Leaving Carbon Footprints behind...

That India is today on the path of rapid industrialization is an undisputed fact. Economic growth has led to an affluent middle class that is increasingly trying to ape the West in patterns of consumption. In Business Today of 27 August, N. Madhavan described Chennai as “India’s Detroit”. According to him, 45 km long corridor near Chennai is on its way to becoming one of the largest automobile centres in the world. "Five global car majors, two commercial vehicle companies, one tractor manufacturer, three earth moving equipment companies, a tyre major and over 100 auto parts producers have either made it their home or will do so soon." Madhavan says that by 2012 we would see production of 1. 28 million cars, 350000 commercial vehicles and an unspecified number of tractors and earth moving equipment every year.

Such a grand vision of the future would make any Indian swell with pride. From eons of backwardness, our society is emerging to claim its place in the industrial world. Our slow and traditional habits are giving way to Western ways of doing things. Soon we would catch up with the West, or so it seems.

Gautam Bhatia in a recent article in Indian Express, however, struck a different note. He cautioned: “Today, every move up a notch on the social ladder is an ecological step in the wrong direction. For years a mug of water sufficed for the elimination of early morning bodily waste. The toilet roll dispenser was a decorative English anomaly. Today it is filled regularly with 230 yards of soft tissue culled from an Uttarakhand forest. In a middle-class house five air-conditioners hum to the tune of eight kilowatts of power — enough juice to light two villages. A driver picks up a fifteen rupee loaf of bread by driving a 3000 cc Pajero to the local market, using up two litres of fossil fuel that took three million years to form deep below the earth crust.”

Bhatia goes on to say that even as India, in rapid consumption, is trying to catch up with the West, several Western societies are turning away from their wayward ways to more responsible lifestyles. Cycles and public transport are rapidly becoming popular modes of transport in Europe and America.

Another area of grave concern is the construction of buildings especially as about 40 per cent of the world's energy is consumed by buildings — both for construction and subsequent use. That is indeed an alarming statistic enough to get the government to adopt a rational policy on green architecture. Yet little effort is being made in that direction. The construction of buildings is perhaps the most booming business in urban India.

In conclusion, Bhatia spells out an alternative worldview which should guide our future: “A 10 per cent growth rate can hardly be a matter of national pride when the country's rivers, air, and cities are some of the most polluted in the world, and lifestyle indices all place India at the bottom of the list. An altered way of life can only be a small part of the solution. However, an imaginative policy can transfer ecological accountability where it hurts least: amongst the high profit businesses and industrial houses, who are the cause of climate change in the first place.”

It would perhaps be appropriate to conclude this discussion with a quote from Barack Obama’s speech at Berlin yesterday: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic and bringing drought in farms from Kansas to Kenya.”

A far cry indeed from George Bush’s (and Manmohan Singh’s) refusal to accept global warming as a reality.