India Needs The Magic Again

Copenhagen (ABC live): When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gets to the climate change talks in Copenhagen he will do well to remind himself what the whole conference is all about.

Copenhagen (ABC live): When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gets to the climate change talks in Copenhagen he will do well to remind himself what the whole conference is all about. He is going to a conference that is essentially about saving the world from horrific consequences of global warming caused by man’s own greed and mindless, relentless carbon emissions. It requires stopping world’s worst polluters like United States, European Union, Canada, Australia, Russia and China from throwing up such dangerous amounts of green house gasses into the air. He will be asking rich western nations to give more for mitigating the affects of global warming and helping Indian economy transform to a low-carbon system. As to asking the western countries for money – almost 150 countries are in the queue. United States, European Union and Japan have agreed to give some $100 billion each year till 2020 to poor and developing countries to build defenses against the impact of climate change. The fine print of who gets how much and what for will be clear later.

But it will be a mistake to have such narrow minded perspective. Manmohan Singh is a visionary and a statesman respected by world leaders for his wisdom and decency. He was a reformer, too, but that was in the previous century, in a different era when India and world faced different kind of crises. He unlocked India’s economic growth by dismantling the license and state controlled regime that ironically, his own party’s successive governments had spent forty years building. What he did not know then – nor did the western countries – was that the road to that economic development that included exploitation of fossil fuels and natural resources was paved with dangers unknown. The dangers revealed themselves as global warming and crumbling eco-systems. By the time scientists got to work and confirmed that global warming was real and the catastrophe was man made, India was already galloping ahead in the global economy. But it was also causing irreversible environmental damage to itself.

Today Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his planning commissioners face a new challenge. The challenge is to rejuvenate the eco-balance of the whole Indian peninsula. Indian population is set to reach 2 billion by the year 2050. The one billion today are already suffering from severe shortages of fresh water and clean air. But instead of tackling the problem head on, the issues of nature, water, air, health, pollution, etc are pushed away as peripheral to the main economic development goals of his government. That is where he could end up undoing all the good he has done as India’s reformist finance minister and prime minister.

Numerous studies and experience are an increasing proof that global warming is not just a threat mitigating which will cost money. It should be seen as an opportunity that requires vision and determination to protect and transform the lives of a billion Indians, create millions of sustainable jobs and make India a true world economic leader. Prime Minister Singh is an economist of considerable intellect and he knows all too well that economies do not surge forward through hand-outs, international support mechanisms, cheap loans or technological gifts. Beggars do not turn into billionaires. It takes innovation and determination to unlock the hidden energies of the nation through a determined policy and fiscal approach.

Prime Minister Singh will arrive too late to attend a conference hosted by United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Copenhagen but as soon as he returns he will do well to summon his planners and economists and ask them to study four things. First the ‘Green Growth’ five year plan of South Korea. Second, the plans of China for a Low Carbon transition and how it envisages a complete transformation of the Chinese economic paradigm. Third, the declaration of President Barack Obama of United States about an innovation driven economy and the support mechanism initiated by his government and fourth, a joint set of reports by UNEP and International Labour Organization (ILO.)

Indian economists and politicians seem to believe that there is no alternative to the current, scorching economic growth of the country. All political parties want more automobile plants, more mega malls, more roads, more airports, more coal plants, and more nuclear power unmindful of the cost to agrarian lands of India, displacement of tribals and villagers, dislocation of villagers to slums and destruction of lifestyles that have remained intact in harmony with nature since the beginning of Indian civilization. They are all wrong about seeking continued growth with business-as-usual approach of Indian economy. Further liberalization of the high-carbon economy of India will destroy India.

Instead, Indian government needs to look at case studies and conclusions enumerated by UNEP, ILO and many regional and national governments. They demonstrate with impeccable credentials and logic that green growth and low carbon economy are a better way forward in every single respect. They will create more eco-friendly jobs, improve the quality of life in remote areas, increase the entrepreneurial potential of Indian innovators, create millions of new sustainable jobs and preserve the bio diversity of delicate and complex Indian peninsula. What is required however is not a half hearted step by step approach. A sudden, shock-inducing jolt is needed in economic direction of the country if it is to make a quantum leap in development. This shift needs to place the interests of the poorest land linked masses of India at its core. But the benefits will be far reaching and wide spread – from alleviating urban poverty to creating new wealth for the generation-next.

The subsidy-driven, fossil fuel dependent economic growth of India is not sustainable. It is also placing India at ever greater risks of energy security. The only main argument against Green Economy is unaffordability and that too in fact is a canard floated by multinational corporations and large resource guzzling industries that use India as a dirty base for production and dumping toxins into its soil, water and air. Finding monies for green growth is not all that difficult. International help will be at hand but the bulk of resources must come from shift of focus from carbon fuels to green energy. Take for example India’s ill- advised investment in an oil company in Russia. Last year India’s state owned ONGC invested nearly US$ 1,9 billion in a Siberian oil company, Imperial. Even ignoring the utter disaster the deal turned out to be – the oil promised is nowhere and almost the entire staff of the company left soon after collecting cash from Indians. Such an investment made in Indian heartlands in green energy would have generated at least 50,000 new sustainable jobs. It would have given India greater sense of energy security than the Siberian oil which will never reach India and will in fact be sold to China, adding to our neighboring giant’s energy security.

India does not lack the financial resources. Indian leadership simply lacks the vision and the will to change its ways. Misspending billions on oil companies in Sudan, Russia, Cuba and Brazil it not the answer to India’s problems. These monies need to be invested in zero-carbon jobs in remote villages where farming and small-scale jobs can be given a boost. They should be spent on education and clean technologies, on innovation and research. Indian wealth is instead being squandered on luxury imports, useless technologies, processing of foreign waste, techno-coolie job creation and acquisition of oil wells in foreign lands. There is no shortage of proven and imaginative ideas on how to achieve real growth in India. But political will seems to be mortgaged under the interests of American and Indian industrial conglomerates that will continue to pollute and exploit till there is a complete destruction of our ecology.

Prime Minister Singh needs to demonstrate now whether he was a one-trick magician of Indian economy or can he conjure up another new trick for the new challenge thrown in front of him. Will he be remembered just for laboring for two decades to undo what his own party did to damage India or for putting India on a new course of development, prosperity, sustainability and leadership in the world.