For thousands of years, Indians lived their lives in close proximity to nature, their rhythms set by the life-giving monsoons.
Cow dung cakes, brushwood and coconut shells served as fuel for their hearths. Industrialisation was slow and limited to pockets such as Kolkata, Kanpur, Chennai and Mumbai until the latter half of the 20th century.
Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Indian independence, pointedly wove his own coarse homespun garments, encouraging his flock to work on self-sufficiency and cut dependence on industrial goods. If ever a country lived by the dictum that ‘small is beautiful’, it was India.
That India is rapidly vanishing.
Consumer goods produced are seeping into its 600,000 villages, breaching the dykes put up by the Mahatma.
Importing far more than they export, India’s growing appetite for industrial goods is helping economies in Asia, Europe and the American continent. Meanwhile, a ballooning population is pressing on its resources, from water to coal and foodgrain.
Now, when its accelerating economy is poised to lift the lives of millions from poverty, India is being told to curb the smokestacks and wheels driving its growth. And this, when 76 million Indian homes do not yet have electricity connections.
The country’s carbon footprint, at 1.1 tonnes per capita, is a third of China’s and one-twentieth that of the United States, comparisons that draw rage in this country when its people are told they have to curb their emissions.
So far, India’s political class has stood firm against the pressure. But it is not easy to ignore friends such as US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Last week, New Delhi shifted a tiny inch from its rigid stance, setting the first targets as it announced an intention to trim its carbon intensity by as much as a quarter by the year 2020.
‘We will, on our own, cut emission intensity by 20 per cent to 25 per cent if we get support from the international community,’ Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Parliament last Thursday. The target, he said, would be voluntary and non-binding.
India is sending Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the most senior figure in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet, as its top negotiator to Copenhagen.
Dr Singh himself confirmed at the weekend that he will be there, probably for the final two days, Dec 17 and 18.
But Indian officials say that while the country wants to be seen as a deal maker and not a deal breaker, much of the success of the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference will depend on how much and how far rich nations will travel to assist the developing countries.
‘Unless we have a substantial amount of financial resources put on the table and effective mechanisms for transfer of climate friendly technologies to developing countries, it would be very difficult to really think in terms of a very substantive outcome,’ says Mr Shyam Saran, Dr Singh’s special envoy on climate change. ‘These things are interlinked.’
In some ways, even as it resists the pressure publicly, officials here privately do not mind the global pressure to improve environmental standards.
Politicians are fully aware of the environmental challenges.
Just take the issue of sea level rise alone. India has a 7,600km coastline, and areas such as the Hooghly delta in the east and Kutch in the west are particularly vulnerable. But ministers are also aware of the unpopularity that doing right sometimes entails.
Take national capital New Delhi. Drawing strength from an order of the Supreme Court some years ago, the Delhi government ordered all trishaws and buses in the city to move to using liquefied natural gas. Polluting industries were relocated out of the capital.
Delhi-wallahs can now see starry skies again because the polluting haze that darkened the skies has vanished.
So, they happily welcome the opportunity to shift the blame somewhere else, and external pressure is a handy excuse.
Officially, India says it will guarantee only this - that at no point in time will its per capita emissions exceed that of the average in developed countries. But that is pure grandstanding and a maximum position from which it will certainly recede.
For instance, India has already dropped the demand that the developed world cut its emissions by 40 per cent by 2020.
‘I am not theological about this,’ says Environment Minister Ramesh. ‘One has to be realistic. The PM’s orders to me are to be constructive…Make sure there is an agreement.’
Where India thinks it can fix things, there is movement. Indian cars are built to European emission standards, and there are plans to raise the bar for more fuel efficient vehicles.
A dedicated rail freight corridor is being built across the breadth of the country that can move thousands of tonnes of freight far more efficiently than the polluting diesel trucks.
Meanwhile, it claims to have one of the most pro-active plans for a greener future, including a target of generating 22,000MW of electricity from solar power in 12 years.
Between 1990 and 2005, carbon intensity was reduced by 17 per cent, or about 1 per cent annually. Now, it will be further reduced by between 1.2 per cent and 1.5 per cent annually until 2020.
‘In this respect, the domestic target will be important and must be supported,’ New Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment, a private think-tank, said in a statement at the weekend.
Indian officials think slashing carbon intensity by as much as a third is do-able, even as they may not be able to cut total emissions.
‘Energy inefficiencies in our industry are endemic,’ says Mr D. Raghunandan, secretary of the Delhi Science Forum.
He says the real difficulty is not with the big polluters, but the hundreds of thousands of small-scale units.
‘They just won’t have the funds to acquire and shift to greener technologies,’ he says.
