Kanika Datta: The power of austere possibilities

SWOT

The Onion is a brilliant weekly online satirical newspaper that provides, as the name suggests, acerbic comment, by Americans on American life and politics.

A couple of years ago, it carried a feature headlined: "Chinese factory worker can't believe the sh** he makes for Americans" (the word sh**, you understand, was not written thus in the original; this is Business Standard's prescribed decorum for the edit page).

The item "quotes" Chen Hsien, an injection mould operator at the fictional Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd, as saying, "Often when we're assigned a new order for, say, 'salad shooters' I say to myself, 'There is no way anyone will buy these'....One month later we will receive an order for the same product but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless sh**?"

The article goes on to show how Chen's pragmatic and thrifty Asian soul is amazed and appalled by the things he's helped create for consumers in the world's largest economy across the Pacific: "plastic-bag dispensers, microwave omelet cookers, glow-in-the-dark page magnifiers, Christmas-themed file baskets, animal-shaped contact-lens cases, and adhesive-backed wall hooks"....

As a comment on the gratuitous consumerism and wastefulness of American society, The Onion couldn't have been more pithy (for anyone who would like to read the full item, the link is www.theonion.com/content/node/31049).

The item comes to mind as global commentators talk warningly about the perils of unbridled consumption in China and India, the world's most populous and fastest-growing economies. Too often the dissenters say that the two economies are nowhere near the US in terms of consumption per head, suggesting scope for growth. Apparently, the average US consumer consumes as much energy as 13 Chinese and 31 Indians.

Overall, the US accounts for just 5 per cent of the world's population but consumes 24 per cent of world energy. If you factor in the energy that goes into units in China and India that produce goods (useful and useless) for the American market, the USA's energy consumption per head would be higher.

True, few countries, even in the developed West, can match the awesome consumption and waste-creating abilities of American consumers. It is starkly visible to the first-time visitor to that country""the outsize helpings at restaurants, the mass disposal of perfectly edible food into trash cans (the US throws out 200,000 tonnes of edible food daily), the indiscriminate use of plastic packaging.

According to a website called Pizzaware.com, Americans eat 100 acres of pizza a day and 350 slices a second, no doubt a statistic that keeps the fitness industry in business. Another source says Americans apparently eat 815 billion calories of food each day, roughly 200 billion more than needed and enough to feed 80 million people.

The point about these random statistics is not that they should make Indians feel snugly complacent about their relative ascetism. On the contrary, they stand as a warning of the extremes of consumerism that appears to be afflicting India's rapidly expanding middle class that is beginning to enjoy the fruits of liberalisation and globalisation.

Middle class Indian homes today can boast cars (witness the decline of the two-wheeler market), washing machines, flat screen TVs and frost-free refrigerators (both unheard of 15 years ago). Many homes now have more than one car or TV. Certainly middle class Indian lifestyles are radically different from what they were just a generation ago. Even in the absence of statistics it is easy to see that they are also infinitely more wasteful.

This does not mean that Indians should abandon the journey up the value chain of consumption and resort to Gandhian austerity, as some western commentators suggest. Any which way you look at it, consumerism is what creates the virtuous circle of employment and growth""even the USSR couldn't find a viable alternative to this model in 74 years.

The flip side is that it may not make sense to follow the American pattern of consumerism. The universe will need four more earth-type planets if undeveloped countries alone matched American consumption rates.

The question to ask is whether it is possible for emerging economies like India to be more austerely prosperous, given the finite nature of the world's observable resources. Is it possible, for instance, to create a washing machine that uses less water and detergent than the current models? Air-conditioners that truly consume less power (there is little evidence to support manufacturers that currently make that claim)?

Can architects maximise real estate use in malls, the new consumer obsession, rather than create concrete sprawls with acres of unusable space? Can consumer companies explore less wasteful packaging options? Car makers produce more fuel-efficient cars?

This should not be a tough ask for a country in which corporations have built up a formidable reputation for best-in-class lean manufacturing practices. Unlike China, India doesn't exploit vast economies of scale; it has developed an innate ability to maximise resources to produce global quality at the lowest cost. Yet, this habit of manufacturing economy has not really broadened its ambit. Doing so will not just be the companies' gain, but the consumers' too.