So the question is how to internalise this externality? This goes beyond reducing subsidies for more-polluting fuels, as I mentioned last time, to actually increasing the costs of fuel use in proportion to its contribution to pollution. There are also rewards for emissions reduction as in the clean development mechanism. India should actively support the implementation of the CDM by making the certification process streamlined while remaining credible.

Creating awareness and peer pressure can also help. Websites like Carbon Monitoring for Action (www.carma.org ) are a step toward publicising power plants’ contribution to global warming, for example, and have spurred greater attention to conservation and more efficient generation. Websites alone are not the answer in a country with continuing digital divides such as India, nor is the focus on power plants alone necessarily the answer. But these kinds of initiatives are a start in revealing information that enables a little more scrutiny. Closer to home, pollution monitoring and transparent reporting could be as important a tool in changing willingness to use efficient/less polluting solutions as any law.

In the end, laws are harder to enforce than public opinion and media campaign.

Few would argue that people in rural areas would cook with wood or crop waste if they could cook with gas. In this sense development and sustainable development are mutually reinforcing. The spectre of climate change increases the pressure to make cleaner-burning fuels available for rural cooking and heating. This requires a sensible inter se fuel policy. The increased availability of gas must principally be used for transport and rural cooking needs. Power should rely on clean coal technology, now increasingly possible.

... contd.