India warns West: ‘We have to grow’

The Indian environment minister clearly wanted to make a point. After some fierce negotiating in Copenhagen, Jairam Ramesh, found himself on his first visit to the Sunderbans tiger reserve.

And he was clearly still contemplating those negotiations when he launched a verbal attack about the ‘constant preaching’ from Britain’s climate change minister Ed Miliband.

He invited us to ‘meet him’ in the mangrove forest, which involved sailing around the Ganges delta in a boat trying to head him off at one of his stops.

He had just helped release a four-year old tiger back into the wild, so was evidently feeling combative. There is a rising sense of ‘carbon nationalism’ in India, against ‘carbon colonialism’.

Rahul Bajaj, the industrialist behind scooters and autorickshaws, and now a parliamentarian, puts it like this: ‘[India] needs to develop fast.

We shall develop fast and the efforts of the developed world to keep India behind will not succeed. I will shout in the Parliament if the government succumbs to the pressure of the developed world.  We have to grow’.

That view is to be expected from a manufacturer of petrol-powered vehicles. However, the environment minister himself now sees the need to engage in some public diplomacy with the West.

The message: Stop consuming and sacrifice some of your own energy rich lifestyles, before you try to bind the likes of India.

‘Indian emissions are survival emissions. In the West they are lifestyle emissions, so I would tell my environmentalist friends to change their lifestyles before they preach to us as to what our development strategy should be,’ said Mr Ramesh.

He thinks there’s a fundamental unfairness here: ‘Our emissions are much lower, our carbon footprints are much lower – and that is because there is a fundamental conservation ethic in our society: the way we live, the way we commute to work, the way our cities are structured, the way we use electricity – we are not a profligate society.

‘We want to be an affluent society, we don’t want to be an effluent society, which is what the western countries are,’ he says.

A programme of mass electrification of hundreds of millions of rural poor, and fast export-orientated industrialisation so that India exports more than just textiles and agricultural products, will see power generation increase on some measures by an incredible 500 per cent by 2030.

Half of that will come from coal.

So walking round the Sundarbans does he not fear that this approach to running an economy will be the end of this wilderness?

Already four islands have sunk, though he points out that new islands have appeared too.

‘We have an historic opportunity. Eighty per cent of our infrastructure for the year 2030 is yet to be built. So we don’t have to repeat the mistakes of the West, we don’t have to repeat the mistakes of China, we can leapfrog into the green era,’ he says.