India’s leaders are determined to restore economic growth and lift the country’s 1.3 billion citizens out of poverty. But rapid development will require India to double or triple its production of coal – and make it the world’s second largest carbon emitter. Is there any alternative?
Beneath a sky made opaque by billowing dust, a mechanised shovel driver steered his vehicle toward the vast wall of an open coal mine. It was the middle of a central Indian summer afternoon, and outside, the temperature had hit 45C. Up in the cab, 15 metres above the black, shiny ground, it was comfortable, air-conditioned.
The driver tipped the steel-toothed rim of the shovel’s bucket downwards, then slammed it into the coal seam wall in front of him. A few hours earlier, a drilling rig mounted on caterpillar tracks had drilled deep holes into the coal from the flat ground above, and filled them with explosives. Their detonation broke the coal into diggable chunks, some of them pebbles, others a metre across.
Among the richest 10% of Indians, a third live in households which have no refrigerators
A well-sited solar panel in India will produce energy up to 22% of the time, as against perhaps 8% in the UK