GURGAON, India — It is
Friday night in the mecca 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. About 700
million 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 United Nations 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,” Mr. 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 where 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 cellphones 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
United Nations group. “India cannot emulate developed countries. We
have to find a path that is distinctly different.”
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