India, Enlightened

Raise a Billion People out of Poverty Without Destroying the Environment. Can It Be Done?

At seven o'clock on a late February morning the scene is much as you'd imagine it, much as you've seen it, perhaps, in a score of earnest documentaries, or in the highlight reels at this year's Oscars. In the slums of Delhi, a man pedals a bicycle laden with milk cans along a narrow, dusty lane swarming with people. A family of five squeezes into the back of a green-and-yellow autorickshaw meant for three. Somnolent cows lie in a field of garbage beside the railroad tracks, where an endless line of rusted coal cars rolls past, off to fuel some factory or power plant south of the city. Half-naked children squat among the discarded plastic bags and food wrappers to do their morning business. No one really knows how many people live here in the hutments of Okhla; 80,000 perhaps. And not a slumdog millionaire in sight.

Up on the footbridge that crosses the tracks, an old man in a filthy dhoti and turban shuffles past a torn notice advertising jobs for "marketing and tele-calling executives." The ad is a dispatch from another India, the new India, which lies, both literally and figuratively, on the other side of the tracks. You can't see it now, but it's out there somewhere in the smog, which is backlit to an opaque yellow-brown by the rising sun. As the day progresses and some of the haze burns off, shapes will start to emerge: the forest of cranes, the towers of blue steel and reflective glass, the billboards with words like Vodafone and Airtel and Intelenet, the Center Stage Mall and the Spice World Mall, and the call centers of the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA). It's Chinese workers who fill the shelves at Wal-Mart with Christmas tree ornaments and socket wrench sets, but it's Indian workers in places like this who answer those phone queries about your credit card bill or your airline reservation, each call helping to build India's $11 billion a year outsourcing industry.

In this new India, faucets run all day. Lights burn all night. Shiny new cars zip into the center of Delhi on the DND Flyway. Water, energy, mobility: three defining elements of the escape from poverty. Such modest goals, but for most Indians still so painfully hard to achieve.

Looking out at NOIDA, at the towers and the smog, I wondered whether India could have it both ways. Could more than a billion people have the prosperity without the environmental havoc, in a country that is already struggling with the impact of a changing climate? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had seemed to suggest as much in a speech launching India's National Action Plan on Climate Change in June 2008. Rapid economic growth was non-negotiable, Singh said, if people were "to discard the ignominy of widespread poverty." At the same time, he promised that India would follow "a path of ecologically sustainable development." In seeking to reconcile these two goals, he pointed to the country's "civilizational legacy, which treats Nature as a source of nurture and not as a dark force to be conquered and harnessed to human endeavour."

What did that have to do with NOIDA? Perhaps one hint lay in a passage from Aravind Adiga's best-selling novel, The White Tiger, which won the Man Booker Prize four months after Singh's speech. The sardonic antihero writes to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao: "Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them."

Could this new entrepreneurial spirit be harnessed to provide India's poor with the three essentials that NOIDA takes for granted -- water, energy, and mobility? There seemed only one way to test the proposition: to embark on a journey that would give me a sampling of this astoundingly diverse and complicated country, from its mountains to its deserts and back again to the city. And the prime minister's speech seemed to suggest where I should start looking for answers -- by going to the river that is the cradle of India's civilizational legacy.

 

THE WATER TOWER OF ASIA

The Hindu pilgrimage town of Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills, where John, Paul, George, and Ringo spent the early months of 1968 in thrall to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, sits on the banks of the Ganges, which Indians call the Ganga.

On the outskirts of town, an imposing line of high-tension electricity pylons marched southward from the mountains, carrying power to Delhi and the cities of the plain. Nearby was a poster advertising Ambuja Cement. A heroically muscled man, chin raised, gaze fixed on the future, clutched a gigantic dam under his arm. Ambuja is a private corporation, but the artwork suggested Soviet-era socialist realism.

Coal still accounts for 55 percent of India's energy mix, but hydro supplies 26 percent. That's an unusually high proportion -- China, for all the publicity about Three Gorges, generates only about 7 percent of its power from dams -- and India's climate plan assumes that hydro will continue to expand steadily. The plan also speaks at some length about the potential for large-scale solar power, since most of the country has clear, sunny skies for 250 to 300 days a year. But solar is expensive, and hydro, despite the huge economic and environmental cost of dams, remains the cheapest of all conventional energy sources.

On the other side of Rishikesh, a few miles upstream, an intense young woman named Priya Patel sat cross-legged in the garden of an ashram and showed me a map of the headwaters of the Ganga. Small rectangular symbols marked the site of proposed hydroelectric projects. Patel is the unofficial leader of the Ganga Ahvaan, a campaign to stop them.

There is already one colossal dam on the upper river at Tehri, which came into operation in 2006 and produces about 2,400 megawatts. (By way of comparison, the Hoover Dam generates about 2,000 megawatts, and Tehri is about 100 feet higher.) The new dams, impoundments, and diversion tunnels on Patel's map would add another 5,000 megawatts to the mix. I counted about two dozen new sites, more or less equally divided between the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, the two rivers that come together to form the main stem of the Ganga at the small town of Devaprayag. Patel said that the first of these structures, the 380-megawatt Bhaironghati I, would be built just eight or nine miles below the Gangotri glacier, where the Bhagirathi originates in an ice cave. The diversion tunnels and proposed minimum flows would dry up miles of riverbed, she said, and to make matters worse, all these massive engineering works were being planned in one of the highest-risk earthquake zones in the world. When a 6.6-magnitude quake hit the Bhagirathi valley in 1991, the greatest number of casualties occurred in a village that sits on top of one of the new tunnels.

"But surely they must have done an environmental impact assessment?" I asked.

She smiled without humor, and enumerated some of the assurances that had been given by the National Thermal Power Corporation, including one that promised that "no historical, religious, or cultural monuments" would be affected by the dams. Of course, the Ganga itself is the sacred core of India's national identity, but the irony of this seemed to have escaped the government.

Later I made the bumpy three-hour drive upriver along a tortuous corniche hundreds of feet above the Ganga until I reached the confluence at Devaprayag. The town is built on a narrow, triangular point of rocks that ends in a ghat -- the ubiquitous riverside steps where Hindus gather to wash, bathe, worship, and burn their dead. The Bhagirathi, a foaming torrent colored turquoise by silt from the Gangotri glacier, rushed in from the west. From the east, the Alaknanda was an unbroken slick of emerald between sheer cliffs. But the waters were much lower than usual, people said. It had been a strange winter, unusually warm and raining only once, a brief downpour a few days before I arrived. Peaches that normally fruited in April were ripe in February.

It was the second day of the festival of Mahashivaratri, a celebration of Lord Shiva, the Destroyer, that is one of the most important events in the Hindu calendar. Pilgrims and priests had gathered on the lower steps of the ghat, knee-deep in the water, one foot in turquoise, the other in green. The wall behind them was scrawled with Hindi graffiti. Translated, it said, "Dam Is Murderer of Ganga."

The flow of India's sacred river is of much more than local concern. Fully one-fifth of all humanity depends for its survival on the great rivers that are born among the glaciers of the Himalayas, which some people call the water tower of Asia. But even as the downstream demand for water increases, the upstream supply is contracting, because the glaciers are melting, and rapidly.

Before leaving Delhi for the mountains I'd talked to Syed Iqbal Hasnain, India's best-known glaciologist. A jovial, white-haired, grandfatherly man, he punctuated his gloomy observations with improbable bursts of laughter.

"The Ganga system is about 60 to 70 percent snow and ice," he told me. "There are more than 800 glaciers in the Ganga basin. The Gangotri is the big one. It used to cover more than 250 square kilometers [about 100 square miles], but now it's breaking up in many places. You will see blocks of dead ice that are no longer connected to the main ice body. I'm afraid that if the current trends continue, within 30 or 40 years most of the glaciers will melt out." He chuckled.

No one could fail to notice the changes in the Himalayan weather, Hasnain said: "The monsoons are being affected by climate change. We are not getting the westerlies, which bring snow in the wintertime. Crops like potatoes, peas, and apples are growing at higher altitudes now. At lower elevations the temperatures are no longer suitable.

"There's also the atmospheric 'brown cloud,' a layer of dust particles three kilometers thick, which is warming the glaciers and creating all these anomalies," he went on. "And black soot is being deposited on the white ice of the Tibetan plateau." Together the soot and dust reduce the albedo (from the Latin albus, or white) -- the amount of solar radiation reflected back into the atmosphere. Instead it is absorbed by the darkened ice. The dust is mainly from fossil fuel emissions, with China the principal culprit. Most of the soot comes from cooking fires on the Indian side, a seemingly trivial source that in fact generates huge amounts of highly polluting "black carbon." I was surprised when Hasnain told me that even the firewood and kerosene burned by the growing numbers of pilgrims to the Gangotri temple and nearby ashrams have a significant impact on the glacier.

The government misreads, or perhaps chooses to misread, these symptoms, Hasnain complained. "Because the glaciers are melting, a lot of water is flowing downstream," he said. "They think, the water is coming, people are happy, so why rake up all these issues of climate change?"

The melting also poses a direct threat to the new hydropower projects, he said. More glacial melt means more silt, and more silt means clogged turbines and incapacitated dams. No one was thinking about that either. "There's a total disconnect," Hasnain said, "between those who are designing these power projects and what is happening on the headwaters." He laughed again.

He said that measuring the precise extent of glacier loss was not easy, and the government's climate action plan had used this shortage of hard data to justify a disturbingly agnostic view of the problem. All the plan says is that "it is too early to establish long-term trends" and that there are "several hypotheses" about the reasons for the great melting. Part of the difficulty is that outside monitors are not welcome in areas that border on China and Pakistan; a matter of national security. You can figure out a certain amount by satellite imagery -- even by looking at Google Earth -- and it's not hard to measure the distance by which a particular glacier has advanced or receded. But the critical issue is what glaciologists call mass balance, the most sensitive indicator of the impact of climate change, and measuring this requires getting up into the high peaks and taking ice-core samples. Hasnain said he had begun to work with the celebrated glaciologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University. "He's the leader in the ice-core business," Hasnain said. "So in four or five years we may have a credible database." He was no longer laughing now.

UNDER THE DESERT SUN

The Ganga Ahvaan campaign was launched in an unlikely place: the former palace of Maharaja Gaj Singh Ji of Marwar-Jodhpur, on the edge of the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan, India's most drought-stricken state. It is also the largest, with 56 million people in an area slightly larger than New Mexico. If India ever realizes its ambition of building affordable, large-scale solar power installations, this will be one of the prime locations.

The palace, a sprawling sandstone complex a few miles outside the ancient city of Jodhpur, is home to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation. An odd name, I remarked to its director, Kanupriya Harish, considering that we were out in the desert, that jal means water, and that the Bhagirathi River is hundreds of miles away in the Himalayas.

Not really, she said with a smile, because the word Bhagirathi also has another significance. In Hindu legend, a king named Bhagirath had to do penance for several centuries so that the goddess Ganga would forgive the sins of his ancestors. Finally she granted his wish and decided to come down to earth, taking the form of a great river.

"Anything that is very hard to do is called Bhagirath prayah," Harish explained. "A very difficult task. And since there is nothing harder than to find water in the desert, that is how we got our name."

Finding enough water is a problem in most of India, and it's getting harder all the time. In theory there should be enough for everyone, since the overall precipitation levels are tremendous. But most of the rain falls in the three-month monsoon season, and in recent years it has been more and more concentrated into a small number of intense downpours. In a single 24-hour period in 2005, for instance, Mumbai got 39 inches of rain. But if the water isn't captured in a timely fashion, it's lost, and India contrives to lose it in myriad ways, including profligate irrigation, degraded infrastructure, and a failure to treat and reuse wastewater. Rajasthan isn't Mumbai, of course; much of the Thar Desert gets only about four inches of rain a year. But the same weather patterns are apparent, Harish said. If the meager rainfall is spread out over several weeks, people can get by, more or less, scratching out a bare subsistence by cultivating lentils, millet, and a poor variety of sesame seeds. However, such rain as there is in the Thar comes more often now in a single, violent burst. "Most of the work we're doing now is actually an adaptive strategy to climate change," Harish said.

In Delhi, Ramaswamy Iyer, a former government official who drafted India's first national water plan in 1987, had told me he saw three basic options for dealing with the water crisis. You can increase the supply by massive engineering projects -- dams, canals, the interlinking of major river systems. You can leave it to the market to supply and price water as it would any other commodity. Or you can treat water as a community resource, making decisions at the local level and educating people about conservation. The Indian government has relied heavily on the first two strategies; Kanupriya Harish favors the third.

In earlier times, she said, people in the Thar developed all sorts of creative techniques for harvesting and conserving water. But the collective memory of these skills began to dissipate after independence, when the expectation grew (though it was often ill-founded) that the government would come in, lay a pipe, and solve the problem. The critique of government was a thread that ran through almost every conversation I had in India: no matter how grand various schemes might look on paper, most were beset by bureaucratic inertia, crippling inefficiencies, and a culture of corruption that allowed budgeted funds to drain away into private pockets like water into the desert sands.

Local people could act with much greater agility, Harish said, and communities could develop entrepreneurial skills along the way. The trick was to revive the old, forgotten techniques and combine them with the smartest of the new technologies. She snapped open her laptop and launched into a brisk PowerPoint presentation to show me the spectrum of possibilities. At one end, a woman dug a hole in the sand to collect seepage. At the other, an improbable high-tech structure, shaped like a pyramid, offered a way to harvest Rajasthan's scarcest resource -- water -- by using its most abundant -- the desert sun.

That sun beat down mercilessly all the next day. It was still winter, and by the standards of the Thar it was not especially hot -- 95 degrees or so. We drove west through a landscape of rolling dunes and spiny scrub, innumerable camel carts, wild peacocks scurrying across the baking sand. Along the way we saw many of the water-harvesting structures Harish had described in her PowerPoint. There were beris and tankas and talabs -- shallow and deep wells, ground-level and rooftop storage tanks, ponds large and small. Women walked away from a water hole with heavy pitchers on their heads, climbing uphill through a grove of thorny khejri trees. Harish told me that these are still zealously protected by members of the local Bishnoi caste -- the original tree-huggers, who sacrificed their lives in a massacre in 1730 rather than allow the khejri to be cut down by the local maharaja.

As we drew closer to the border with Pakistan, the land was dotted with white salt flats, left behind by the evaporation of last year's monsoons. At one point a man in camouflage fatigues waved us off the one-lane road and ordered us to loop around across the salt flats. For hundreds of yards ahead the roadway was occupied by a long column of battle tanks.

I asked my taciturn driver if he thought India and Pakistan would go to war.

"Inevitable," he grunted, seeming almost to relish the idea.

In the village of Trisingadi Sodha, members of the local water-users' association, the jal sabha -- village elders with gold earrings and brilliant turbans of red, white, yellow, and purple -- garlanded us with oleanders and daubed our foreheads with vermilion. We walked with them to a large pond, perhaps a hundred yards across, which collected rain that was channeled from a jagged line of sandstone hills five miles away. The pond held enough water year-round for 10,000 people. One of the men pointed out a flock of migratory Siberian cranes poking around in the muddy shallows on the far side. Later, as we sipped sweet masala chai, the elders brought out their records for inspection -- dog-eared notebooks with minutes and decisions from their monthly meetings, signed in neat Hindi script or with thumbprints, careful entries of money spent and received. Some of the jal sabhas charged monthly fees to water users, Harish said. Others sold it by the tanker-full. This income financed the necessary maintenance, with each village devising its own system -- posting a guard by the pond, for example, to keep away would-be defecators, or perhaps training a young man to keep the pumps and filters in good working order.

"It's a challenge to get the women involved," Harish said. "This is still a very feudal area."

"But what about you?" I asked.

She twinkled. "For most of these communities I've ceased to be a woman. They think that I'm a man."

Something significant was happening here, it seemed to me. The jal sabha was blending traditional principles of community organization with a newer entrepreneurial spirit. In the process, India might ease some of the historic tension between village and city. Gandhi believed that the village was India's beating heart; Nehru, the first prime minister after independence, thought its future lay in the cities. Here was a way to maintain the integrity of the village while building the modest, incremental prosperity that might make it unnecessary for people to migrate to places like the slums of Okhla.

This was not the only way in which Gandhi's vision was being updated. Forty miles to the south, in the straggling village of Roopji Raja Beri, a surreal sight confronted us. I recognized the flattened foil dome, which somewhat resembled a silvery mushroom cap, from Harish's PowerPoint slide. It looked as if an alien spacecraft had set down among the sand dunes, but it was a "water pyramid," only the second of its kind in India. The technology was Dutch; a team of engineers had come here for six weeks to install it, and the inauguration ceremony had taken place just five days earlier.

The entrepreneur in charge was an imposing, barrel-chested villager named Prem Ram, a 20-year veteran of the Indian army. He said that the water shortage in Roopji Raja Beri had grown so severe that people had come to blows. The groundwater was so salty that you could literally burn your tongue, and there had not been a decent rain since 2003. "The natural order is breaking," he said.

Prem Ram seemed as proud of his pyramid as he was of his military service. He opened a vent for me to look inside, but a fierce surge of heat and humidity drove me back before I could catch more than a glimpse of the glittering pool of freshwater. The strange structure used the power of the sun to function as a combined distillation and desalination plant, he explained. And since it ran entirely on solar energy, the operating costs were close to zero. The brackish groundwater was pumped in from a nearby holding tank; once inside the pyramid, it was distilled through evaporation. He thumped a meaty fist on one of the sloping sides, and shimmering streaks of freshwater ran down the interior walls. The salt that was left behind provided an added source of income for the villagers, who subsisted otherwise by selling the milk from their scrawny herds of cattle, goats, and water buffalo.

One day, if the costs of the technology come down, if the government bureaucracy becomes more efficient, if the high-tech entrepreneurs from Hyderabad and Bangalore put up the start-up capital, there may be other strange sights here in the Thar Desert: gigantic solar farms, perhaps, each one capable of feeding as much power into the national grid as all the new dams on the Ganga. But it will be equally important for India to think small and local, and to focus on the entrepreneurial village culture that is emerging in obscure places like Trisingadi Sodha and Roopji Raja Beri. To Americans, living off the grid may imply a hair-shirt lifestyle choice, a yurt among the Oregon redwoods. To Indians, paradoxically, it may be a pathway to the national mainstream.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

"Turn left at the monkeys," Sumant Dubey said to my taciturn driver. We were 200 miles north of the water pyramid now. We drove another five minutes or so along the highway, dodging homicidal Tata trucks, until a narrower road turned off into the scrubby Aravalli Hills. At the intersection, a large, dusty lot served as an informal truck stop, and hundreds of monkeys were rooting around for scraps and handouts.

I had been introduced to Dubey, a cheerful, round-faced young man, a few days earlier in Delhi by Leena Srivastava, executive director of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). Headed by Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Prize-winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, TERI is an unusual hybrid of scholarship, science, policy analysis, and grassroots activism. It has its own university, and its labs specialize in off-the-grid renewable energy technologies.

There are still 400 million people in rural India without access to electricity, Srivastava said, and progress was slow because the government insisted on trying to meet their needs by the conventional means of extending the national grid. "We're still throwing good money after bad," she said. "It's easy enough to set up the infrastructure, even with our monetary constraints, but it's much harder to actually get the electricity flowing through the wires. So distributed generation is something that we need to pursue very aggressively."

We'd been joined now by Dubey's boss, Akanksha Chaurey, an expert on solar photovoltaics. "People are beginning to recognize that a better way to go is the smart mini-grid and micro-grid," she said.

I asked her what she meant by this, and she said, "Multiple small-scale, interconnected power plants in rural areas, serving isolated communities. They may generate power by solar, or small hydro, or biomass. Solar is the easiest, although it's also the most expensive."

What Srivastava said next echoed Kanupriya Harish's point about creating sustainable connections between rural India and the economic mainstream. "In the last two or three years we've proven that if you provide people with the energy they need to run their businesses, you can create new linkages, things like agricultural retail networks where rural people have direct access to urban markets," she said. Take refrigeration: 60 percent of fresh produce is lost before it gets to market; provide affordable electricity, and the local economy can be transformed. The key, she explained, was to identify entrepreneurs, or "franchisees" -- individuals who are known and trusted in their communities, who can make sure that the business model is sound, that the bills are paid, that those miniature power plants remain in good working order. It was much the same vision as that expressed by the jal sabhas in the Thar Desert, only this time to provide energy rather than water.

Chaurey told me about a new TERI program called Lighting a Billion Lives. The name seemed stunningly ambitious -- a billion lives? -- but that didn't seem to faze her. It did, however, raise the question that bedevils any local initiative in a country as vast and complex as India. Can it be replicated? In the jargon of development, is it scalable? The water-harvesting structures in the desert were designed to be scalable in horizontal fashion, so to speak. A solar pyramid creates freshwater; villagers from miles around come to see how it works (these days they may even hear about it by cell phone), and they want one too. The model that TERI was promoting worked vertically as well as horizontally: not only did you show the villages what worked, but you showed the government too, and Srivastava said that on a good day it might even sit up and take notice.

Lighting a Billion Lives was launched last year at a ceremony in which Rajendra Pachauri presented Prime Minister Singh with a handheld solar lantern. The gift was rich in symbolism: it took the power of the sun and the large vision of international climate science and linked them in one direction to the national government and in the other to India's 638,365 villages, all through a simple device that would illuminate the humblest hut in the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan. The only question was, how would people afford it? Even a solar lantern costs about $80, more than most Indians earn in a month.

Dubey, who was responsible for the implementation of the program in Rajasthan, told the driver to follow the narrow blacktop that branched off the Jaipur highway. We passed through a small town, kept going for a few more miles, then turned off onto a one-lane dirt road, and finally bumped along a narrow, rutted track of dried mud until we reached a two-story concrete house at the edge of a field of wheat and gram, the following season's worth of chapatis, parathas, and nans. The house was modest enough, but by the standards of the hamlet -- one of several that make up the village of Badgujran, which has 5,000 people -- it was a mansion. The paunchy, middle-aged man who lived there was the most prosperous person in Badgujran, as well as its solar entrepreneur. He introduced himself as Mahavir Singh.

I asked him why his fields were so green; a rarity in Rajasthan. He removed the cover of his deep tube well, where a rope descended into unfathomable darkness. Five years ago it was 250 feet deep, he said; now he had to go down 800 feet to reach water. It hadn't rained in eight months; the monsoons had ended several weeks earlier than usual. In the old days, wells like these were excavated by gangs of lower-caste workers who charged 150 rupees -- three dollars -- for every foot they dug. Now a truck came with heavy equipment and did the job in a day. But it was expensive. A well like this costs two lakh rupees (Indians count in lakhs, multiples of 100,000, not in millions). Four thousand dollars, in other words, making the tube well something that only the wealthiest farmers could afford. Poorer ones had to sell their land or leave it uncultivated and work for men like Singh as field laborers.

I was surprised to see that the village had some half-hearted electricity poles, although many of the wires were trailing on the ground. The power reached only four or five houses, Singh said, though others had strung up illegal wiring to feed off the current, as poor people have done since electricity was invented. But the supply was dependent on the whims of load-shedding, when a utility shuts down secondary lines like these during hours of peak demand. In Badgujran, that meant that the juice might start to flow at useless times -- at ten at night or four in the morning, while the village slept. And most people couldn't afford it anyway. As Leena Srivastava had said, putting up the infrastructure was the easy part.

Until this year, that left no option but kerosene lamps, still the basic source of light in 68 million Indian homes. Village huts have uneven floors, no windows, walls full of holes and cracks. Kerosene lamps -- usually no more than a bottle with a crude wick -- burn black and smoky. Children knock them over, the wind blows them down. Smoke inhalation and kerosene fires are among the leading causes of child mortality. Furthermore, Chaurey had told me, in terms of the intensity of carbon emissions, kerosene is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Lighting a Billion Lives is TERI's alternative; the program is now up and running in 33 villages in Rajasthan and is expanding rapidly nationwide.

A young woman named Sunita took me up to the roof of Singh's house to show me how it worked. Like many Rajasthani women she was a walking rainbow: orange sari, lime-green scarf spangled with silver, bright bangles and earrings, fingers and toes painted with intricate patterns of henna, a cherry-red cell phone. She showed me the small array of solar panels, which stood next to a stack of dung cakes that had been laid out to dry -- the traditional cooking fuel of village India. A tangle of wires led to a charging station in a small room downstairs, where rows of lanterns, some yellow and some green, were hooked up to chargers. Each lantern will hold a charge for six to eight hours.

What made the idea so attractive was the financing model, Dubey said. With solar power, whether it's a single lantern or a 5,000-megawatt array, the biggest obstacle is the initial cost. Part of the production costs of TERI's lanterns is underwritten by a variety of often surprising corporate sponsors, including GE and Coca-Cola. As the program expands, the unit price will come down, but for most villagers the lanterns will still be out of reach. So TERI's solution is fee for service: rentals, not sales. Each village would have a charging station run by a local entrepreneur, who would rent out the lanterns for a couple of rupees a day -- pegged to the amount an average family would otherwise spend on kerosene.

Mahavir Singh led me along a narrow path through the fields to a cluster of mud-walled houses and a small white temple. Green parakeets raised a racket in a large neem tree. There were several small holes around the base of the tree. Singh said they were cobra dens. About 10 villagers are bitten every month, but most are cured by a holy man who lives nearby, with a poultice of neem leaves -- highly prized in traditional Ayurvedic medicine -- and hair from a cow's tail.

We came to a hut where three or four scrawny goats had their faces stuck in a feed bowl and a bad-tempered water buffalo strained at its heavy metal chain. The woman of the house invited us inside. Some children's T-shirts hung on a clothesline. The wall was covered with pictures of Hindu gods and gurus. Next to them was an Iberia poster that showed an airplane taking off over a chalet hotel in the Alps and a row of motorboats at anchor on a sapphire lake. The inspirational motto on the poster said: "Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out for it."

"The solar lanterns allow people to do many things," Dubey said. Women gathered in the evenings to discuss health and family issues; the embroiderers and carpet makers in a nearby hamlet were working longer hours and making more money. This woman's two sons were sitting in the glow of a lantern on the mud floor of another room. The 13-year-old, Ajay, was using the lamp to do his English homework.

It was dark now, and Singh had switched on his own lantern to guide us back through the snaky field. As we stood outside his house, making our goodbyes, I noticed something I hadn't seen earlier. He had water, he had energy, and now I saw that he also had the third element of prosperity: mobility, a car. An entry-level Tata Indica hatchback, to be precise. He said it was the only one in the village. I couldn't imagine how he had brought it here, along that potholed track.

I asked if he had heard of the Tata Nano, which was scheduled to be unveiled in Mumbai at the end of March and was already making headlines around the globe. At one lakh -- $2,000 -- it would be the cheapest car in the world, and it would get more than 50 miles to the gallon. Some people said it would usher in a car-owning revolution. I asked Mahavir Singh if he might be interested in a Nano himself. He thought about it for a while, but seemed skeptical. "Perhaps," he said. "But I'd need to see it first." A sentiment that many Indian environmentalists have echoed, albeit for different reasons.

THE MAN FROM SIAM

Back in Delhi, I stopped at a newsstand and picked up a copy of Auto India. There was nothing in there about the Nano: Tata Motors was keeping its new baby under wraps for another couple of weeks.

Otherwise, Auto India looked much like any other car mag: reviews of the new E-Class Mercedes; glossy gatefold ads that said things like Smooth. Suave. Sure. The Über-Cool Is Here. So when I went to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) to meet its director, Dilip Chenoy, I pretty much knew what to expect: lots of guy talk about sound systems and leather upholstery and zero to 60 in 5.9 seconds.

Instead, Chenoy started talking about milk.

"My favorite image in India is the milkman," he said. "He used to walk to your door with four bottles. Then he developed a carrier, so he brought eight. Then he came on a bicycle with two big drums. Then he progressed to a motorbike, with four drums, and then a small pickup truck with even more. From there to a larger truck, and then the mother dairy bought a big refrigerated truck. In the process India went from being the 15th-largest producer of milk in the world to being the largest. And without that shift in transportation you would not have been able to realize the dream."

He intended this as a parable, obviously, and it served as the prelude to an impassioned speech about India's development goals and the social benefits of greater mobility, ticking off the environmental pros and cons of various forms of private and public transportation.

"We have more than a billion people but fewer than a hundred million motor vehicles on the road," he began. "So our challenge is to figure out the most economically viable way of providing mobility, so that people can get to school, find employment in rural areas, become entrepreneurs. And it has to be sustainable in terms of emissions. That's what we're trying to do here, and the private car is only part of it."

Even though car ownership might increase, he wanted to put the numbers in context. He said, "There are fewer cars in India than Detroit produces -- or used to produce -- in a year. So the scale is totally different. And the primary use of a car here is for the service economy. As you will have seen, the cars here are loaded with stuff."

I asked why there was such a wide variation among Indian cities in "mode share" -- the percentage of travelers using different kinds of transportation. I picked three cities, more or less at random, from a chart I'd been given by Partha Mukhopadhyay, a transportation expert at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi. All three were about the same size, close to two and a half million people. In Kanpur, 16 percent of passengers travel by car. In Jaipur, the figure is 8 percent. In Nagpur, it's 3 percent. It depends to a large extent on the availability of public transportation, Chenoy explained, and that sector has historically been neglected in India. The term is also too narrowly defined, he added. "There's this mind-set that public transportation equals a 42-seater bus. But it may also be a car, or a small van, or an SUV."

Presumably he'd seen me wince at the mention of SUVs. Too polite to sneer at my American preconceptions, he explained patiently that SUVs in India are generally not sold to highway hogs and soccer moms; three-quarters of them are sold in rural areas, where they may be used to haul goods, to take village kids to school, or as a "para-transit" option to compensate for the absence of buses. And Indian SUVs, made by companies like Tata and Mahindra, are subject to increasingly stringent fuel efficiency and emissions standards. The SUV as instrument of social progress and friend of the environment: an arresting notion.

"A lot of well-meaning people talk about gas-guzzlers and also about big luxury cars," he continued, warming to his theme of cultural relativism. "But let's not miss the wood for the trees. We're only talking about 3,000 luxury cars a year." And those high-end vehicles, while they may be emblematic of India's new culture of conspicuous consumption, are very important from an environmental perspective, he said. They're the test-bed for all the technological innovations -- things like common-rail diesel engines, homogeneous gas compression, variable valve timing, lightweight alloys and composites -- that will later find their way into the mass market to increase efficiency and lower emissions.

"And all of the major Indian manufacturers are thinking that way?" I asked.

"Yes, yes!" he exclaimed, as if there were any other way to think.

 

THE ÜBER-COOL

The following day it took more than an hour to get to the spanking-new Tata Motors showroom in Okhla Phase II, just a mile or two from the train station where I'd begun my journey. The first part of the ride was deceptive, since it sped us along the broad, grassy avenues and past the heroically scaled government buildings that the British architect Edwin Lutyens laid out in the early twentieth century, when Delhi took over from Calcutta as the capital of the raj. After that, though, it was a tedious stop -- start crawl through the morning traffic, with constant diversions around "Work in Progress" signs that denoted new highway overpasses or extensions to the Delhi Metro.

As we inched forward along the ring road, countless two-wheelers -- motorbikes and scooters -- slalomed in and out of the traffic. Some carried four people: dad in front, older kid in the middle, mom riding sidesaddle with an infant on her lap, and only dad wearing a helmet.

Getting around Delhi is a tricky business; in the language of urban planning it's a "poly-nodal" city. It isn't like Mumbai, for example, which is built on a narrow north-south axis and where people have a long tradition of traveling from A to B by train. Delhi planners must anticipate the need for complicated, zigzag journeys. If they don't, people will shun public transportation.

Which is not to say that the buses aren't overcrowded; there just aren't enough of them. All of them carry hand-painted slogans, which, given the choking smog, appear to have been written by someone with a sense of humor. Some read "World's Largest Eco-Friendly CNG Bus Service." The message on others comes in a number of variant spellings: "Propeld by Clean Fuel," or "Prepalled by Clean Full." In 1998, following a series of Supreme Court rulings on air pollution, the city of Delhi ordered the conversion of all commercial passenger vehicles -- buses, taxis, and autorickshaws -- to compressed natural gas. But that raised a couple of big questions, Mukhopadhyay had said. Was it wise to mandate a particular fuel, rather than to increase overall fuel efficiency? And could the plan be replicated in other cities, since that would mean a massive increase in India's capacity to produce and distribute natural gas? At best, he said, given the overall increase in congestion, Delhi had bought itself a short reprieve from even more polluted air.

The Metro, which I'd ridden the previous evening, was supposed to offer another remedy. It is squeaky clean, and the trains are punctual. There are notices about the specially designed features for "differently abled passengers." The first phase of the system, which opened in 2000, was finished on time -- a distinct rarity for India, and indeed for any megaproject anywhere. Now the lines are being extended to the airport and to the satellite city of Gurgaon, a center of India's outsourcing boom. Yet the Metro, too, has its share of critics: much of the cost was borne by massive public subsidies; ridership predictions were over-optimistic; and the lines didn't go where they were needed, since they had been planned in the 1970s, when Delhi had just a fraction of its present population of 14 million.

So the number of private vehicles just keeps on rising. At the last count, in March 2007, there were almost 1.6 million cars in the city, Mukhopadhyay had told me, more than in India's other two megacities -- Mumbai and Kolkata -- combined. And there are twice that number of two-wheelers. More than 1,000 new vehicles hit the roads every day.

We arrived at the Tata showroom at last, and while I waited for the regional manager to get there I made small talk with a couple of the salesmen. They spoke about Ratan Tata, the head of the company, with something approaching reverence, as if he were not only a corporate titan but a personal guru, even a saint. It was those overloaded two-wheelers, one of the salesmen said, that had inspired Mr. Tata to come up with the idea of the Nano. He wanted something for families that was safe, affordable, and environmentally friendly.

One side of the showroom was given over to Tata, the other to Fiat; the two companies have a joint marketing arrangement. But I couldn't see any car that looked small enough to be a Nano. "No," the salesman said, "they haven't let anyone see it yet, not even us." He giggled with anticipation, like a kid waiting for Santa Claus.

His boss, Vishwas Kapoor, arrived at last, full of apologies for being late. "Stuck in traffic," he said, unnecessarily.

He walked me around. Many of the models on display were variants of the Indica, the car I'd seen at Mahavir Singh's house in Rajasthan. Nearby were several larger Tata cars and SUVs.

"What kind of mileage do all these vehicles get?" I asked, wondering how they would compare to the aptly named Nano, which looks a bit like a four-door version of the tiny, slope-fronted Smart car that is so popular in Europe.

The answer amazed me. The various models of Indica get anything from 35 to 50 miles per gallon. Even the 10-seat diesel Sumo Victa, the biggest of the SUVs, boasts more than 32 mpg on the highway. Impressive numbers by U.S. standards.

Around eleven o'clock the first walk-in customer of the day arrived, a smartly dressed Sikh in a red turban. He introduced himself as Manjeet Singh, a travel agent in the suburban neighborhood of Vasant Vihar. He already owned a small fleet of eight Indicas, which the company used for commercial purposes. He was here today to buy number nine.

I asked him the same question I'd asked the other Mr. Singh, back in the village of Badgujran: "Would you consider a Nano?"

"Not for myself," he said, "but a lot of my friends are thinking about it. It could be as a second car, or maybe a gift for their wife or their 18-year-old who has just learned to drive. And the two-wheelers are also interested, of course."

That was really the crux of the matter, Mukhopadhay had said. It all depended on how the Nano was marketed. The idea of millions of two-wheelers being replaced by four-wheelers appalled him, no matter how high the mpg. "But in the unlikely event the Nano becomes a lifestyle statement, switching people away from larger cars, it could be a great success," he said. "It will be a test of our social imagination about what car ownership means."

The Nano will appeal to both market segments, said the man from Tata, although no one really knows what to expect. The numbers will be small at first, just a few thousand cars a month; the main production facility, in the state of Gujarat, isn't even on line yet. As if to assuage my anxiety at the prospect of all those two-wheeler owners upgrading, he pointed at the Fiat poster on the wall. It showed a car swerving around a scenic bend, as cars always do in the ads. It was the latest incarnation of the humble Fiat 500, introduced in the 1950s as the Italian equivalent of Germany's VW Beetle or France's tin-can Citroën 2CV.

"How much does one of those cost in India?" I asked.

"With 100 percent import duty, about 14 or 15 lakhs," Kapoor said.

"Thirty thousand dollars? Who's going to pay that?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised. It's very popular. We get famous movie actors, models, fashion photographers in here all the time to buy it. In Europe it may be basic, but here it's a lifestyle product."

In India, he was suggesting, small can be über-cool.

WHAT WOULD GANDHI DRIVE?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wound up his presentation of the National Action Plan on Climate Change last year with the homage to Gandhi that is obligatory for any Indian politician. In this instance he paraphrased one of the Mahatma's most famous sayings: "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed."

But virtually in the same breath Singh set the bottom line of India's climate policy, and it seemed to sit oddly with Gandhi's philosophy: per capita greenhouse gas emissions would never exceed those of the industrialized world. To put this in perspective, the current per capita level is only about one-twentieth that of the United States. But a population of 1.15 billion is a powerful multiplier. India is already the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and its recent economic growth rates, if sustained, will mean a doubling of energy demand by 2020.

By the time you read this, India will have a new coalition government. Perhaps the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party will come out on top this time; perhaps the Congress Party. Either way, there will be the same onward rush of economic growth, the same commitment to bring millions out of poverty. And given its agricultural and service-based economy, its lack of dependence on exports, India may be shielded from the worst of the global meltdown. Indian diplomats will take part in the climate negotiations that will lead, by the end of this year, to a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, and they will insist, with good reason, that the United States take the lead in finding a solution. You created the problem, they will say; you solve it. Meanwhile, the monsoons will grow more erratic. There will be worse floods and more severe droughts. The glaciers will go on melting. There will be more coal-fired power plants and more hydro dams. More Indians will buy cars.

What would Gandhi make of it all? I wondered. I had a pretty good idea what he'd think if he stood on that footbridge at the Okhla train station and peered out into the murk at the cranes and the malls of NOIDA. There was no mystery about what he'd think of the ads for the E-Class Mercedes. But in other respects I was less sure.

What would Gandhi make of the Nano? And, come to that, what would he think of village kids going to school in an SUV instead of sitting with their teacher in the shade of a neem tree or, more likely, not going to school at all? What would he think of a water pyramid, or the chance to power the spinning wheel in his ashram with solar panels? These were not easy questions to answer, and in trying to do so it seemed wise to leave many of my Western preconceptions behind.

The rutted back roads of Rajasthan and the sleek flyways of the Delhi suburbs: at first they seemed worlds apart. Yet there was a common logic in the changes that were under way in both places, and it was summed up in that word entrepreneur that people kept using. There are the kind of entrepreneurs, of course, who have created entire new Silicon Valleys in Bangalore and Hyderabad. There are those who will design the next generation of diesel engines and variable crankshafts. But there are also the jal sabhas with their account books and Mr. Singh with his lantern, Mr. Ram with his pyramid and Dilip Chenoy's parable of the milkman -- all of them hints, however small, of how India might yet realize its dreams of development without tearing itself, and the rest of the planet, apart.

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This article was made possible by a generous grant from the Josephine Patterson Albright Fund for Special Features