India\'s Prime Minister Asks Developed Nations to Use Less Energy and Water

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday called on developed nations to strive for gains in energy efficiency and to reduce their environmental impact to help protect the world’s poor from a growing paucity of electricity and water.

“There are genuine concerns that in an unequal world, scarcity of resources would affect the poor more adversely,” Mr. Singh said at the inaugural session of the three-day Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, an annual international conference. “Key resources will become accessible only to a small selection of people on the planet, leading to the exclusion of a large number of people who live in poverty and persistent deprivation.”

In India, an estimated 30 percent of people lived in poverty in 2010, according to the World Bank. That was down from the World Bank’s estimate of 37 percent in 2005.

Mr. Singh said India was committed to reducing its grenhouse gas emissions per rupee of gross domestic product by at least 20 percent between 2005 and 2020.

“We in India are fully conscious of the need to conserve our resources for their utilization in a truly sustainable manner,” Mr. Singh said.

But if developed countries fail to adhere to environmental agreements struck in Kyoto and other cities in recent decades, Mr. Singh warned that it “will be difficult to persuade governments, industry and the general public in India and other developing countries to step up the pace at which they are moving on this front.”

Delegates attending this year’s conference at the Taj Palace Hotel include the presidents of Guyana, Kiribati and Seychelles, according to organizers. Ministers from Nigeria, Poland, Norway, Canada and the United Arab Emirates are also attending. More than 40 nations are represented, with many of the delegates coming from developing countri! es.

The conference is taking place in a country where gross domestic product, while it has slowed in recent years, is still steadily rising, and where the government is targeting 8 percent annual economic growth. But electricity and clean water already are in short supply, and pollution levels are dangerously high, threatening to choke economic growth. Northern India was crippled by widespread power outages last summer that affected half of the country.

“We certainly have some major challenges in energy security in the future,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, director general of The Energy and Resources Institute, an influential Indiannongovernmental organization that organizes the annual summit meeting, said in an interview. “There’s a whole range of areas where, for a variety of reasons, we need to bring about an improvement in the efficiency of use of resources.”

The efficient use of water, power and other resources is the major theme at this year’s conference, which features a series of panel discussions between government officials, scientists and thought leaders. Other themes include climate change, which is an important issue in a country where annual monsoons are arriving later than they used to and dumping less of the summer rainfall that is stored for year-round use by farmers, households and hydropower operators.

Most Indians endure periodic blackouts, while hundreds of millions live without any electricity supply. But demand for power is growing with the economy.

E! ach India! n used about 6 percent as much electricity as an American on average in 2009, according to an analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration figures. The United States’ per-capita energy use is falling while India’s is growing. In 1999, each Indian was using 3.8 percent as much electricity as an Americans on average.

In a country of more than a billion people, even small per-capita increases in energy consumption quickly add up.

A study by The Energy and Resources Institute and the Indian government found that under a “business-as-usual” scenario of 8 percent anual economic growth, demand for energy by the nation’s commercial sector would roughly quadruple from 2012 to 2032.

A deepening energy shortfall throughout the country has prompted political and business leaders to propose building a large nuclear power plant, solar farms, new coal-fired facilities and 292 dams to produce hydropower through the Indian Himalayas. They are seeking to open coal mines domestically and abroad, in such far-flung places as the United States, Canada, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa.

“Ours is a large population,” Mr. Pachauri said. “We have to look at the future and s! ee that w! e are able to bring about improvements in the well-being of people with much lower levels of inputs.”

But Mr. Pachauri said the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit is about more than just India - it’s about tackling problems of energy waste worldwide.

“We’re getting leaders from civil society, leaders from defense, from government coming together, so hopefully they’ll take back some messages,” he said. “The average person on the street has to start worrying and taking some action on these issues.”