India's climate change policy a hot topic

Carbon footprints trifling, but energy demand is immense

It is Friday night in the center of new Indian ambition. The air is thick with the construction dust of new glass-fronted high-rise buildings. The traffic moves so slowly that commuters can gape all they want at the Burberry advertisement that lights up the facade of a shopping mall. In the din of car horns and cranes, Sucharita Rastogi, 27, a business school graduate, waits wearily for her office van to pull up and take her home; it will be at least a 90-minute crawl. "Mind-wise," she says, "we are exhausted, sitting, waiting."
A beacon of India's red-hot economy, this new suburb on the edge of the capital, New Delhi, is also a symbol of India's fast-growing hunger for energy. By the government's own estimates, energy consumption in this country of 1.1 billion is expected to quadruple over the next 25 years, inevitably expanding India's emissions of greenhouse gases.
At the moment, it is a mixed blessing that Gurgaon remains an island of air-conditioned malls and roaring, round-the-clock office towers, and that behind this brightly lighted boomtown lies a vast nation of darkness and cow-dung-fueled stoves.
Almost half of India's population has no access to the electricity grid, and many more people suffer hours without power. Nearly 700,000 Indians rely on animal waste and firewood as fuel for cooking. As a result, India's per capita carbon footprint remains a small fraction of that of the industrialized world - the average American produces 16 times the emissions of the average Indian - and in turn empowers the central Indian argument for its right to consume more, not less, energy in the future.
India has consistently bucked pressures to set targets for reducing emissions, arguing that it has neither been a significant polluter nor yet able to spread modern energy to millions of its poor. Instead, it has pledged to ensure that its per capita emissions never exceed those of the developed world.
"It's not logical to talk of emissions cuts without reference to per capita emission levels," Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of India's Planning Commission, said. "It's logical to talk about burden-sharing in terms of per capita emissions entitlements, or some other principle. The main point is that we must first agree on a principle that is felt to be fair."
India points out that it contributes only 4.6 percent of the world's greenhouse gases although its people represent 17 percent of the world's population.
Even so, how India will contend with its expanding carbon footprint is under growing scrutiny from abroad.
The U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, while acknowledging India's resistance to mandatory emissions cuts as "a fair position," said on a recent visit that the ball was in India's court to offer alternatives. "It's clear to me that developing countries don't want binding targets," de Boer said. "Now I want to hear what they do want."
The Indian government has yet to unveil its long-awaited climate change policy.
India's total emissions are the fourth-largest in the world, after the United States, China and Russia, though its per capita footprint remains as low as anywhere in the developing world: 1.2 tons annually, compared with 20 tons in the United States and the world average of 4 tons. The International Energy Agency, a policy and research group in Paris, forecast in November that India's energy demand would more than double by 2030. In turn, if policies remain unchanged, per capita emissions will double, it said, but will remain well below the level of industrialized countries today.
The agency also forecast that the transportation sector was likely to drive up energy demand the fastest, as prosperity brought more cars on the road. Coal imports alone could rise sevenfold, the report added. Construction is also hugely energy intensive.
Gurgaon illustrates the peculiar asymmetry of the Indian energy pie and the difficult challenge that it creates: how to balance the cravings of India's citizens with its obligations to the environment.
As it happens, cravings run deep in the India of darkness and dung. You can hear it in the talk at the tea shop in Chakai Haat, an unremarkable village in eastern Bihar state, from which armies of working men travel to boomtowns like Gurgaon. Chakai Haat has no access to the electricity grid, cooking stoves are fueled by animal waste and bicycles are the main mode of transportation on rutted country roads. Three diesel-powered generators hum a few hours each night so the village bazaar can be lighted and cell phones recharged.
For the most part, the people of Chakai Haat live in the dark.
Lakhan Lal Biswas minds his provisions shop by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Gita Devi buys enough twigs and straw to cook one meal a day; on a recent night it was rice, with eggplant and potato, and it would have to last through the next morning.
Shamshuddin Sadiruddin Shah, who lives in Mumbai most of the year running a private telephone booth, misses the hot showers he grew accustomed to there; no one has water heaters in Chakai Haat.
The men of this village straddle the two Indias. In the New India, they watch television after a day's work and sleep under fans on hot nights. In the Old India, they while away evenings at the tea shop until the generator goes down for the night, and then they walk home with flashlights.
Muhammad Mumtaz Alam, who works in a garment factory in Gurgaon, put it bluntly. "There, we live in light," he said. "Here, we live in darkness."
Chakai Haat once had power at least a few hours each day, and it changed the rhythm of life. Petty thefts dropped because the village was lighted up. The government installed wells to irrigate the fields. Rice mills opened, offering jobs.
The boon did not last long. Strong rains knocked down the power lines. The rice mills closed. Darkness swathed the village once more.
The Planning Commission estimates Bihar to have India's lowest rates of energy use, in contrast with the National Capital Region, which includes Gurgaon.
Power generation across India has been stepped up, with the government promising to extend electricity across rural India over the next five years, but that, too, is a mixed blessing. India's old-fashioned coal-fired power plants are among the country's biggest polluters, according to a survey released recently by an American environmental group, Carbon Monitoring for Action.
In India's growth story, many environmentalists see opportunity for energy efficiency. The Center for Science and Environment, an advocacy group in New Delhi, has called on the government to remove excise duties on buses and increase them on diesel cars. It has had mixed success: On Friday the government announced tax cuts on buses, as well as on small cars and motorcycles.
Others have called for stepped-up government investment in urban rail lines and for tighter energy-saving building codes in new construction. India, they argue, cannot fritter away energy as the West has done all these years.
"It causes me deep anguish," said Rajendra K। Pachauri, the chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. group. "India cannot emulate developed countries. We have to find a path that is distinctly different."

Somini Sengupta, New York Times