| What is in question here is not the growth of India and China per se, but the economic and industrial model that they want to emulate. This 'western' model of growth uses huge resources""energy and materials""and it generates enormous waste. The rich world has learnt to mitigate the adverse impacts of its wealth creation by investing huge amounts of money. But let us be clear that the industrialised world has never succeeded in containing the impacts: It remains many steps behind the problems it creates. |
| Take the example of local air pollution control in cities of the rich world. The economic growth in the postwar period saw it struggling to contain pollution in each of its cities: from London to Tokyo to New York. It responded to the growing environmentalism of its citizens by investing in new technology for vehicles and fuel. By the mid-1980s, the indicators of pollution, measured then by the amount of suspended air particulates, declared the cities to be clean. But by the early 1990s, the science of measurement had progressed. Scientists confirmed the problem was not particulates as a whole, but those that were tiny and respirable, capable of penetrating the lungs and the circulatory system. The key cause of these tiny toxins, this respirable suspended particulate matter, was diesel fuel used in automobiles. So vehicle and fuel technology innovated. It reduced sulphur in diesel and found ways of trapping the particulates in vehicles. It believed new-generation technology had overcome the challenge. |
| But this is not the case. Now scientists are discovering that as the emission-fuel technologies reduce the mass of particles, the size of the particles reduces and the number emitted goes up""not down. These particles are even smaller. Called nanoparticles (measured in the scale of a nanometre""one billionth of a metre), these particles are not only difficult to measure, but also, say scientists, could be even more deadly since they easily penetrate human skin. Worse, even as technology has reduced particulates, the tradeoff has been to increase emissions of equally toxic oxides of nitrogen from these vehicles. |
| But the icing on the cake is a hard fact: The industrialised world may have cleaned up its cities. But its emissions have put the entire world's climatic system at risk and made millions, living at the margins of survival, even more vulnerable and poor because of climate change. In other words, the west not only continues to chase the problems it creates, it also externalises the problems of growth to others, those less fortunate and less able to deal with its excesses. This is the crisis of climate change. |
| Let's stay with the challenge of air pollution. Some years ago, we had argued, that Delhi should convert its public transportation system to compressed natural gas. The move to gas would give us a technology jumpstart as it would drastically cut particulate emissions. Delhi today has the world's largest fleet of buses and other commercial transport vehicles running on gas. The result is that the city has stabilised its pollution in spite of its huge numbers of vehicles, poor technology and even poorer regulatory systems to check the emissions of each vehicle. In other words, Delhi did not take a technology-incremental pathway of pollution control on the basis of fitting after-treatment devices on cars and cleaning up fuel. It leapfrogged, in terms of technology and growth. |
| Therefore, we must learn the answers will not lie in small change tinkering with technology or substituting fuel. Instead, the answer will lie in reinventing the development trajectory so that it is sustainable. This is the big change that matters. |
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