My friend Ashutosh Sheshabalaya recently wrote a piece in which he underlined the important differences between India and China when it comes to approaches towards global warming and sustainable development.
In the piece he pointed out the intellectual laziness (and the mistake) of lumping India & China together in any debate about global warming and who bears responsibility for what. It is a brilliant read and one I highly recommend.
Some excerpts: EYE ON THE TIGERS (by Ashutosh Sheshabalaya)
…
They are omnipresent, even if they lie shrouded backstage in discussions about climate change. At last count, there were almost two-and-a-half billion of them – Chinese and Indians.
Indeed, one of the most sterile facets of the global warming debate is to refer to China and India, rather than to Chinese and Indians. China and India may be among the world’s biggest CO2 emitters. But your everyday Wang or Rajiv hardly qualifies for such an honour.
The reasons are clear: out of the world’s 235-plus countries, China and India’s populations outnumber the bottom 220 put together. And their per-head/per-body contribution to global warming is vastly lower than that of the West.
In the typical Indian’s case – commercial energy use is, crucially, also far below the global average. In 2005, world electricity consumption was 2,400 kilowatt hours (kWh) per person. India’s was just 432 kWh, four times less than China’s 1,662 kWh. Oil use, too, exemplifies such trends.
An Indian’s consumption of crude, at 0.8 barrels per year, pales against the world’s 4.5 barrels, and is less than half China’s 1.8. There is little point throwing more dazzling, vulgar beams of light by juxtaposing such figures against the Western world, lit up end-to-end for the Christmas and New Year festivities.
Still, what is clear is that the difference between India and China is at least as significant as that between China and the world. And here is a suggestion to move the climate change debate beyond noisy palavers (a word originally referring to the patronising monologues of European colonial adventurers in Africa).
Firstly, differentiate between India and China. Both may be rising industrial powers, but China’s economic growth-at-any-cost is rather different from that of India, and this difference goes far beyond the numbers referred to above.
Although similarly determined to remove poverty, democratic India also boasts deeply ingrained soft systems which have begun priming its voters for the trade-offs between economic growth and their longer-term costs.
It was India – not China, or the West – which established the first Ministry for Renewable Energy. That was in the early 1990s. Since then, India’s Supreme Court – widely considered among the world’s most activist judiciaries – has set the country’s green agenda, from forcing metalworking and chemical plant closures to driving one of the world’s most ambitious environmental projects to date, namely the conversion of the New Delhi public transportation system to compressed natural gas. There are hundreds of other such examples.
The rest of the Indian system, too, has responded, at least as far as possible in what remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Rural India now hosts 30 million high-efficiency ‘smokeless’ stoves, with a conversion efficiency four times higher than their predecessors. Indian biomass gasifiers – a key renewable energy technology – are exported across the world, even to squeaky-clean Switzerland. More broadly, even modern, industrialising India has chipped in. The country’s energy intensity has fallen from 0.3 kgs of oil equivalent per dollar GDP in 1972 to 0.19 kgs in 2003 – equal to Germany.
Against this, the near-comprehensive lack of awareness about such efforts outside India remains striking. So too does the innate assumption that clean air and climate change are concerns of enlightened shock troops from the West battling recalcitrant polluters in ChIndia’s wastelands. On November 23, without a by-your-leave, the New York Times announced that the US was “the world’s third largest wind (producing) country, after Germany and Spain.”
It also cited the Chief Executive of the European Wind Energy Association about a ‘second wave’ of “new countries with significant wind capacity” – among them, “Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands. “ No numbers anywhere, nor a single mention of India. As it happens, figures from the Global Wind Energy Council show India in fourth position, with 7,093 MW of installed windpower capacity in July 2007, three times that of Britain, Canada, Italy or Japan, and double that of China.
This is not to say that continuing industrialisation in India will not add to the world’s environmental woes. But pretending that India, and the 800 million Indians below the Davos line are doing nothing about it robs the debate of seriousness, and provides little incentive for meaningful cooperation with the West.
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Read more from Tosh here:
Of Googlies*, Cricket, India and China
“The 3 Rounds of Globalization”
The Gospel according to Goldman Sachs
and finally, a related post: Globalizing Consumption, American Style…
January 15th, 2008
Posted by
Shantanu |
Asia & The World, China, Development Issues, India |
one comment
Many of you must have picked up these two (separate) news-stories from a few weeks ago…
1. Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries (India) reportedly became the world’s richest person - partly owing to the rally in the Indian stock market.
2. PetroChina became the world’s first trillion-dollar firm when it floated on the Shanghai stock exchange a few weeks ago.
I wonder if this just the beginning of The Great Reverse?
November 12th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
China, Emerging Markets, India |
one comment
A few days ago I met Matthew Scott for lunch. Matthew told me the story of “Mighty Light“.
MightyLight aims to bring “light” (literally) into the lives of millions who live in remote parts of the world and don’t stand a chance to get grid connectivity. It aims to do so by a clever product that is solar-charged and uses energy efficient white LED for lighting.
It got me thinking on how innovation in distribution channels is probably as critical as innovative product design in the context of domestic consumers in emerging markets (and particularly so in the case of BOP consumers…)
Now, if you are a purist – this may not count as true innovation.
Distribution channels (or even innovation in distribution channels) is not something that you can patent…and yet there is no doubt that products like these are capable of transforming the lives of millions through clever combination of technology and distribution which hitherto was not possible.
In other words, they fit the criteria of high-impact and definition of a “breakthrough product” – and possibly innovation.
What do you think?
On a related note, I also spoke with Alok Singh, CEO of Novatium a few days ago – they too are doing something that is fairly unusual and exploting a business model around services that has not been tried in the PC industry before . Will it work? We dont know yet.
Is it an innovative approach? I certainly think it is.
Related Post: Has the $100 PC finally arrived?
October 1st, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
Development Issues, Entrepreneurship, India, Tech & Innovation in Asia, Technology & Innovation |
6 comments
A few weeks ago while I was in Japan, a mini-storm was brewing up in the blogosphere precipitated by the somewhat careless choice of words by Daniel Altman on the IHT blog.
In a piece on the occasion of Japanese Prime Minister’s visit to India, Daniel wrote:
“…Not so long ago, there were only two countries that collected client states around the world: the United States and the Soviet Union.
These days, it seems like anyone with some economic clout can join in the fun. China has Sudan, Venezuela has Bolivia, and now Japan has India.”
Predictably that kicked up a furore (and not just because of the ill-considered comparisons).
Our friends at Wikipedia describe “Client States” as:
“Client state is one of several terms used to describe the subordination of one state to a more powerful state in international affairs. It is the least specific of these terms and may be treated as a broad category which includes satellite state, puppet state, neo-colony, protectorate, vassal state and tributary state.”
Clearly this was not a flattering description.
Daniel went on to say that, “One day, India’s economy may be bigger than Japan’s. But for now, the Japanese government is happy to underwrite India’s growth, in return for a share of spoils.”
The brief post elicited several comments with readers pointing out that:
- Japan’s increasing interest in India was also at least partly due to its growing suspicion of China
- A $100bn investment does not make a client state make
- On a PPP basis, India’s economy is now larger than Japan (link courtesy Suraj Swami on the IHT blog)
- Sino-Japan economic trade and ties dwarf the relationship between Japan and India (A related piece on IHT had noted Japan’s trade with India was about $6.5 billion in 2006…about 4 percent of Japan’s trade with China)
On the Indian Economy Blog, Shefaly posted a more balanced perspective. In her post she pointed out several flaws in Daniel’s hypothesis, notably:
- …the assumption that investing in infrastructure is going to produce spoils worth sharing, and produce them post haste
- Daniel’s diregard of the “strategic” reasons for such a investment and the influence that sovereign states wish to exercise through such measures
Shefaly had kindly asked me for my take on all this. I decided to wait for the dust to settle down before jumping in.
Here is what I think (in “ugly” bullet points; sorry for not crafting this more elegantly – I am fast loosing whatever skills I had learnt in the diplomatic service!):
- Whatever Mr Altman might think, India is unlikely to become anybody’s client state – ever
- Daniel’s piece was meant to provoke – which it did. It was not meant as a serious expression of opinion – hence it is best ignored beyond a point
- Financial aid is – almost always – linked to political objectives (however strenuously denied) and rejecting it also sends political signals
- Japan’s increasing (and belated; in my opinion) interest in India has as much to do with geo-politics as it has to do with economics & trade
- Japan’s investments in India – as elsewhere – are based on economic as well as political considerations and a combination of perceived political & economic benefits
- No doubt many people see the shadow of China looming over this relationship – but clearly that is not the only factor driving trade and commerce between the two countries
I will stop here.
P.S. For more on client states, read “We are now a client state” by David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor that talks about how “Britain has lost its sovereignty to the United States”
Will we ever see that kind of relationship between India and Japan? I think we all know the answer.
September 6th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
China, Economics, India, Japan |
6 comments
Chris Devonshire-Ellis has posted a great piece on his blog re. The US, China & Indian Innovation Race.
I am taking the liberty of reproducing it in full. Read on (emphasis mine):
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A good friend of 2point6billion, Nick Polimeni, is an experienced QC engineer and conducts work in both China and India. He’s had some interesting comments to make recently to us about Engineering standards in these countries, and the potential competition with the US in technological innovation. I quote:
I’ve been working in China for the last 4 years, and have met more ‘engineers’ than I had met in the previous 30 years. Chinese students who graduate as engineers are not what we call engineers in the west. Chinese Engineers “specialize” in a given application. They’re more like technicians, by U.S. standards. They do not seem to be trained in basic engineering science, and are very deficient in such things. I have yet to meet a single one who has any familiarity for example, with the laws of thermodynamics. I’ve worked with a wide variety of them in various fields. The few who know enough to think with science, have acquired it after years of experience.
Here’s an illustration for a different field. Dentists are not trained as complete medical doctors; they’re just trained as teeth repair technicians. They are quite good at what they have been trained; but they’ve no rounded knowledge of medicine.
So, even the reported statistics, do not tell you what engineers look like.
I once gave a class on database design to a group of Indian engineers. I have to tell you, they had formulas for everything I only had generalized logic from experience. In fact, if you gave them a stringent academic test, they would all pass with flying colors, where I would most likely fail. Yet, I could design databases, and they came to me to learn it.
Now I’ve had Indian engineers sitting next to me in working environments, and I have to say that overall, they’ve been a notch above some of the American counterparts.
What is in the future? In my opinion, the Chinese will take a very long time to catch up, because there are cultural, and educational system barriers which produce a way of thinking that prevents Chinese engineers, bright as they truly are on a personal level, from competing in development with the west.
Indians are top notch when it comes to raw technology, so they are likely to catch up faster if they are not there with US engineers already.
U.S. Engineers possess something, however, which I don’t think either Indian nor Chinese has, which I believe is “educated out of them,” and that is, a thirst for going outside the box, and breaking the mold, and moving beyond the conventional.
Before counting engineers, we need to define what one is.
That is an interesting observation, and touches again on a subject that came up a few months here – political systems affecting development strategies. With the Communist system, all if for the greater good of the society, and individualism is discouraged. Yet in a democratic system, the individual is given rights and can prosper.
When we analysed this in Nobel Prize Winners between India and China, both nations ran up a total of six each. Yet tellingly, the Indian Nobel Prize winners had all been educated in India, while the Chinese had been educated overseas, primarily in the US, with one of them (for literature) having his works banned in the PRC.
This negative aspect of communism also seems to have spilled over into engineering development issues, and as Nick points out – it is India that is closing the gap with the US in terms of the development of innovative technologies, with China far behind.
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Do also have a look at some of the comments on the 2point6billion blog.
Related Posts:
China, India and the “3D Advantage” and
Why India will* overtake China – II
Happy Independence Day to all fellow Indians… Here’s a ”cool” way to celebrate it!
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August 15th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
China, India, USA and Asia |
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