It is a national disservice, too, to not get your country the best deals for tackling complex problems. Even with the best-case scenario for nuclear power capacity addition, India’s growth will remain excessively carbon dependant in the near future, sans large-scale adaptation of what green jargon calls cleantech. Standard and Poor estimates that, for every dollar of GDP produced, India emits three times as much carbon as the US. You don’t have to be a genius to guess what will happen to vehicular emission when ‘Rs 1 lakh cars’ hit the market. No Indian politician can tell the aam aadmi not to buy cars. And a carbon tax, even if it were politically acceptable, may not work.

In an EPW paper (June 16, 2007) that deserves to be widely read, Samantak Das and others argue that Indian industry’s technology absorption capacity is generally low. So a carbon tax, even one as high as 50 per cent, will tend to increase costs and lower production, not spur new, clean production techniques.

Of course, some big Indian firms are already in the game. ITC’s Sonar Bangla is the world’s first hotel to receive carbon emission reductions under the UN convention on climate change. But what Sonar Bangla does today isn’t even thinkable for India tomorrow.

India’s R&D capacity is infamously suspect. Spending is low; in purchasing power parity terms its per capita R&D spending was a shockingly meagre $12.1 in the mid-1990s. Ambuj Sagar (EPW, September 21, 2002) analyses R&D performance in the energy sector and comes to a depressing conclusion that holds five years on: India is a laggard.

... contd.