India

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Parekh on having initiated this debate, along with Amartya Sen, who is one of the few intellectuals equally well known in India and in the UK, and of course across the rest of the world. He is one of our best ambassadors, linking the two countries, and I congratulate him on the breadth and importance of his work across the years.

I would like to make some remarks about the links between India and the UK, which could be developed around areas of climate change and sustainability, briefly touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad.

For a long time the Indian leadership essentially saw climate change and sustainability as “not our problem”. As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, said, using slightly different statistics, with about 30 per cent of the population living in or close to absolute poverty, development was seen as a priority, and climate change was well down the agenda.

That attitude has now shifted very radically—and quite rightly. I had two conversations with Prime Minister Singh on these issues, separated by about five years, and his attitudes over that time had changed quite substantially. That was not as a result of what I said to him, I am sure—I am not claiming that. In general, India has assumed a leadership position globally on climate change and sustainability issues. It was one of the five nations that forged the Copenhagen accord, and has been very active over the past few years in climate change debates across the world.

It is now recognised by the Indian leadership how dangerous climate change is to India. About 70 per cent of the River Ganges, for example, comes from runoff water from glaciers. Those glaciers have melted dramatically over the past few years, and it is clear that in a country that already has a monsoon season—quite extreme weather—one of the consequences of climate change is much more extreme weather. These things are very dangerous for India, and are now fully acknowledged by the Government.

I therefore see several key areas of potential collaboration which could be of value to both countries, and I will mention three of these. First, the most obvious one, I suppose, is in the area of low carbon and sustainable technologies. India now has substantial investment, particularly in solar technology, but also has quite a large number of wind farms. So far, those two technologies combined make up for less than 1 per cent of the total energy mix in India. In India and the UK, a key issue in both those technologies is to bring down costs so that they are comparable to fossil fuel energy production. An enormous amount of valuable dialogue could be carried on about that. Even though the UK does not have much manufacturing capacity in these areas, it has a lot of technical know-how. Collaboration could be very important to both countries.

The second area is urban design. I think we know that in future we will have to construct our cities differently to follow the demands of sustainability. In an Indian city, for example, where there already is a fair degree of solidarity and connection between people, it does not make sense simply to build supermarkets around the edge of that city, thus creating an evacuated city centre and breaking down the connections which exist. I think that we are all looking for new models of urban development which have sustainable bases to them. Again, we in the UK have a lot of expertise in eco-technology, not just for dwellings but for city design. We have a number of famous architects who have worked extensively in India in some part on these issues. We should try to develop these ties in a much richer way.

Thirdly, we could have intellectual and political collaboration between the two countries. Both countries will need to think of alternative models of development. We know that in the UK growth will be limited over the next few years. That invites us to think what kind of model of growth we should have. India, we hope, will have much higher growth rates but there is no way in which India can recapitulate the western model of development beyond a certain point. It is too destructive, as we have seen in the case of the environmental destruction in Chinese development. India should seek to avoid that.

There could be a lot of collaboration, which is where jobs will be created. Jobs will not be created in just alternative technologies; they will be created through alternative lifestyles. We could have a sort of coffee-shop model of development. Who knew that the British, after years of drinking horrible coffee, really wanted to drink nice coffee and get together in coffee shops? Well, no one very much knew that but this created lots of new jobs. The same thing will be true of the lifestyle changes associated with increasing sustainability.