Essay · Section A15 October 2026

A treaty is a promise made to people not yet born.

Ten years ago today, in Kigali, the parties to the Montreal Protocol agreed to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, the gases inside most of the world's air-conditioners and fridges. Nobody who signed that paper will be alive to see its last deadline kept. India's schedule under it runs to 2047: a freeze in 2028, a tenth off by 2032, eighty-five per cent off by 2047. The gain, the Ozone Secretariat says, is up to half a degree of warming avoided by 2100. A child born this October will be seventy-four then. She did not sign; she cannot yet vote; she will inherit whatever is kept or broken. The honest way to describe a treaty, then, is not as a deal between governments but as a promise made to people not yet born. This essay asks who pays for such a promise and what it takes to keep it when those it protects cannot hold anyone to account.

Edmund Burke, writing in 1790, gave the idea its classic form. Society, he said, is a partnership whose ends cannot be reached in a single lifetime, and so it becomes "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born". Burke was defending old institutions against revolution, but the sentence has outgrown its politics. Parliament inserted Article 48A and Article 51A(g) in 1976, asking the State and every citizen to protect forests, lakes and wildlife, for beneficiaries mostly not yet born. And the road to Kigali is itself a story of promises to strangers across time.

That story began with two chemists, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, who in 1974 showed that chlorofluorocarbons, harmless in a kitchen, would break ozone high in the stratosphere. In 1985 British scientists in Antarctica reported a hole in the ozone layer, and theory became photograph. The Vienna Convention came that year, the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and the CFCs were phased out. The replacement gases, the HFCs, spared the ozone but trap heat hundreds to thousands of times more strongly than carbon dioxide. In 2009 Micronesia and Mauritius, two small island States with everything to lose from a warmer sea, proposed that the ozone treaty take on the new gases, and in 2016 it did. Those who banned CFCs did so for grandchildren who would otherwise grow up under thinner skies; those who wrote Kigali did so for islanders not yet born. The promise was kept not by goodwill alone but by a treaty with a secretariat, a fund, a schedule and a reporting duty, so that each generation of ministers inherited an obligation rather than a sentiment.

The hard part of any promise to the unborn is that the living pay for it. Here India's case is the sharpest in the world. Cooling already takes slightly more than a tenth of the country's electricity, and the International Energy Agency expects demand to more than double by 2035. India's baseline for the Kigali count is the average of 2024 to 2026, the very years of this surge, which makes the freeze in 2028 easy and the cut to 2047 hard. The Environment Ministry's memorandum of 1 April 2026 is the domestic edge of the bargain: no new HFC plant will be cleared after 31 December 2027. Someone pays for that: a factory that must change its line, a clinic that must afford a dearer, flame-safe machine at 45°C. The unborn child does not send a cheque. She only receives a cooler century, if the cheque is honoured.

The counter-argument deserves its full weight. Who gave the present the right to tax itself for people who do not exist? The poor of today are real; the beneficiaries of 2100 are a projection. A farmer in Marathwada waiting on a drought payment this Diwali may reasonably ask why his government signs schedules in Kigali rather than fixing the price of cooling at home. There is a second objection, sharper still: a promise to the unborn is a promise nobody can enforce. The unborn cannot sue, strike or vote out a minister. History is full of treaties kept on paper and broken on the ground because the injured party could not appear in court. Nor does the present know the future's needs; the chemists of the 1930s thought CFCs a gift to humanity, and in a sense they were.

These objections do not defeat the thesis; they tell us how such promises must be built. First, the cost must fall mostly where the capacity to pay lies. That is why India held out at Kigali for the slowest schedule and for the Multilateral Fund to pay agreed incremental costs, and why the richer parties began cutting in 2019 while the hot countries of Group 2 wait until 2028. A promise that bankrupts the living poor will be broken at the first election. Second, the promise must be made cheaper to keep than to break. Efficiency is not a binding Kigali obligation, yet UNEP and the IEA find that changing the gas and the machine together roughly doubles the climate benefit and pays for itself in saved electricity. A promise that saves the promisor money is one that will be kept. Third, and most important, the promise must be lodged in institutions that outlive their makers: a schedule in a treaty, a rule under an Act, a star label on a machine, a reporting duty that a ministry cannot quietly drop.

India's own week offers smaller mirrors of the same principle. Cheruvayal Raman, the Kurichiya farmer of Wayanad who died yesterday at seventy-six, kept fifty-five native rice varieties alive on three acres while the State promoted hybrids. He never sold seed. He gave it on one condition: that the farmer return part of the harvest as seed. That is a treaty with people not yet born, written in bamboo baskets instead of articles. When the Cabinet cleared the sale of IDBI Bank this week, the Reserve Bank's conditions on the buyer, five years of locked capital and a fall to 26 per cent over fifteen years, were a promise to depositors who have not yet opened an account: that ownership will change slowly, under watch. Even the Supreme Court's order that every counter-bought train ticket carry insurance from 27 October is of this family. The passenger it protects is one who has not yet bought a ticket, and the Court lodged the duty with a named body, the Railway Board, so that the promise has an address.

What, then, is a treaty? It is a sentence that the living write and the unborn read. Ten years after Kigali, the test for India is not whether its ministers can recite the schedule but whether the rules are notified before the baseline closes, the efficiency standard tightens with each step, and the clinic and the family can afford the cleaner machine. The unborn cannot argue their case, so the present must argue it for them, in the only language that reaches across generations: a law that is written, funded and enforced. Burke's partnership is not a sentiment; it is a set of obligations. The measure of a State is how many of its promises are addressed to people who will never know its name.