led climate mobilisations. For each, identify the social base, the ideology and the repertoire of action. Locate them within the new social movements framework and within debates on sustainable development.
Sustain a critical register in the conclusion. Note the tension between growth imperatives and ecological limits, and the question of whether these movements have reshaped policy or remained defensive. The wider terrain is developed in our note on environmental movements in India.
Model answer
Anthropogenic influence on India's climate is both deep and distinctive. Its nature lies in a development pattern that has leaned heavily on fossil fuels, extractive industry and the transformation of forests, rivers and farmland. Deforestation for timber, plantations and infrastructure has stripped ecological cover; coal-based power and rising vehicular density have driven emissions; large dams have submerged valleys and displaced communities; mining has hollowed out mineral-rich but socially marginal regions; and the Green Revolution, for all its productivity, has depleted groundwater and degraded soils through chemical intensification. The scope of this influence runs from the intensely local — a polluted river, a poisoned aquifer, an unbreathable city — to the global, where India figures as a major emitter even as its per-capita footprint remains modest.
Crucially, this influence is socially uneven. Gadgil and Guha's typology captures the asymmetry: omnivores, who command resources and technology, appropriate ecological gains; ecosystem people, who depend directly on local nature, bear the immediate costs; and ecological refugees are those displaced when their resource base collapses. Climate impact in India is therefore inseparable from questions of class, caste and region. Coastal fishers, forest-dwelling Adivasis, and rain-fed smallholders are the first and worst affected, though they have contributed least to the problem.
It is out of this asymmetry that India's environmental movements arise. The Chipko movement of the 1970s, in which Himalayan villagers embraced trees to prevent commercial felling, fused livelihood defence with conservation and became emblematic of an environmentalism of the poor — a green politics rooted not in the aesthetic appreciation of wilderness but in the material dependence of the marginal on their ecology. The Narmada Bachao Andolan carried this logic to the politics of large dams, challenging the developmental consensus that displacement of the many was an acceptable price for the prosperity of the few. Anti-mining struggles in central India, anti-nuclear mobilisations on the coast, and movements against thermal plants extended the same critique.
Sociologically, these belong to the family of new social movements. They are less about seizing state power than about contesting the meaning and direction of development. Their social bases are typically communities directly dependent on threatened resources, often allied with middle-class activists, scientists and lawyers. Their ideologies range from Gandhian ecological restraint, articulated by figures such as Vandana Shiva in her critique of monoculture and biotechnology, to Marxian readings of ecological exploitation, to indigenous claims of customary rights over land and forest. Their repertoires span non-violent direct action, litigation, transnational advocacy and, increasingly, digital mobilisation among urban youth concerned with air quality and climate.
Evaluating their scope demands honesty. These movements have secured notable victories — halting particular projects, reshaping forest-rights and environmental-clearance law, and inserting ecological considerations into public debate. Yet they operate against a powerful growth imperative. The state remains committed to rapid industrialisation, and environmental regulation is frequently diluted in the name of ease of doing business. The movements have altered the moral vocabulary of development more than its material trajectory.
In sum, anthropogenic influence on India's climate is the ecological signature of a particular, inequitable development model, and the country's environmental movements are the organised expression of those who bear its costs. To read them together — degradation and resistance as two faces of one process — is the properly sociological response the question invites.
Examiner's perspective
The trap in this question is to answer only one half. Weaker scripts describe pollution and climate change at length, then tack on a paragraph naming Chipko and Narmada. The examiner is looking for integration — an argument that connects a specific pattern of anthropogenic impact to the movements it generates.
High marks go to candidates who deploy the Gadgil-Guha framework and the environmentalism of the poor to explain why India's green movements differ from Western environmentalism. This conceptual move demonstrates disciplinary command and directly answers the arising out of it phrasing.
Precision about the movements matters. Identify social base, ideology and strategy for each, rather than listing names. A candid evaluation of impact — moral influence achieved, material trajectory largely intact — signals analytical maturity and prevents the answer from lapsing into celebration or lament.