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A number of functionaries with documents in envelopes wait outside the small office of EVR Raju, the environmental manager of the Jharia coalfield in north-east India. It's the country's biggest, covering some 440km<sup>2</sup>, and most significant; this status comes not only from the amount of coal it produces, but the fact that it has been on fire, calamitously, since 1916; entire villages have collapsed into the smoking ground. Raju has the job of putting out the fire so that his company can double the mine's output in the next five years. Whether - and how - he can perform this will have a big impact not just on India, but the entire world.
He waves aside a minion who offers tea. "The prime minister said the fires have to go out," he says. "He said money was no issue. He made a statement a few days back. Things have to happen fast."
India has the world's fastest-growing major economy, is its biggest weapons importer, is on track to become the most populous nation (probably by 2022), to have the biggest economy (possibly by 2048) and potentially the largest military force (perhaps by 2040). Nowhere is India's influence more significant than on climate change. For years, attention has focused on the role of China, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the US, one of the largest per capita emitters. In November 2014, the two nations promised substantial limits on greenhouse-gas emissions for the first time; China has pledged that its CO<sub>2</sub> output would fall after 2030, and the US has vowed to cut its output by more than a quarter in about the same time. Indeed, China's emissions have fallen so fast in the past year that many believe it may achieve its target ahead of time.
India's carbon output, by contrast, is growing faster than any other country's. Should that trend continue, India could surpass China in 25 years to become the world's greatest emitter. Its increasing emissions could offset all the efforts at curtailment in the rest of the world. "India is the biggest piece of the puzzle," says John Coequyt, Sierra Club's director of federal and international climate campaigns.
"Is there a way for that rapid growth to happen quickly and pull people out of poverty using a lot more renewable energy than has ever been used before? Or will they build more of what they have - huge coal plants with almost no pollution controls?"
The inevitable conflict between India and other nations could come to a head as early as December's international climate talks in Paris. India appears to be participating only reluctantly - it was the last major nation to release an emissions plan. Although the plan projected big increases in solar and wind power, energy efficiency and reforestation, it didn't actually promise to cap greenhouse gases. It also demanded rich nations pay for most of the cost, which it estimated to be "at least $2.5 trillion [£1.6tn]... between now and 2030" - more than $166 billion a year for the next 15 years. Within weeks, environmental groups complained that India was threatening to capsize the negotiations, holding the whole world hostage to its demands.
Matters look different inside India. There, officials and academics have long argued that western nations are demanding that India industrialise without burning even a fraction of the fossil fuels that developed nations consumed when they industrialised. And Indians resent that western nations insist on the right to judge Indian performance while refusing to help with the cost of transition. "The west - not India - filled up the air with carbon dioxide," says Sunita Narain, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. "The west is asking us to pay for its mistakes. They are saying, 'Oh, you are a rich country now, you can cover the cost.'"
A "premature superpower", in the words of economics writer Martin Wolf, India is focused on both increasing its influence abroad and raising its living standards at home. Its per capita income is just $1,778. (The comparable figure for the UK is $45,603; China's is $6,050.) Even India's wealthy are poorer than their counterparts in the west; of the nation's richest ten per cent, a third live in households with no fridges. Worse, 300 million Indians - a quarter of the population - have no electricity. Nearly as many have only intermittent access to it. Most of these people cook their food on wood or dung fires. The smoke kills about 1.3 million Indians a year.
Providing power to these literally powerless people is "a priority in every imaginable way - human, economic and political", says Navroz Dubash, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. Partly in consequence, India's demand for electricity is widely expected to double by 2030. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is determined to satisfy that demand. In fact, Modi - arguably the most powerful Indian prime minister in three decades - is pursuing this goal by charging down not one, but two paths, each fraught with difficulties.
The course touted most by outsiders is an aggressive programme to expand solar power. In his former position as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, Modi oversaw the construction of Asia's biggest solar park, a giant utility with battalions of solar panels. Soon after being elected prime minister in 2014, he announced that India would produce 100 gigawatts of solar power by 2022 (the US now has about 20 gigawatts). Earlier this year, India unveiled plans to build the world's biggest solar park, in the northern state of Madhya Pradesh. This path is next to impossible: no nation has ever expanded its renewable-energy infrastructure at the speed Modi envisions. India could easily spend huge sums and still fall short, leaving tens of millions of people in the dark.
Simultaneously, Modi is forging a second, contradictory path: to power the nation using India's vast coal reserves, among the top five in the world. Increasing output will require transforming the corrupt, hidebound state enterprise Coal India and moving a million people out of the way to extract the coal. To generate electricity from it, India plans to build 455 coal-fired power plants, more than any other nation - indeed, more than the US now has. (India's existing 148 plants, which provide two thirds of its electricity, are among the world's dirtiest and most inefficient.) This strategy has a brutal downside: vastly increased carbon emissions that would make it nearly impossible to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2°C, the goal of the Paris talks. Higher temperatures will have catastrophic implications around the globe - and India, with its long coastline, scarce water supplies and hot climate, may be more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than any other big nation.
Last summer, WIRED spent three weeks in India, speaking to academics, activists, businesspeople and politicians concerned with the nation's energy and climate issues. Not one person believed India had the financial muscle to pursue both paths. One will have to be downsized, or even abandoned. In practical terms, the nation will end up making a choice: more coal or more renewables. That choice will affect the lives of the hundreds of millions of Indians who today live without lights, fridges, air conditioners, telephones or the other necessities of modern life. But its ramifications will also ripple across the rest of the world. "Indians used to be furious at the way decisions in the west - decisions in Washington and London they had no say in - could upend their lives," Narain says. "Now, I sometimes think, people in the west will understand what that feels like."
From an aeroplane window, the coastal state of Gujarat seems like a monument to the ambitions of its native son, Narendra Modi. In former badlands 160 kilometres from Ahmedabad, its biggest city, one can see sunlight reflecting from the Charanka solar park, Asia's biggest. Dozens of rectangular photovoltaic arrays were scattered in a broad U over a kilometre on each side. Thirty-five kilometres from the airport was a metallic ribbon, nearly a kilometre long and over 30 metres wide: a solar park built atop an irrigation canal. South-east of the city was a second, a 3.5km tunnel of aluminium and polymer. As the plane approached the Tarmac, solar panels stood like sentinels atop buildings everywhere - a vision of a green future, almost all of it brought into being by the preternaturally determined Modi.
Modi was born in 1950, the son of an impoverished tea-stall owner in a remote Gujarat town. Charismatic and with a resonant origin story, he has a passion for politics and a reputation for flexible ethics. From adolescence, he worked as an operative for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS - National Volunteer Organisation), a nativist outfit dedicated to the idea that India is an essentially Hindu nation, founded on Hindu beliefs and ideals. It has a network of schools, charities and clubs run by disciplined cadres of conservatively dressed activists - and a violent aura; it has repeatedly been accused of organising attacks on Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other non-Hindus.
In 1987, Modi joined the Bharatiya Janata (Indian People's) Party (BJP), a pro-Hindu, nationalist party tied to the RSS. He rose steadily and won election as chief minister in October 2001. A few months after the vote, a Gujarat train loaded with Hindu pilgrims and activists caught fire, killing dozens of passengers. Angered by rumors that the blaze was started by Muslims, club-wielding Hindu thugs murdered a thousand or more people, most Muslim.
Human-rights groups charged that the BJP had encouraged the attacks. Modi, they said, stood by as Muslims died. An inquiry dismissed the accusation, but the riots stained his reputation; in 2005, he became the only person ever denied a US visa for "severe violations of religious freedom". (This was reversed in 2014.)
Alarmed by the fallout, Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a sharply dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian, to invest in Gujarat. He also became one of the world's most prominent advocates for solar power. In a "green autobiography" published in 2011, Modi promised to transform hot, dry Gujarat, with its 55 million people, into a model of sustainable development, increasing irrigation and recharging aquifers, converting thousands of cars and trucks from petrol to natural gas and turning the state capital, Gandhinagar, into a "solar city". He created Asia's first ministry of climate change and led a pioneering programme to install solar panels atop irrigation canals, shielding the canals from evaporation and generating power without covering scarce farmland.
Getting to that tomorrow will be difficult. During WIRED's visit to Charanka, it was about 43°C and windy. Dust, whipped into the air, obscured the Sun and coated the solar panels. Pipes beneath the arrays carried water to wash them. Solar parks, farms for electrons, effectively had to be irrigated. Here and there, the serried lines of panels wobbled, nudged out of alignment by harsh conditions and land subsidence. Energy from the Sun today is responsible for about one per cent of India's electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just five per cent. Optimistic government scenarios show it rising to ten per cent by 2022. The state-owned Power Grid Corporation of India has proposed creating huge installations in Indian deserts to increase solar's share to 35 per cent by 2050. Little that WIRED saw in Charanka made these goals seem plausible. Not one person we contacted at the park would speak on the record; Gujarat Power, the state-run developer of the project, had stopped issuing triumphant press releases. (Gujarat has quietly junked its climate-action plan.) Perhaps the lack of interest in accommodating foreign journalists meant nothing. But the silence when WIRED asked about the other part of solar power - energy storage - seemed to speak volumes.
For solar panels to provide electricity at night, power generated in daylight must be stored. Typically storage systems employ the Sun to heat a liquid (water, say, or molten salt); at night the stored hot liquid drives a steam turbine, producing electricity. In 2010, India announced seven solar-energy-storage projects, one in Gujarat. Only one, in another state, has been built. The others were abandoned when the builders discovered that the air is so hazy their initial estimates of potential solar power were out by as much as a quarter.
Renewable-energy advocates state that these difficulties can be solved with sufficient will and money. That's why so many of them cheered Modi's election as prime minister in May 2014. The BJP promised in its election manifesto to "put sustainability at the centre of our thoughts and actions."
A month after his election, Modi pledged he would deliver electricity to all Indians by 2019. Soon after, he moved the date to 2022. But to accomplish that, Modi about-faced, increasingly emphasising coal. That September he conspicuously skipped a UN climate summit. The same month, the man whose autobiography denounced the "carefully orchestrated campaigns" to foment scepticism on "whether or not [climate change] was happening" told an audience of children "climate has not changed. We have changed... God has built the system in such a way that it can balance on its own." In November that year, he said India would double coal production by 2019, when, he said, a billion tonnes a year would be produced.
Five hundred and fifty metres below the surface, the ancient coal-mine elevator opens into a space lined with icons of Kali Ma, goddess of the hungry earth, the deity most important to miners. Railway tracks march into the distance, disappearing in the haze. WIRED is standing in the Moonidih mine, one of 23 in the Jharia coalfield in north-east India. The air is hot and intensely humid despite heroic efforts at ventilation. Forty minutes' walk away is the mine face, black and glittery in workers' headlamps.
A giant bore with a 1.8-metre drill crunches into the wall with shocking ease. Streams of water play on the head to prevent the coal dust from igniting. Wet black shrapnel flies everywhere. Behind the machine is a series of conveyor belts, rumbling one after another, conducting a black stream of coal rubble to a bunker almost seven kilometres away.
The massive coalfield is owned by Bharat Coking Coal Ltd (BCCL), a subsidiary of Coal India, one of the country's biggest companies. Coal India owns more coal reserves than any other corporate entity in the country. Still, Jharia and BCCL occupy a special place in India's future.
In addition to being Coal India's biggest colliery, Jharia is the nation's most important domestic source of prime coking coal, the hard coal that is an integral part of steel production - it both provides the necessary heat and the carbon that makes steel strong. Because any imaginable path towards matching the west's development involves making massive amounts of steel, ramping up production at Jharia is a top national priority. Achieving Modi's billion-tonne target, company officials tell WIRED, will require the colliery to increase its output by about 15 per cent a year.
The men and women who must accomplish this huge task work in a landscaped headquarters that, during our visits, is full of people standing around in hallways and lobbies without obvious purpose. One morning, WIRED interviews an able young engineer. Jammed into the other half of his office are half-a-dozen older men, one of them his supervisor, drinking tea and telling stories. The interview lasts nearly two hours. During that time the other men do not move. Phones do not ring. Email alerts do not ping. Keyboards lie untouched. The office door opens only to admit flunkies with tea on a tray. Perhaps the activists who protest against India's ambitious coal expansion plans would be comforted by this scene. Increasing productivity is going to be no easy task.
The difficulties are not all internal. The Jharia coalfield has been on fire for a century, consuming and ruining huge amounts of coal, and continuing to imperil dozens of villages. When WIRED visits the area one evening, toxic fumes, issuing from the cracks in the Earth, wreathe the buildings and the black, leafless trees. Patches of smouldering red are scattered like watching eyes across the charred landscape: it's like Mordor without the Orcs.
When the coalfield opened in the late 1800s, people who wanted work simply moved into the area around the mine. In legal terms, they were squatters, but nobody wanted to drive away the workforce. In time, the city of Dhanbad - population about 2.7 million - grew atop the eastern end of the deposit. Dhanbad is no squatters' camp; it is a bustling, relatively prosperous city, complete with grocery shops, restaurants, middle-class apartment blocks and bird-stained statues of dead Indian notables. To increase production from Jharia, BCCL will not only have to put out the fire, buy millions of dollars' worth of new drill-and-conveyor assemblies and stabilise the land riddled by fire, it will also have to relocate a large fraction of this city, its satellite communities and the burned villages in the next few years.
Because India is a democracy, people can resist such government plans. The de factoleader of the local anticoal movement is a middle-class businessman called Ashok Agarwal. A member of the Dhanbad chamber of commerce, Agarwal lives in a pleasant two-storey structure built by his grandfather. His machine-parts business is on the ground floor; his struggle against BCCL, which has lasted 20 years of protests and litigation, is headquartered in his home, amid patterned rugs, cheerful paintings and photographs of family members. Indian law requires that BCCL relocate not only the villagers already displaced by fire but all the people who will be affected by the mine's expansion, he says. "That's 700,000 families," he says. "More than two million people." Has the government ever constructed a new city of that size overnight? "I don't think any government has," he says. "When they talk about doubling coal output, they don't mention this part." The part about moving an entire city? "Yes - that part."
Similar efforts must occur in many other places in India to fulfil Modi's goal. Unfortunately, about 90 per cent of Indian coal is not Jharia-style coking coal but low-quality, highly polluting thermal coal. Outdoor air pollution, most of it due to coal, is already responsible for 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a study published in Nature. New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world's most polluted air. Burning more coal will only make the situation worse. Already India has a high rate of chronic respiratory disease. "Success would be a disaster," Agarwal says to me. "I don't see how they get to a billion tonnes."
Even the smallest Indian villages have a shop or two - and Luckman, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, is no exception. At the edge of town stands a single kiosk, no bigger than an old-fashioned news stand. Basic supplies fill its unpainted shelves: rice, lentils, oil, chickpeas, beedis (hand-rolled cigarettes made by wrapping leaves around tobacco flakes). At night, it has Luckman's only electric light: a six-Watt LED lamp, powered by what looks like an old car battery. From the battery dangles a cable that leads to the kiosk roof, on which sits a battered solar panel about the size of a cafeteria tray. This is what solar power looks like in much of rural India.
When WIRED walks over at about 8pm, the owner is asleep with his head on the counter. Still, the store is open - the illumination allows him to keep the kiosk going after dark. Behind the clerk, a small girl crouches on the floor, doing homework in the pool of light. And behind her is an old woman, rolling beedis for sale. The extended hours, the ability to do homework after chores, the chance to earn extra income - all of it comes from a single light.
Enabling even this small amount of electricity has long been a struggle. India's villages can be astonishingly remote by western standards; a hamlet may be only 80 kilometres from a city but be next to impossible to reach, especially when the rainy season makes roads impassable. Stringing and maintaining transmission wires in such circumstances is a nightmare.
In network jargon, India has a last-mile problem, referring to the way that bottlenecks are often found in the link that physically reaches the customer's premises. Because of this challenge, the cost of building India's electrical grid was so high that rural farmers often couldn't afford to pay for their connection. To solve the problem - and to shore up sagging popularity among poor voters - the government launched a programme in the late 80s to provide free power to low-income tribal families. Unfortunately, over time and at great expense to utilities, the benefits of the programme were mostly captured by wealthier families. Today, 87 per cent of Indian household electricity is subsidised, but less than a fifth of the subsidies go to the rural poor for whom they were intended, and the utilities have little incentive to spend what it would take to connect them. Even if India floods the sky with coal smoke, the 300 million Indians without power still might not get connected - the worst of all possible worlds.
Enter Harish Hande. Born in 1967 and raised in the eastern state of Orissa, he won a scholarship and obtained an engineering PhD at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His dissertation focused on rural electrification. When Hande returned to India, he went to the southern city of Bangalore, where he bought a solar home-lighting system with the last $300 from his scholarship. He sold it, installing the system himself. The transaction earned him enough to purchase a second system, which he sold, and then a third. He found a US partner who helped him obtain additional funding. In 1995, the two men incorporated a for-profit business, the Solar Electric Light Company - Selco. As Hande built up his customer base, he kept asking villagers why they didn't have electricity. For decades they had been waiting for government agencies to fulfil promises to provide power. Why couldn't they go out and get it themselves by installing solar panels?
According to Selco's technical manager Jonathan Bassett, the single biggest problem was financial: classically risk-averse loan officers at local banks found ways to avoid lending money for solar projects. Hande and his team came to believe that the route to India's energy future ran through the offices of low-level bank functionaries. Persuading and cajoling, experimenting and testing, they gradually installed 300,000 solar-power systems in remote villages in southern India and Gujarat, along with 45 branch offices to provide service and maintenance. As a rule of thumb, Bassett tells WIRED, "We won't install systems without a branch that's less than two hours away."
Increasingly, Selco is expanding beyond individual installations - the kiosk in Luckman is one - to village-wide projects. The key, Bassett says, is the "local guy who runs the kiosk". Selco installs solar panels adjacent to the store. The electricity feeds a charging station inside the kiosk. Clipped into the station are small batteries, each the size of a cigar. At dusk, participating families send someone to fetch their battery. It connects to a Selco six-watt LED via a standard VGA port (the unusual plug both helps deter theft and makes it harder to damage the devices by amateur fiddling). In the morning, the families return their battery for charging. They pay 25 rupees a month (about 25p) for the service. The next step, now being tested, is village solar networks - with greater capacity and independent "minigrids" that allow participants to run fans, sewing machines and computers.
Selco is far from alone; dozens of other solar ventures exist in the Indian countryside, though few have been as successful. Because solar energy is intermittent, many Indians see it as second class; a Greenpeace minigrid experiment in the north- eastern state of Bihar last year was met by villagers chanting, "We want real electricity, not fake electricity!" But Selco-style projects have a signal advantage: they can expand rapidly. Selco's installations are increasing at a 20 per cent annual clip. More importantly, the company is training 100 entrepreneurs a year to replicate its business model across the country. Instead of building huge solar parks or coal plants and trying to distribute electricity to remote villages, it is attempting to make the villages themselves the source of power. Hande envisions a bottom-up movement, with entrepreneurs training entrepreneurs. With luck and favourable government policies, it could represent a third path to the future - one quite different from anything envisioned by Modi.
Whatever decisions India makes on the road to providing power for its hundreds of millions of unwired people, its choices will resonate around the world. Its popular prime minister has alternated between promoting renewable energy, as he did in Gujarat, and increasing the focus on coal. Neither is an easy path. Grid-style solar power requires building both massive new Charanka-style solar plants and massive energy-storage facilities, all on a scale that has never been seen in the world. It is a daunting prospect. Coal is cheaper, and there is little mystery about how to use it. But obtaining enough for India to prosper will require Coal India and other companies to sort through enormous logistical and humanitarian difficulties. And even if Modi managed to surmount them, he would be burdening India with a huge pollution problem - and the rest of the world with CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. The nation cannot follow both paths equally. Modi, in his shifting allegiance, seems to be signalling a preference for coal.
Still, one can envision another course, in which bottom-up efforts like those from Selco could buy some time, giving rural Indians some of the most important benefits of electrification while allowing the nation to build up its renewable infrastructure. No serious study has yet laid out the conditions under which this could occur. But it is hard to believe this could happen without significant financial assistance from developed nations. (There is also the moral argument: as Narain said, the west did fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide first.) But ultimately the decision about assistance will be made by Europe and the US. India will make a choice, but it will not be India's alone.
Charles C Mann is the author of 1491 and 1493 (Granta)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
