India: Innovation Nation

a greenfutures Special Edition

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innovatioN Nation

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“ Sustainable innovation isn’t an option for India – it’s essential”

A race between innovation and catastrophe

Rajendra Pachauri looks for decisive action to shift India’s economy.

Jonathon Porritt welcomes the ‘invigorating turbulence’ of Indian inventiveness.

HG Wells was fond of berating the politicians of his day for their failure to recognise the importance of education: “Civilisation is a race between Education and Catastrophe”.

That is as true today as ever, of course. But I rather think innovation has now become an even more important thing standing between us and catastrophe. And in India, education and innovation have to march hand in hand.

As I discovered talking to business leaders during a recent visit, innovation is still a relatively new rallying cry. Decades of paternalistic government, reinforced by equally paternalistic corporatism, hardly provided the best seed bed for innovators to flourish.

But, inventiveness certainly flourished, particularly of the ‘frugal’ kind highlighted by Ian Thornton [‘Frugal plenty’, p4]. This celebrates a culture of jugaad – using imaginative, improvised solutions in the face of challenging circumstances and limited resources.

India’s great cities sometimes seem to be held together by jugaad, in the face of chronic infrastructure deficits balanced by an invigorating turbulence. But the sheer dynamism of the Indian economy today is already having a transformative impact on those cities, and helping spur a rather more systematic approach to innovation, with the private sector very much part of that process.

Leading Indian companies are seizing the initiative here. Whether it’s simple water filters which save lives daily, or sophisticated energy management systems which save companies millions, there is no shortage of innovations being put into practice. This Special Edition of Green Futures provides a snapshot of both the diversity and the massive sustainability benefits that those solutions promise.

When we hosted a CEO roundtable on sustainable innovation with The Energy and Resources Institute, one of the most exciting things we heard about was a growing readiness for companies to combine forces to drive more disruptive innovation.

There’s a real buzz around this agenda – and those two key words (innovation and sustainability) are found linked together more and more frequently. This was something that the Harvard Business Review flagged up some time ago as an increasingly powerful synergy: “Our research shows that sustainability is a motherlode of organisational and technological innovations that yield both bottom line and top line returns. We find that smart companies now treat sustainability as innovation’s new frontier”.

But there are still many cautionary voices regarding the potential for innovation in India, calling into question the quality of the political seedbed. It is hugely encouraging that, for all sorts of timely reasons, the Government of India has declared this to be the Decade of Innovation. But it won’t work just handing that over to the private sector. Much will need to be done by the politicians themselves to ensure those seeds of innovation can really flourish.

If we pursue the same path as some of the highly developed countries, we are going to end up with a hugely resource-intensive pattern of growth, imposing major constraints on our society. It will simply not be practical, and we would have some very serious crises to handle as a result. So sustainable innovation isn’t an option for India: it’s absolutely essential.

We have to get our pricing right People need to be motivated to look for solutions, so we need the right policies in place to encourage them.

In particular, we need to get our pricing right, especially when it comes to those resources which are going to be scarce. That means getting rid of some of the subsidies, explicit or hidden, which are encouraging their use. Take diesel. It is heavily subsidised, to the extent that if you don’t have electricity, the simplest thing to do is to set up a diesel-generating system – rather than look for renewable solutions. So that is clearly not providing the right signals.

It’s the same with kerosene. Through our ‘Light a Billion Lives’ programme, we are promoting the use of solar lamps, which should be a much more economically viable and certainly environmentally cleaner system than kerosene. But subsidies on the latter make it harder to compete. And we also know that kerosene is used on a large scale for adulteration of other petroleum products, so subsidising it creates a major distortion: one that has environmental and other economic downsides which we really should be able to eliminate.

If you build green, you should be rewarded There are more positive incentives available. For example, at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future.

So just what is sustainable innovation?

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or environmental challenge – such as air pollution, or access to markets for the poorest in society. And crucially, it must do so in a way which is environmentally harmless, makes a positive social contribution and is economically viable.

It sounds a tall order, but it’s one which a growing number of companies are starting to see as an opportunity.

Take Ingersoll Rand, whose new cold chain vehicles can dramatically cut food wastage from farms [see p22]. Or Infosys, which is proving that new thinking in building design can lead to dramatic savings in costs and energy and a more productive workforce [see p28].

Economic reform can encourage innovation Opening up this entire [sustainability] sector to investments from overseas can bring in new technologies, and would give us a chance of securing the brightest and best people from everywhere. That can only be to the benefit of the country.

We don’t always give a rational explanation…

Taking action on all this is politically possible, but first the Government has to decide that it is in the interests of society, and then it needs to inform the public. We don’t always do that, and the fact that we are not able to provide a rational explanation for what seems eminently sensible is, in my view, a real handicap to the Government taking the right kinds of steps.

I’ve never seen so much dynamism…

I’m encouraged by the sheer amount of dynamism that was in evidence at our CEO roundtable [hosted with Forum for the Future]. There was so much desire to innovate. What’s particularly encouraging is the huge variety of things in the pipeline. So, these may be challenging times, but they are exciting ones too.

Rajendra Pachauri is Director-General of TERI and Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Our cover illustration shows a puja pandal (temporary shrine) constructed for the Durga Puja festival in Kolkata, October 2012. The festival honours the goddess Durga, who epitomises female power.

The pandal is constructed wholly from recycled plastic bags, reflecting a strong sustainability theme throughout the festival. The committee which designed and built this pandal draws some of its members from the city’s slum communities, themselves experts, by force of circumstance, in making maximum use of available resources.

While efforts to outlaw plastic bags have both divided opinion and had mixed success rates, imaginative ways of reusing this ubiquitous resource continue to grow – see p8.

The challenge now is to make these outliers of innovation the norm. That means seeing sustainability as a potential driver of new business ideas. And it also means getting everyone involved in a particular ‘system’– food say, or energy, whether they are companies, governments, communities or entrepreneurs, working together to find a solution.

Encouragingly, there’s plenty of evidence that this is happening increasingly in India – which makes it an increasingly exciting place to work.

Photo: Matt Robson Stephanie Draper, Director, Change and System Innovation, Forum for the Future.

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Photo: TERI

At Forum for the Future, we have been working with companies and governments on sustainable innovation over nearly two decades. But what does a ‘sustainable’ innovation actually look like - and how do we get more of it?

Essentially, it involves the creation of a new product, service or business model that addresses a particular social

we have a good green rating system for buildings (GRIHA: see p27), and some local governments are now encouraging developers to build to higher standards by relaxing size restrictions for buildings which score high ratings. This is a very positive approach. It does not cost the government anything, but there’s a huge benefit to the builder. So it can act as a real incentive to do the right thing.

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Frugal plenty India’s culture of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has helped produce a wide range of sustainable breakthroughs.

Are there lessons there for the rest of the world?

Ian Thornton meets the innovators.

Winter greens: frugal innovation brings fresh vegetables to Kashmir

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Photo: Vortex

sustainability credentials: they pioneered a new technique for growing rice. Traditionally, young rice saplings are transplanted to fields from a nursery, then the fields are flooded to inhibit the growth of weeds. The new direct seeding technique cuts labour needs by half, saves 30% of the usual water requirement and slashes carbon emissions by 70% – all while maintaining yield and quality. Reducing water required for rice cultivation is a major priority in India: it accounts for a startling 40% of the country’s total usage. Through direct seeding, PepsiCo India saved nearly 1.5 billion gallons of water in 2009.

Both of these innovations provide high quality goods or services – as good as, or better than, existing alternatives – at a low cost and a small environmental footprint. As such, they are exemplars of ‘frugal innovation’: responding to limitations in resources, whether financial, material or institutional, and turning them into an advantage.

Successful Indian frugal innovations include new products, like the Vortex ATM, new processes, like direct seeding of rice, as well as new business models. In rural Karnataka, Harish Hande [see ‘Smaller grids, smarter grids’, p18] has brought solar

Photo: Martin Wright

Low cost doesn’t mean low tech – you can be frugal and sophisticated

“What we’re doing is essentially space technology at low cost”, says Lakshminarayan Kannan, Founder of Vortex Engineering, laughing. “To do anything in rural India it has to be cost-effective, robust, reliable and energy-efficient”, he adds. “It’s like sending something to Mars. You can’t send an engineer up there to fix it. The only difference is that you don’t have budget constraints in space technology!”

The cash machine (ATM) which Kannan and his colleagues in Chennai developed is remarkable. With the lowest power consumption in the world – up to 90% less than conventional alternatives – it can run on solar power. Moreover it costs just one-third of conventional ATMs, despite having sophisticated inbuilt fingerprint scanning which allows even illiterate farmers to access the formal banking system. It holds out the prospect of bringing basic banking services within reach of rural India, most of which is far from the electricity grid. It is already being taken up by the State Bank of India and others, and Kannan hopes to see 3,000 installed by the end of 2013.

In Punjab, two PepsiCo employees developed a completely different innovation with equally impressive

power to over 150,000 poor households by devising a viable pay-as-you-go model. Customers either buy or rent solar lights with the help of a loan. By partnering with banks and local entrepreneurs to create this ecosystem, Hande’s company, SELCO, is providing clean, bright electric light well below the cost of kerosene (the normal lighting fuel for millions of Indians) to people earning barely $50-100 a month, and all without a rupee in subsidy.

Low cost doesn’t mean low tech. On the contrary, frugal innovation can use highly sophisticated technology. The Tata Swach water filter is 50% cheaper than its nearest competitor, and can clean 3,000 litres without electricity or running water. To do this it combines rice husks (a common waste product) with frontier technology in silver nano-particles, developed in collaboration with MIT. Sometimes a mix of low and high tech can achieve remarkable results. In the high valleys of Ladakh, farmers can grow fresh vegetables through the freezing winters thanks to an innovative greenhouse designed by local NGOs in partnership with the French organisation GERES. The Ashden Award-winning greenhouses use traditional earth and straw insulation coupled with a specially developed UV-resistant heavy duty polythene.

A number of conditions have come together to make India conducive to frugal innovation. Above all, perhaps, is a culture of jugaad: a Hindi word that roughly translates as ‘overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an effective solution using limited resources’. From connecting a diesel engine onto a cart to create a truck, to powering complex irrigation systems by motorbike, there are examples all over the country. And while some see these as an embarrassing reminder of a willingness to put up with poor quality stopgap measures, others celebrate them as creativity in the face of adversity.

Meanwhile, yawning gaps in basic service provision can stimulate demand for low-cost solutions in health, education and energy. Often, the people excluded from these services are the rural poor, a group which until recently was considered not worth companies’ time and effort. Management Professor C K Prahalad did much to counter this assumption, highlighting the ‘fortune to be made at the bottom of the pyramid’ as sheer numbers of people make up for low individual purchasing power.

The pursuit of this vast potential market is another key driver of frugal innovation.

Dr R A Mashelkar, one of India’s leading scientists and a board member of the Tata Group, is an enthusiastic advocate of frugal innovation. “It is fundamentally about doing more with less, for more and more people. Not only people excluded today, but also people likely to be excluded in future.”

Doing more with less, and thinking about future generations, is clearly core to sustainable innovation, but in India this has not been driven directly by environmental concerns. “India, so far, has done this out of compulsion. The combination of scarcity and aspiration was the trigger”, says Mashelkar.

Regardless, many of the tools and techniques used to reduce cost and increase access also have positive environmental benefits. For example, Gyanesh Pandey [see p18] wanted to bring electricity to rural Bihar despite the conviction of the

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Government that some areas were too remote to reach. Pandey’s Husk Power Systems developed local plants that generate electricity via a biomass gasifier, using rice husks as principal fuel – the same abundantly available waste product as used in the Swach.

This is not to say that frugality and sustainability are the same thing. The Tata Nano is the best known frugal innovation, bursting onto the scene as the world’s cheapest family car. The company’s chairman, Ratan Tata, was explicit in the car’s social aim: to get families off precarious scooters (often bearing four or five people plus baggage) and into safer cars. But increasing the number of cars on India’s already crowded and polluted streets is hardly a recipe for positive environmental change. That said, work is underway to develop an electric Nano. If powered

by India’s abundant sunlight, this could change the narrative dramatically.

Historically, much of the innovation taking place in India has been in spite of, and not because of, government action. Recently, however, there are signs that the Government has recognised the potential of new solutions, and is seeking to drive them.

India’s President declared 2010-2020 the ‘Decade of Innovation’, and a National Innovation Council has been formed to devise and implement a model of ‘inclusive innovation’. In a speech last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: “Research should be directed to [finding] frugal solutions to our chronic problems of providing food, energy and water security to our people.” While the scale of ambition is eye catching – including a proposed $1 billion Inclusive Innovation Fund – it is much too early to tell what impact government initiatives will have [see panel, ‘Government: help or hindrance’].

Whatever their success, frugal innovation will really thrive outside government. Multinational investment in R&D in India has grown sharply since the turn of the millennium, and companies like Unilever are leading a trend to focus this resource on affordable products and services. Venture capital investments crucial to developing and scaling innovations have quadrupled since 2005, and bounced back strongly after the financial crisis. Taken together, these suggest that the future for innovation that is both frugal and sustainable could be very bright.

Frugal cash: Vortex’s solar powered ATM

What works in India can work for the world

Ian Thornton is a former Research Associate at Nesta, where he researched and wrote ‘Our frugal future: lessons from India’s innovation system’ with Kirsten Bound. He is now Deputy Director at the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences.

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The bike, the bag and the matka pot

Bamboo Bambike A pedal-powered innovation hits the road A backstreet garage in Bangalore may not be the most obvious place for a design revolution, but that is what furniture designer Vijay Sharma seems to be pulling off. He was familiar with bamboo, and had also dabbled in making recumbent tricycles.

But it was when a friend suggested putting the two together that the real innovation happened. “I knew that bamboo is as strong and sturdy as steel”, says Sharma, so he started experimenting with making an all-bamboo bike frame.

It took three years of trial and error to hit on the ideal design. Early versions suffered from a ‘fishtail’ effect at high speeds, causing the bike to sway alarmingly. “It was an uncomfortable and rather scary feeling”, Sharma recalls. The solution was to reduce the frame’s weight while increasing the tube’s diameter. Sharma refined the design after testing it on the Nilgiris Hills tour, where he could compare its performance with conventional ones ridden by hardened cyclists, and get their feedback.

The ‘Bambike’, as it’s inevitably called, retails for around INR45,000 – compared to INR25,000-30,000 for a conventional cycle.

That means it’s still something of a niche market,

Sapna Gopal celebrates three rising businesses which sum up the spirit of frugal innovation.

Roads to recovery Plastic bag ban triggers innovative asphalt

Sapna Gopal is a Hyderabad-based journalist specialising in energy and environmental issues.

Sourcing the surface

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I knew that bamboo is as strong as steel

Potters’ progress

Compost revival sprouts a new industry

Photos: Annapindi Ramesh

Since plastic has a tendency to act as a binding agent, it increases the ability of bitumen to hold together, even at higher temperatures. (Plastic melts at 130-140°C degrees, bitumen at half that.) And plastic’s water resistance helps prevent the roads from becoming waterlogged, even in heavy monsoons. This means they have fewer potholes, so need repairing less frequently than normal surfaces. All this makes the additional 3% construction cost a wise investment.

Thanks to the backing of Karnataka’s Chief Minister, SM Krishna, the brothers were able to resurface a (highly symbolic) 500m stretch of road outside the Rajarajeshwari Nagar Gate, and have since covered 1,500km of the state’s roads, using 5,000 tonnes of plastic in the process which would otherwise have gone to landfill – or more likely been burnt.

They’ve also boosted the livelihood of traditional kabaadiwalas (waste collectors) and rag pickers, who are paid INR6/kilo for the waste. “People in apartments and schools in Bangalore even give us things like biscuit packet wrappers and milk packet covers”, adds Rasool Khan. “They like the idea that what was rubbish ends up in the road.”

Rasool is a strong opponent of banning plastic bags. “It’s just eyewash. It won’t be enforced”, he insists. Instead, he advocates collecting plastic from people’s doorsteps on a contract basis. This will not only help in the safe disposal of these bags but will also give companies like his the raw material to lay roads successfully. “If the Government takes the initiative, the problem of disposing plastics can be solved in no time.

Banning [all] bags is definitely not a solution.”

Photo: KK Plastic Waste Management

People give us their plastic waste – they like the idea that it ends up building their roads

Being environmental entrepreneurs was never on the minds of brothers Rasool and Ahmed Khan: they were content running their plastic bag business. Until, that is, a possible ban on plastic bags in Karnataka compelled them to do a rethink. Instead of shutting up shop, they scouted around for viable alternatives.

Intrigued by stories of plastic being used as a constituent of road tar, they began to experiment.

With advice from experts at Bangalore University, they started with pothole repair, using a mix of plastic, tar, stones and aggregate. The results were encouraging: the holes stayed filled. Soon their company, now reborn as KK Plastic Waste Management, had won the backing of the Central Roads Research Institute in Delhi, and a patent, too.

The process works like this. Plastic bags are shredded, stored for a week to remove moisture, then mixed with asphalt to produce a tough polymerised compound. The resultant substance is stronger than conventional road surfaces, and lasts twice as long (around six years rather than the conventional three) before starting to degrade.

albeit one with a growing appeal to European and American customers, who enjoy the distinctly ‘natural’ look and feel. As Sharma points out, “the frame is completely handmade and so each bike looks a bit different from the other”. It’s still an artisanal process, but in theory at least, mass manufacture would be possible – in which case this could be a very viable business indeed. And, given the relatively high energy costs of steel manufacture, a pretty sustainable one, too.

Take two problems facing modern India: the mounting volumes of food waste and the decline of traditional crafts. Put them together, and create one big, sustainable business opportunity. That’s the thinking employed by Poonam Bir Kasturi and her mischievously named venture, ‘Daily Dump’.

It began when she started using matka, simple traditional earthen pots, to convert her kitchen waste to compost, rather than simply throwing it out, as is the usual way in urban India. Family and friends were impressed, so she started exploring how to finesse designs to make composting as simple and effective as possible. She worked directly with artisan potters to develop the three-tier design, and soon her pots were selling across India, thanks in part to some slick marketing using the latest in social media. A witty website uses cartoons to dispel people’s typical objections to composting (“It’ll take too much time...”, “My kitchen will smell...”). Enough have been persuaded that sales have now reached 12,000, with pots sourced from Shillong in the north to Pondicherry in the south.

Interest from overseas, including America, led Kasturi to consider exporting – “but the whole idea is to encourage local employment for potters”.

So instead she set up a so-called ‘clone licence’: effectively a franchising system. In return for a licence fee, the clone company gets detailed

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drawings and technical support, and is able to manufacture and sell the composters locally as certified ‘Daily Dump’ products. So far, clones have been set up in the US, Chile, Brazil and Malaysia.

The core company remains small – just six full-time staff and half a dozen consultants – but many more are involved in clone businesses or as potters.

Kasturi’s particularly proud of her part in reviving the prospects for the country’s potters, who have been hit hard by the transition from clay to plastic for items such as disposable drinking cups. Providing an expanding market for their work is vital to ensure the sector’s survival, Kasturi explains, otherwise “the children of potters do not want to become potters themselves”. And if the tradition dies, then there will be no alternative to greater use of plastics.

She’s now planning to build a ‘production-cumtourism’ space for potters in Palamaner, Andhra Pradesh – conveniently placed on the BangaloreChennai highway. “Most importantly, this will be owned and run by the potters themselves.”

Clones have been set up in the US, Brazil and Malaysia

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“ Sustainable innovation is everywhere – it is just not seen as such”

“ Minds on the margin are not marginal minds”

India must play to its strengths, argues Prodipto Ghosh.

Out of India…

Jugaad could be a commodity ripe for export.

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Innovation can spring from the margins as well as the centre. Take the example of a bamboo windmill which was developed by two Muslim farmers in north-east India. It cost around $100 and was originally used to pump water from a small padi field.

Now it’s been adopted by Gujarati salt workers, who are some of the poorest people in the state, to pump brine water. This is a task which they used to accomplish with counterfeit diesel engines burning huge amounts of fuel, at a cost of around $1,000 each year. But now they’ve adapted the windmill to make it more powerful and suitable for the work, and it has transformed their lives. It costs around $1,200, and does the job much better.

“You can scale up the kabaadi system to industrial levels” It is a system which extends all the way up to the ship breaking yards at Alang [in Gujarat]. In the market there you can buy anything from a ship’s refrigerator to a 500kW generator. A significant quantity of India’s steel requirements come from there, which is a much less energy-intensive way of sourcing them than making steel from iron ore, limestone and coke. Everything of value is recovered. Sure, there have been concerns about working conditions, but they can and should be fully addressed. It is the most efficient and sustainable way of disposing of ships, so it serves a function not just for India but the world.

“The beauty of it is simplicity in design” Our formal training constrains our minds; it makes us eliminate certain frugal choices which are actually very useful and sustainable. For example, most windmills have gearboxes, because we are conditioned to believe that maximising output for a range of time is something everyone must do.

This one does not, because it doesn’t matter how fast or slow the water comes out. If it takes two days instead of one, it is not a problem. And the gearbox is the part which usually needs the most maintenance.

“If you want innovation, harness tradition” Even though India is building up its infrastructure, it remains for now a relatively resource-efficient economy, and much of this has to do with the presence of these traditional practices. If we really want sustainable innovation, we need to harness these practices and adapt them, rather than consign them to history.

Prodipto Ghosh is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, and a Distinguished Fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute.

Interview by Martin Wright.

“Frugal engineering is about getting more out of every single gram of material”, says Ramesh Mashelkar. “That is not taught in Western society.” A different kind of mindset is needed. Thus, Davy Hwang and engineers at GE Bangalore created an ECG machine at one-sixth of the usual cost by stripping out all unnecessary parts and modifying a bus ticket printer to keep development costs down.

For Kannan of Vortex Engineering, part of the mindset involves freeing yourself from

what has gone before. “Ignorance is bliss, as they say – but in a good way! So I chose not to look at conventional [ATM] machines.

If I did so and thought, where can I save energy, materials and so on, then I’d maybe have come up with something 20% better [in terms of energy use]. I wanted [mine] to be ten times better.” His lesson to other innovators? “Don’t assume that the features are needed just because they are built like that elsewhere.”

Independent Indian innovation consultant Arati Davis – while finding the

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Photo: Honey Bee Team

“Indian culture is inherently resource efficient” There is a TV advertisement showing an Indian family on a tour of an aerospace museum in the US. The guide tells them all about the spaceship, which can go out to the farthest reaches of the solar system. Then he asks if there are any questions.

And the Indian father immediately responds: “Yes. How many miles does it do to the gallon?”

Look at the kabaadiwalas [dealers in scrap and junk]. Every month, one will come to your doorstep and buy anything that is potentially reusable or recyclable: all your accumulated newspapers, bottles, plastic bags, tin cans, old shoes, tyres, plastic, utensils, your old TV sets, your old computers… And since every household is paid for it, it is worth their while to segregate everything.

So we have a fairly sophisticated system of waste recovery built into our culture.

Typically, if you go to an Indian appliance store to buy a new refrigerator, the shopkeeper will ask you if you have an old one to sell in return. What happens to the old refrigerator? It is not stripped for

its metal. It is refurbished, repaired, repainted and it goes to a market of unbranded generic refrigerators which are available for a third of a price of a new branded model. So the cradle-to-grave life of an average Indian refrigerator is about 20 years, far greater than in the West.

Photo: TERI

A typical sight in Delhi is a small rickshaw piled high with tin cans, being pedalled across town. Now a load that size anywhere else in the world would go by a small truck. But you don’t need a truck for this load, because these cans are empty. So this rickshaw represents a very intelligent, efficient use of labour and energy.

Then you see a slightly larger rickshaw and it’s carrying bags of cement and bricks. This is much more than the rickshaw’s been designed to carry, and it’s beyond the strength of one person to pedal. Elsewhere, again, it would normally go by truck. But here people have taken the backside of a motor scooter and bolted it on to the rickshaw. And now you have a 100cc engine doing the work of a 2000cc truck. This is frugal innovation in action.

Anil Gupta argues that we overlook the small scale at our peril. are at least expressing interest in designs from the margins – like the manually powered wheelchair which can climb stairs.

“Scale is not necessarily the Holy Grail” There is increasingly an argument that, unless you can scale up an innovation, it has no legitimacy. This ignores the fact that some innovations, especially those which help marginal communities, may remain in a niche – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value. Imagine [rather] a future which combines a much more decentralised model of production and consumption, but using the best of modern technology and communications. You could have open-source content available for downloading from 150,000 rural post offices across the country, and see the ingenuity of minds at the margin at work as a result.

Professor Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad is Executive Vice Chair of the National Innovation Foundation and founder of the Honeybee Network. Interview by Martin Wright.

“The mainstream can learn from the margins” All the talk now is of ‘customer connect’, ‘userdriven innovation’, ‘co-creation’, and all that. But really very little of this is actually happening. Instead, [mainstream actors] tend to go to communities with a worked-out design, and say, ‘can you help us improve it slightly?’

They don’t say, ‘do you have a design which we could help you improve?’ But there are signs this is starting to change. Some companies, such as GE,

‘frugal’ tag somewhat patronising – believes that smart companies are already cottoning on, seeing the country as a template for the majority economy. “GE realised that what works in India can work for the world.

That’s why you see the ECG machine – developed for Indian villages – being sold in the US. So if you want to innovate, you don’t do it in the US, or the UK [with their relatively specialised markets]”, says Davis. “If you design it here, you can sell it anywhere. People are realising India is no longer an outpost market; you need to live

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life here as much as possible.”

International partnerships are a clear way for non-Indians to learn the frugal innovation mindset. Under CEO Carlos Ghosn, Nissan-Renault has embraced the idea, and dispatches key staff to understand and learn from emerging economies. In medical technology, innovators on the prestigious Stanford India Biodesign programme spend half their time in a hospital in Delhi and half in California.

This model seems to work: the ‘Jaipur Knee’ is a $20 prosthetic joint developed

by the 2008 team in just 20 weeks, which has since been fitted to thousands of India’s million-plus above-knee amputees.

Other models to promote transnational learning exist, from formal government funded collaborative R&D programmes, to the Dishaa Initiative, which brings together future leaders in the UK and India around common challenges. But, as yet, there is no Stanford India Biodesign equivalent for environmental sustainability. That’s surely an opportunity waiting to be seized.

– IT and MW

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Can business find the sweet spot?

Kicking out the kickbacks Corruption and weak governance are stymying innovation, says Mahima Kaul – but change is in the air.

India faces two major, systemic challenges: entrenched, pervasive corruption and irresponsible governance. Time and again, these familiar roadblocks have stopped businesses, NGOs and even politicians from bringing new ideas into an inefficient system.

The consequences can be devastating.

A refusal to pay bribes can mean innovative solutions which could improve people’s basic living conditions never reach them.

Then there’s the question of capacity within government, particularly at the more junior, operational level. There is almost no real education given to government officers as to why they need to encourage newer, disruptive technologies. Even if there’s no corruption, it can mean the cheapest tender gets the contract, rather than the sustainable alternative offering better long-term value.

One of the ways in which the government is trying to tackle both corruption and the lack of capacity within its ranks is to integrate ICT platforms into

basic government processes. This has injected a welcome degree of transparency.

For example, it’s possible to track the progress of tenders through sites such as www.tenders.gov.in. Meanwhile, activists can expose decisions as to why certain companies are given contracts over others through using the Right to Information

Act. Wielding new governance tools such as these could help India’s citizens start to translate the concept of sustainable development into a reality.

Leading Indian companies increasingly identify sustainability as a business opportunity, rather than just a social duty – and that’s encouraging some to revel in ‘unreasonable goals’, discovers Martin Wright.

Mahima Kaul is a New Delhi-based journalist specialising in governance and development issues, particularly digital inclusion.

“I paid a bribe…”

Imagine publicly confessing to bribing an official. Thousands of Indians are doing just that via a provocative website, Ipaidabribe.com, which shines a public spotlight on everything from petty police extortion to large-scale corruption. They’re joined by disgruntled current or former government officials, who give tips on how to avoid having to make a bribe.

(There’s a section headed “I didn’t pay a bribe”, too.) “Do you think corruption is corroding the country?”, asks the site. “Your data will help change the system.”

“It’s a great example of a new kind of democracy and public participation”, says Ligia Noronha, Executive Director at The Energy and Resources Institute. “This sort of approach can produce a real shift in people’s attitudes.”

If innovation’s the sexy face of sustainability, then efficiency is the boring flip side. But it often drives the shinier stuff. When all resources are at a premium, says Samir Saran, former Vice-President of Reliance and now senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, then innovation is essential for any business seeking to survive. “It’s not so much a case of ‘frugal innovation’, more that frugal is innovation. The companies that are unable to be frugal in their consumption of resources … will be companies unable to compete.”

Viraal Balsari, an independent consultant on energy and environment, agrees. “Sustainability in an Indian context is essentially about efficiency: human efficiency, resource efficiency and, above all, cost efficiency. Indian companies are now terrified about costs, and very keen to manage them. So if you go and say, ‘This is your investment, this is your payback time, this is how much your costs will come down’, they understand that. Then you’re getting down to brass tacks.”

It has an obvious appeal. When Asian Paints succeeded in eliminating all liquid waste, Chief Strategy Officer Manish Choksi said simply: “It’s no longer an economic burden.”

“Over the last few years, the economics has evolved as resource prices have risen”, comments Vishwesh Palekar, Senior Vice President for Innovation at Mahindra & Mahindra. “So all sorts of

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assistance often doesn’t reach the people for whom it’s intended.”

So given government’s track record, what hope is there for its much trumpeted Decade of Innovation? Sam Pitroda, who as a telecoms tycoon and later policy adviser did much to shape India’s communications revolution, is cautiously optimistic. Speaking at a conference in Delhi in October in his new role as Chairman of the National Innovation Council, he says its formation is evidence that there is “a political will to drive innovation in all walks of life”.

He talks of creating an “ecosystem for innovation”, linking venture capitalists with the best brains in universities and the country’s network of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and strengthening intellectual property protection to incentivise innovators.

The key, he says, is to work with India’s industrial clusters such as auto parts, food processing, brassware, bamboo textiles and leather. “We need to go into those clusters and seed innovations; link them with banks, universities, R&D labs. The Council’s already taken on some pilot projects. “Take the food-processing cluster.

The mango has a shelf life of around five days. We found ways to increase that to 35 days, so now it can be shipped to Europe … A little bit of innovation can mean a substantial change in income.”

At TERI, Industrial Energy Efficiency Director Girish Sethi is working on similar principles: bringing together the glassware manufacturers of Firozabad, near Agra, who are famous across India for their bangles, to work on designs for more efficient furnaces.

Pitroda wants to see a ‘national knowledge network’, with optical fibre links between universities, industrial clusters, libraries and more. He talks enthusiastically of its potential to crowdsource bright ideas.

But there’s no mistaking the scale of the challenge, he concludes. “We have a 19th-century mindset; 20th-century processes; and 21st-century needs. We have a tremendous amount of young talent, but we also have the largest numbers of poor in the world. The best brains in the world are busy solving the problems of the rich, who really don’t have problems at all … We need to refocus that talent on the needs of the poor.” - MW

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Making light of sustainability: Infosys’s new campus does away with the need for artificial light.

Photo: Infosys

“India has always been highly innovative”, says Saurabh Srivastava, the IT entrepreneur and venture capitalist who has been charged with spearheading a new $1 billion Inclusive Innovation Fund under the remit of the National Innovation Council. He pauses for effect before adding, “except for the last 300 years.”

Historically, Indian governments have not made great innovators. “Back in the 17th century, India used to account for 25% of global GDP. Then we had the Raj, and then we had the Licence Raj [the few decades leading up to economic reform in the 1990s, when bureaucracy stifled business]. Imagine if mobile phones had been around then. They would have cost $1,000, and had a 10-year waiting list!”

The remit of the Inclusive Innovation Fund is to harness the dynamism of venture capital to address the needs of the poor. “There has been too much focus on philanthropy and on government grants and subsidies”, says Srivastava. “Both are inadequate and inefficient. You can’t depend on philanthropy because when the money stops (as sooner or later it does), the good work stops too. And government

Photo: Mahima Kaul

Government: help or hindrance?

investments [which might have had a philanthropic basis] – whether it’s water conservation or renewable energy – become a firm business proposition, with a sustainability theme.” As an aside, Mahindra is just launching its first electric sedan car, the Reva E2O: a ‘business proposition’ which Palekar admits is also a “leap of faith”.

But cautious resource management isn’t the whole story (which is just as well, or it could get quite boring). Sometimes sustainable innovation pursued, if not for its own sake exactly, but with a fearless commitment to what Rohan Parikh, Head of Green Innovation at Infosys, terms “unreasonable goals”, can produce surprising results.

When the company decided to eliminate artificial lighting during daytime, he says, they discovered that, “We not only saved electricity; we saved on the heating load, so we reduced the size of our chillers, and therefore we reduced the size of our transformers and the size of our diesel generator sets.” And it didn’t end there. Maximum daylight meant huge window spaces with wide-open views of sky and trees, so the workforce was happier and more productive too.

Engaging staff in sustainable endeavours reaps its own rewards, adds Parikh, citing a neat gizmo which sends a text alert to let you know you’ve been away from your computer for half an hour and left the power on. “It’s much more effective than just badgering them about efficiency”, he says.

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Women lead, men follow Over the last decade, over 45,000 women have been enrolled as shakti ammas (which means ‘powerful mothers’), selling Unilever products such as soap and shampoo around their home villages. The ammas receive training in how to run a small business, and some are taught how to give basic health and hygiene education, too.

Now the ammas are being joined by men: around 30,000 shaktimaan, usually husbands or brothers of an amma, are being given bicycles so that they can travel around nearby villages, selling Unilever products to stallholders. “Effectively, we’re creating family enterprises. It means we double our market reach, and the family doubles their income”, says Unilever’s Meeta Singh.

Several pilot schemes are exploring other possibilities, including helping villagers open bank accounts and selling telecom services.

In the ten years that the project has been running, technology has transformed it. Where once a van toured round the villages with replenishment stock which may or may not have been needed, now growing numbers of shakti entrepreneurs use their mobiles to order precise quantities of what they need via a simple app. As Singh puts it: “The spread of mobile coverage in rural areas has made so many things possible: you may not have a decent road, you may not even have water, but you’ll have a network connection.” – MW

Photos: Creatas / thinkstock

Selling shakti: one of the ammas at work in the village

Setting “big, bold, hairy, ambitious goals”, as Gaurang Pandya, MD of Carrier India (one of Infosys’s partners in its cooling research – see p28) is a great way of motivating people internally. Whether driven by concern over resources or not, leading Indian companies are developing a taste for bold and hairy.

Johnson Matthey aims to halve its environmental footprint per unit produced by 2017, from a 2007 baseline. Alcatel Lucent’s going even further. “The single biggest operating expense for our sector is the power it takes to run telecoms networks”, explains Arun Seth, its India Chairman. “So we’ve created a consortium of 60 members from around the world, with the aim of completely redesigning the infrastructure to bring down the energy use of telecoms technology companies by 1,000 times.”

Which you have to admit is a seriously bold goal.

Collaborations such as this are an increasing feature among Indian innovators – and necessarily so, believes Vivek Sharma, Ventures Technology Manager at BP India. “There are too many people working alone”, he says. “There are big structural gaps in the way industry is set up: so academic researchers operate in isolation, business operates in isolation.

There’s no Indian equivalent of a Silicon Valley”, where businesses come together in a bubbling ferment of bright ideas. Ligia Noronha, Executive Director of TERI, agrees: “The worst thing for innovation is people not talking to each other – not connecting to

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each other. You have to instil a collaborative culture.”

Partly in response to this thinking, BP is launching a new $100 million venture fund focused on cleantech and applied innovation, which will be incubated at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

“This appetite for collaboration is really encouraging”, says Dhananjay Tapasvi, MD of Johnson Matthey Catalysts. “There’s a danger in just having atomised, isolated innovation stories. There are so many exciting things happening, and across so many sectors. And not just blue sky thinking, either: this is near-term stuff. It’s amazing to think where this could go!”

It’s all a far cry from what could be described as the comparatively sober, ‘traditional’ Indian corporate approach to sustainability, rooted in a long tradition of philanthropy. It’s a tradition which has been absorbed smoothly into the relatively recent concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

But a philanthropic approach to sustainability doesn’t sit comfortably with the growing number of Indian business leaders who prefer to see new approaches and solutions as an opportunity, not an obligation. And moreover, an opportunity which can deliver social goods at least as effectively as charity, if not more so…

As Meeta Singh, General Manager of Sustainability at Unilever, India, puts it: “If communities fail, then business cannot thrive.

That’s why there’s a link between business and development.”

“Take our work on water”, continues Singh [see p24]. “If people have a decent water supply, they can produce more crops, be more prosperous, and that means they can afford to buy more of our products. If there’s food or water insecurity, people won’t have the money to spend on one of our creams. It’s the same thinking with the shakti ammas project [which trains village women as sales entrepreneurs; see panel, ‘Women lead, men follow’]. We wanted to reach new markets for our products, in areas beyond the range of traditional retail outlets. And we found that the best way we could do so was one which also financially empowered rural women. It put money directly in their pockets, which we know they use for food and their kids’ education.”

In some ways, it’s a model closer to social entrepreneurship, without any softening of clear business goals. Sachin Joshi, Director of the Confederation of Indian Industry, cites the example of Jain Irrigation. Its success is built on building close relationships with the farmers (many of them far from prosperous) who constitute its customer base, he explains. “Jain were willing to talk to each farmer, to find out exactly what they needed, which crops they were growing and when, what size their fields were, the soil composition and so on – and then design a solution specifically for them.”

Getting to know the customer meant getting to see other opportunities, too, Joshi continues. “They realised the seeds the farmers were using weren’t the best quality, so they started supplying improved ones.

And then they found out the farmers weren’t getting the best deal for their produce, so they went into food processing … And it was all based on pure business logic. If the farmer’s income increases, then Jain’s income increases. So the company is very clear: they

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will not get into a business unless it increases the incomes of the people in the value chain by, say, two or three times. And that’s how Jain has become such a successful company.”

There are echoes of this in a new initiative from YES Bank, which allows rural migrants to transfer money home via small shops, rather than queue for hours at one of the few bank branches which deal in such remittances. It’s proved very popular: over 300,000 users have now remitted INR5 billion through the system. “People were wasting half a day standing in a queue”, says YES’s President of Responsible Banking, Namita Vikas, adding, only half-jokingly: “We knew that, where there’s a queue, there’s a pain – and where there’s a pain, there must be a demand to alleviate it – and that’s a business opportunity!”

“It’s all about finding the sweet spot between ‘doing good’ and ‘doing well’”, says Meeta Singh.

“The [Government’s] 2% rule [which stipulates that businesses of a certain size must donate 2% of their profits for charitable work] is missing the point. It has to be about the whole 100%. That’s the only way to make sure you really have a positive, lasting social impact.”

“So the only purely charitable work we do is disaster relief: everything else is tied in with our business. If it’s not about building the business, we won’t touch it. And that, I am convinced, is the best way in which we can do good.”

All smiles at the spreadsheets: time and again, sustainability cuts costs.

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Talk the talk With a few exceptions, global brands are shy of plugging their eco-credentials to India’s consumers. But with sustainability rooted deep in the country’s cultural heritage, says Ella Saltmarshe, this could be an opportunity missed.

Seen one, seen ‘em all: no new city’s complete without a suite of near identical malls – a badge of prosperity for modern India.

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Photo: Infocus.

according to National Geographic’s 2012 Greendex.

Could cool marketing help reclaim the old ways?

A handful of brands are trying to do just that: notably, Nokia India’s comprehensive phone-recycling campaign, with workshops in 2,500 schools, awareness-raising in 3,000 small mobile stores, and an award-winning viral video campaign showing toasters vibrating, lights with ring tones and washing machines receiving text messages.

Most, though, still fight shy of the S-word. Take green leader Marks and Spencer (M&S). It has already built two pioneering sustainable stores in India and revolutionised its supply chain, with plans to expand its sourcing of Indian cotton 12-fold over the next three years. But when it comes to point of sale in the country’s stores, M&S is surprisingly coy about trumpeting its (considerable) eco-credentials.

Mike Barry, head of its sustainability programme, Plan A, argues that it’s important not to confuse consumers when entering a new market. So in India, M&S focuses on a core message of quality and keeps its trailblazing sustainability work backstage. “We were working on Plan A for at least ten years before

Photo: Amit Bhargava/Corbis

The last thing we Indians voluntarily threw out was the British

For most Indians, sustainability is not just a matter of academic debate. Farmers struggle to conserve enough water to survive. Young commuters ride scooters through the worst air pollution in the world. Executives manage businesses amid soaring electricity prices and unreliable supply.

And it wasn’t so long ago that most Indians had daily habits which were object lessons in the art: returning glass bottles after use, buying unpackaged vegetables from stallholders on the street, and recycling liberally. As consumer behaviour expert Rama Bijapurkar joked in a 2009 interview, “The last thing we Indians voluntarily threw out was the British.”

So it’s ironic that, while growing numbers of consumers in the West flock to farmers’ markets and host ‘swishing’ parties to swap old clothes, big brands in India are pushing shoppers in the opposite direction: to swap street stalls for supermarkets, soap for highly packaged shower gel, and scooters for sedans. In the last two years, the number of consumers who are choosing to buy second hand goods is down 41%, those opting to repair items rather than buy new is down 16%, and recycling levels are down 20%,

aggressively positioning it in the UK. In India it’s not going to happen this week, or next week, or even in a year’s time.” Only when the brand has built local trust and the company feels the market is ready will M&S begin a sustainability conversation with Indian consumers, he adds.

Understanding why ethical brands shy away from ethical branding involves understanding the country’s consumer landscape. On the one hand there’s the 69% of the population that lives on $2 or less per day; on the other, there’s the upper and middle classes, numbering between 100 and 200 million (depending on how they’re defined) – and growing. With only a few notable exceptions, sustainability is absent from brand communications to each class – albeit for very different reasons.

For the poor, argues Agnello Dias, co-founder of Taproot India and one of Asia’s top advertising creatives, “Sustainability is obviously going to be low priority. If I’m struggling to keep my head above water, the last thing I want to be told is my backstroke is not correct: I just want to float.”

When it comes to the middle class, companies are waiting until the heady rush of newfound consumerism subsides. “India is a young economy,” says Piyush Pandey, Executive Chairman of Ogilvy & Mathur India. “People seem to be quite satisfied just being able to consume, rather than looking at the higher order benefits.”

Yet it seems there is at least one sweet spot that’s good for cost-conscious shoppers and the environment. Enter Dr Ajay Mathur, India’s Energy Czar, who has recently finished his six-year stint at the helm of the Government’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE). Mathur’s challenge was massive: to try to decouple energy consumption from India’s booming consumerism. Take air conditioners (ACs): once too expensive for the masses, they now account for 40% of Mumbai’s surging electricity use. When Mathur started, manufacturers said that he was on a “wild goose chase”. The Indian consumer, they told him, would not pay more for energy-efficient products.

Mathur quickly proved them wrong. He launched an efficiency standard and labelling scheme for household appliances, and within 18 months, 50% of all AC units and 75% of all refrigerators were labelled, despite the scheme being voluntary. Consumers were willing to pay more for an energy-efficient product – provided it recouped the costs within two to three years. BEE teamed up with manufacturers to launch an outreach programme for shop floor sales teams, and even developed the ACSaver app to help the consumer calculate cost savings. By 2011, the average efficiency of AC units sold had increased by 20%. “The vast numbers of appliances in India are bought by people who are first time users [or near enough]”, Mathur explains. “So, value effectiveness is an important proposition.”

But what about those with cash to blow? Why is there little talk of sustainability aimed at the 5% of Indian households that account for 38% of its total wealth? It’s not completely absent: ‘green living’ figures widely in adverts for swish new housing developments, for example, but often means little more than a view of the park. Could the answer be as simple as conspicuous consumption? Rajiv Mehta, MD India of sportswear retailer PUMA, thinks this

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could play a part. “Most of the wealth is very recent, so people want to show they have arrived.”

This may explain the relatively weak performance of Tata’s no frills Nano – the ‘one lakh car’ (priced initially at INR100,000, hence the name) which would bring motoring within the reach of families reliant on scooters. Prodipto Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute, hails the Nano as an admirable triumph of frugal engineering, which was let down by “a marketing disaster”. He explains: “When an Indian family moves up from a scooter to a car, they want to show the world that they are now people to contend with. Tata’s mistake was pitching this as the cheapest car in the world. Because if you graduate from a scooter to the cheapest car in the world you’re not exactly demonstrating that you’ve made it large in life.”

Rajiv Mehta is nonetheless trying to put sustainability on the upper class agenda. PUMA’s new high-profile sustainable store in Bangalore is 100% solar powered, with a geothermal cooling system, bamboo floors and a recycled steel façade.

And PUMA is starting to talk the talk, as well as walk the walk. Guests pedal-powered the shop’s launch party, generating electricity from stationary bikes.

Inside the store, thought bubbles inform shoppers about the importance of fair trade and organic cotton, while consumers take their shoes home in one of PUMA’s iconic ‘clever little bags’; an award winning eco-alternative to the traditional shoe box. But Mehta is clear this is only the start. “One store is not enough.

We need to do it with 20 across India,” he asserts. “In fact, developers should take a cue from us, and build a completely sustainable mall.”

To which he adds a note of caution: “Consumers feel that if we talk too much about sustainability, it means we are going to charge them more.”

Solar flagship: PUMA’s Bangalore store pins its colours to the mast.

If I’m struggling to keep my head above water, the last thing I want to be told is my backstroke is not correct

Ella Saltmarshe is a writer and communications strategist who splits her time between South Asia and Europe.

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Mapping the future

1 Greenhouse effect

hakti cleans up 2 S

In the high valleys of Ladakh, farmers grow greens through the coldest of winters thanks to greenhouses made of earth, straw and UV-resistant polythene, boosting their health and their income, and avoiding air miles, too [see p5].

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Women entrepreneurs trained in everything from shampoo sales to hygiene are helping Unilever find rich pickings at the bottom of the pyramid, and giving themselves a decent quality of life as they do so [see p12].

India is alive with innovation in action 4 Magic bus While most Indian commuters tap their fingers with impatience on the steering wheel, or stare hapless out of a stuck bus, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s commercial capital, traffic is flowing more freely than it has for years, thanks to an efficient new rapid transit network [see p29].

3 Sparks from a husk

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Burning rice husks and other crop waste to generate electricity is lighting up prospects for homes and markets in one of the poorest parts of India – and producing three-phase power which can drive machine tools, too [see p19].

4 6

5

5 Sunshine state

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8 8 Light emerging

9 Primary Puma

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Sportswear specialist Puma is first out of the blocks in the race for greener retail with the opening of its sustainable store in downtown Bangalore [see p15].

Photos: xxxxx

High in the Western Ghats, tens of thousands of remote rural farms are starting to enjoy urban comforts, thanks to a combination of solar, biogas and micro hydro power [see p19].

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6 Tiger energy

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Threatened by rising seas, salty soil and tigers alike, the people of the Sundarbans are looking to clean energy to help boost their resilience in uncertain times. The tigers stand to gain as well [see p30].

7 Cool past, cool future

Photos: Martin Wright; Stockbyte/Thinkstock; American Centre Mumbai; Mahindra

Like much of the country, Gujarat basks in over 300 days of sunshine a year.

But, unlike most of India, it’s starting to harvest it to the full, with large-scale solar power stations springing up, and canals ‘roofed’ with PV panels [see p18].

IT giant Infosys has drawn on ancient architectural practices to transform its new sites into cool campuses, in every sense, leading to major cost savings and a more comfortable workforce [see p28].

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Smaller grids, smarter grids

of Patna, the state capital. Until recently, there was no electricity to speak of – despite it being officially connected to the grid. At night on the fringe of the village, the Milky Way still shines out clear against the blackness, the brightest stars fiercely white, undimmed by the slightest hint of skyglow. To an outsider on a brief visit, the lack of power makes it look charming and romantic. For villagers like Hemanti Devi, bringing up her three daughters alone, it looks like hard work.

Last year, she was connected to Husk’s newly installed grid, and she’s clearly still excited by the difference it’s made – as are her daughters. Instead of peering at their homework under the smoky flicker of a kerosene lamp, they can read without strain by electric light. They don’t have to go to the market to charge their mobiles, and can gossip with their brothers, away working on building sites in Varanasi. “I can see properly to do the cooking now”, says Hemanti, “and my eyes don’t water from the kerosene smoke.”

Best of all, she’s saving money. Husk – which operates on essentially commercial terms – charges her INR150 a month – compared with the INR250 or so which she was spending on kerosene. It’s a similar story in the market, where café owner Manoj Kumar can stay open several hours later thanks to the light, boosting his earnings by around a quarter.

One advantage of biomass gasification over standalone solar panels is that it generates more juice: enough to drive basic machine tools, for example.

So the minigrids it powers come closer than most to ‘conventional’ power. The Government’s coming round to the minigrid argument, with the ‘Rajiv Gandhi Rural Electrification Scheme’ exploring a solar-biomass gasification hybrid for Bihar along the lines of Husk’s approach, and possibly with its involvement. Another advantage of having a ‘day’ and ‘night’ source of power is that it’s available for much of any given 24-hour period, while adding to the general resilience of the supply.

Husk is now working on basic solar microgrids,

When the lights and air conditioning across northern India stuttered and went out on one of the hottest nights of the year last summer, it sparked a debate about the future of energy which is still burning today, says Martin Wright.

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The Government’s not oblivious to the issue.

Its ‘National Solar Mission’ aims to make use of the country’s 300 annual average days of sunshine to harvest its prime renewable asset. Gujarat, blessed with wide arid spaces and an ambitious chief minister in the form of the controversial Narendra Modi, is stealing a march. It boasts Asia’s largest solar park, at Patan, with 214MW installed capacity, and expects to have solar power purchase agreements covering a total of 1.3GW by 2013. It’s also embarking on some innovative approaches to solar, including ‘roofing’ some its major irrigation canals with PV panels – at a stroke generating power from ‘spare’ space, while also cutting water loss through evaporation.

But the real excitement around renewables is happening closer to the grass roots, where an array of entrepreneurs is developing decentralised solutions based on solar, biogas, biomass, small-scale hydro and wind.

Some, such as D.Light, are focusing on solar lanterns. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has an entire programme, ‘Light a Billion Lives’, which develops high-quality lanterns for rental at affordable prices, together with a network of thousands of solar charging stations. Others, such as the Karnataka-based NGO, SKDRDP, work with local self-help groups to provide them with a range of clean energy solutions, from solar to biogas, via a carefully constructed micro credit loan system.

A growing number of entrepreneurs are developing local ‘minigrids’. Among them is Husk Power Systems, which uses crop waste, principally rice husks, to generate electricity via a process of biomass gasification. Based in Bihar, India’s ‘darkest’ (that is, least electrified) state, Husk was founded by a local engineer and entrepreneur, Gyanesh Pandey, and now supplies power via village-scale grids to around 35,000 households. “If you can do it in Bihar, you can do it anywhere”, he smiles.

For people marooned far from the mains, technologies such as these are nothing short of life changing. Rampur Sahebganj is a typical Bihari village: a wide swathe of homes, markets and temples in the gently sloping countryside some way north

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Villagers could spray paint their roof to power their home

Electric smiles: Hemanti Devi and her daughters at home in Bihar.

Photos: Martin Wright

Carbon rich, vision poor: children studying by kerosene light at a night school in West Bengal.

“Blackout cuts electricity to 700 million Indians.” So ran one typical headline at the end of July 2012. But it was typically misleading, too. For sure, 700 million people lived in the area affected. But as energy entrepreneur Harish Hande put it, “half of them had never seen a light bulb.”

India’s mains grid is not only failing to deliver to half its population: it’s also failing to keep up with demand. According to McKinsey, by 2017 the country will be facing an energy gap of 25% – and rising.

And given the present balance of power sources, if it did manage to close the gap the climate impact could be disastrous: over 70% of India’s electricity comes from coal.

powering groups of around 40 households from a 300-350W solar supply. That should give each home enough power for LED lighting, a mobile charge point and even a low-wattage TV, in return for a monthly fee of around INR75-100, which is the same or even less than the average household pays out for kerosene.

Such micro-scale power has many benefits. With a radius of just a few hundred metres, transmission losses are virtually non-existent. And with everyone knowing everyone else in the area, the risk of theft – commonplace from the mains – is massively reduced as well.

Many energy entrepreneurs are aiming at this scale too. People like Nikhil Jaisinghani, founder of Mera Gao Power, who is setting up a series of small grids in Uttar Pradesh. “We looked at what people were paying for kerosene lighting and charging their mobiles – around INR120 per month – and then designed a system which could match that.”

TERI itself is working on microgrids, while others, like start-up Gram Oorja, are exploring a system of ‘RESCOs’ (renewable energy service companies), with an ‘anchor customer’, typically a small business already using a diesel generator, helping provide an energy service to their community.

Variations on the theme abound. TERI is planning a biomass-based system in Uttar Pradesh, where the waste heat from the gasifier would power a cold store, while the generator itself feeds up to 150 households, as well as irrigation pumps and commercial operations.

Potentially, such micro- and minigrids could end up being patched into an expanding mains network – an approach favoured by Amit Kumar, Director of the Energy Technology Development Division at TERI. Ashden Award-winner Pandey, by contrast, is not a fan of such integration: “In India, the more sophisticated the approach, the harder it is to manage. It will all get too complicated – my power goes there, your power comes here, and so on.”

So, just how much of India’s power demand could renewables meet? Amit Kumar puts it at around 30%;

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“ For four hundred million Indians, decentralised energy makes sense today”

Sachet solution

The sun in her hands: simple solar lanterns, like this D.Light Kiran, are a portable and affordable alternative to kerosene.

Can you turn one of India’s growing waste problems into an energy source?

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Selling small quantities of products like shampoo in tiny sachets for a few rupees each is one way of bringing them within reach of the poor. But what happens to the sachets when the product’s finished? A few decades ago, waste was virtually unknown in villages. Now, litter, especially discarded packs and wrappers, is an all too common sight. As one of the companies which has gone down the ‘small is affordable’ route, Unilever has drawn its share of flak.

Surely it would be simpler just to sell small quantities from a bulk dispenser? “We have actually developed a machine for refill options”, responds Meeta Singh, “but we’re concerned about tampering, which is a big issue in India.

There is so much contamination, and we cannot risk people losing trust in our products. So, for the moment we’ve parked it.”

Instead the company’s embarking on an ambitious waste recovery programme. “We’re looking at ways of collecting the spent sachets, and using pyrolysis to produce oil which can serve as a diesel substitute. Eventually this could be extended to all our flexible packaging.”

Meanwhile, they’ve launched a pilot with Wal-Mart, by which customers bringing in recoverable waste to one of 30 Delhi stores receive an INR5 voucher redeemable against any Unilever product. It’s early days, says Singh, but if the concept works in practice, it could be a solution which could be applied more widely.

“We should be able to process any flexible waste: it’s not as though we’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s one of our competitor’s sachets, we’re not taking that!’ Long term, we want to make sure that all waste has a value: that there’s no such thing as waste at all, basically.” – MW

The Government drew precisely the wrong conclusions from the blackouts [last summer]. It said, effectively, “There are so many power failures that we’ve obviously got to ramp up the mains grid as quickly as possible, and that means more coal and nuclear power.

We haven’t got time to wait for renewables…”

You can’t treat a cancer with a Band-Aid It’s a massive misconception of what’s really needed. It’s like they’re looking for a quick fix: a Band-Aid for cancer. But the best treatment for an unreliable grid isn’t to pour yet more resources into it. More importantly, this isn’t going to reach the 400-500 million people who have never had any electricity.

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Photos: SELCO Solar Light Pvt. Ltd

Spend money on decentralised energy to help the poor up, not fences to keep them out There’s mounting social unsustainability in rural areas: a growing sense of expectation and frustration. Just look at the conflict between the mining companies and tribal people. These companies have three or four fences surrounding their operations, because they don’t know when or whether the tribals will attack. Which is a ridiculous situation to find yourself in! Instead of spending so much money on security, why don’t we create equal opportunities for those people? And decentralised energy can bring those opportunities to their door. People don’t realise the direct impact it can have. For 400 million people, decentralised energy makes economic, environmental and social sense today.

Photos: studiomode/Alamy

Access to energy for all is not something we can’t afford

Gyanesh Pandey plumps for 40%. But he cautions that it would need a lot of things to work unusually well in terms of institutions and governance. “Think of any field of knowledge, and India has the best policies in the world, it has a research centre for it, it’s probably got a government department for it. But when it comes to executing things – that doesn’t always go so smoothly!”

But of all the obstacles, he says, money’s not the biggest. “The Government says there are 120,000 villages which don’t have good power (it’s probably much more, but let’s take its word for it for now).

It would need $5 billion to electrify these 120,000 villages (using a mini-grid model). That’s less than the subsidy to kerosene every year. It’s less than the $6 billion in foreign remittances each year. It’s less than the $6 billion charitable contributions made by Indians in India each year. Access to energy for all”, concludes Pandey, “is not something which we can’t afford.”

Sachin Joshi, Director of the Confederation of Indian Industry, is adamant that decentralised energy is the way forward. “I don’t think the overall energy problem, both in terms of the demand gap and carbon emissions, can be solved if we are still obsessed with huge centralised energy production systems.”

And with new technologies emerging almost daily, there’s scope for some disruptive surprises. Pandey is particularly excited about new ‘quantum dot’ LEDs, which can provide bright light for less than 1W, and ‘organic’ or ‘spray-on solar’, which he’s exploring in partnership with Iowa State University [see GF84, p30]. The aim: to commercialise a system which would ultimately see local villagers buying ‘solar spray cans’ in the market for a few hundred rupees and coating their roof space with low-efficiency photovoltaic ‘paint’, which would be enough to give them basic power. It’s not going to happen in the next few years, but the very fact that it can be seriously mooted symbolises the speed of innovation under way in this fast-moving, most vital sector.

Harish Hande calls for a sea change in government thinking.

You don’t have to be poor…

The middle class can enjoy the benefits of super-efficient hybrid minigrids, whether it’s solarwind, or solar-micro hydro, or biogas or biomass...

They can bring reliable power to people suffering long hours of electricity cuts or voltage fluctuations.

polluting and dangerous kerosene with clean, safe solar.

Second, I’d outlaw inefficient appliances. For example, we have fans rated from one to five stars, and there’s a huge difference between them: from 35W for the most efficient five star model to 80W for the one star. Why allow inefficient ones?

They drain power from the grid, and they can’t be powered by small-scale solar. The efficient ones do the job of keeping you cool just as well…

We need the energy equivalent of the agricultural revolution Over the last few decades, we’ve seen a lot of effort by local technical institutes to create an ‘ecosystem for agriculture’, for example by training and equipping people on everything from repairing water pumps and motor windings through to selling fertilisers, and so on.

Exactly the same revolution needs to take place, through the same network of institutions, for decentralised energy. We need to train people in servicing and repairing solar, pico hydro [ie water power up to 5kW], biogas and biomass installations.

There are 600-plus technical institutes in the rural areas: just think what sort of an ecosystem that could create! Once you have a body of resourceful people out there, trained in these energy technologies, you will have pressure building up to push these products and services out through the villages, and that creates entrepreneurship.

This is how the agriculture revolution took place in the 1970s, which resulted in India achieving self-sufficiency in food. We need to apply the same passion and rigour now to look at our real power requirements and decentralise our energy.

Harish Hande, one of India’s leading energy entrepreneurs, is founder of SELCO, a social enterprise which provides sustainable energy services to the rural poor, and winner of the Ashden Outstanding Achievement Award for Sustainable Energy. Interview by Martin Wright.

One in a billion: TERI’s solar lantern programme aims to bring electric light to villages across India.

Two things I’d do tomorrow to boost sustainable energy First, I’d remove the taxes on solar and other renewables. Taxing renewables while subsidising kerosene completely distorts the market, and discriminates against the poor who want to replace

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Harvest home

The plants beneath your feet

Helping farmers produce more food is vital to India’s future, as is ensuring that current production doesn’t go to waste.

Fields of plenty?

India’s farmers, like this husband and wife team in Karnataka, have to deal with uncertain climate – and policies.

In India, the pursuit of food security isn’t just a lofty political goal: it’s a daily reality for hundreds of millions. And it’s not getting any easier. Raj Ganguly, Agricultural Water Specialist at the International Finance Corporation, sums it up: “We need to produce more food, from less land, for more people.”

Cracking that nut will need a whole range of different tools: some policy, some practical. As with

An innovative use for their crop could transform the prospects of India’s castor bean farmers – while shrinking corporates’ carbon footprint, reports Martin Wright.

other sectors, the present structure of subsidies comes in for a kicking. “Studies show that spending on R&D is nine times as effective as spending on fertiliser subsidies”, says Ashok Gulati, Chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices. “And yet, overall, 80% of public funding for agriculture comes in the form of subsidies, compared to just 20% in investment in new techniques, or in infrastructure like rural roads. So the ‘subsidies to investment’ ratio should be precisely reversed!”

On the practical side, sustainable intensification is on the radar, too. Working directly with farmers to improve food quality and yield is a priority, too [see box]. But there’s no point growing crops if they’re just left to rot. And this is just what happens to a surprisingly large chunk of the Indian harvest: some experts put the figure as high as 35-40%.

The reasons? A significant one is the lack of refrigerated transport to stop the produce spoiling before it gets to market. If there were a thorough ‘farm to fork’ cold chain, the spoilage could be cut to just 5%. “The amount of food that gets wasted is truly shocking”, says Venkatesh Valluri, Chairman of Ingersoll Rand (India).

Spotting the combination of a business opportunity with a clear social need, the company designed a compact low-energy refrigeration unit which can be powered directly from the engine of a small reefer truck suitable for narrow country roads, so covering the ‘first and last mile’ of food distribution. Unlike other refrigerated vehicles, the B100 unit works with the DC supply direct from the alternator, so doesn’t need its own power source. – MW

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Photos: Interface

Tomato sauce is a ubiquitous feature of many Indian dining tables – but few people give much thought as to how the essential ingredient arrives in the bottle. Tomatoes are grown widely in the sub-continent, yet until recently Unilever (which makes the Kissan brand) imported much of its supply. Why? Because uncertainty over quality and availability, along with price volatility, made it impossible to rely on the local crop.

This state of affairs hardly fitted with the company’s Sustainable Living Plan, which aims to source 100% of all agricultural raw materials sustainably by 2020. So Unilever embarked on a new partnership, working with a group of over 500 farmers in the Nasik area of Maharashtra. In return for a range of advice on improving quality and productivity, with tips on using drip irrigation and precise use of pesticides and fertilisers, the farmers undertake to follow sustainable practices, and – assuming the crop meets the right standard – are assured of a purchase deal from Unilever at a guaranteed price.

As part of the programme, which also draws on expertise from Bayer CropSciences, Indus and Syngenta, Unilever identified two seeds which give maximum ‘pulp per kilo’ when processed. Farmers are supplied with these seeds at subsidised cost. The programme is currently in its first year, but, assuming all goes well, says Singh, it should mean increased yields and profits for the farmers, and an assured supply of good-quality tomatoes for the company – all from a demonstrably sustainable source.

(Providing, presumably, a demonstrably sustainable sauce.)

Photo: Martin Wright

Sourcing the sauce

Castor oil may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no reason to grind it under foot.

Or is there? Because that’s what Interface would like you to do.

The company specialises in modular flooring or carpet tiles, which are typically made out of nylon – in other words, petroleum. But Interface, which has a long track record of looking for more sustainable approaches, is keen to find alternatives. Indeed, it’s committed itself to making all its products free from virgin petroleum by 2020. That’s one of the targets of its groundbreaking and highly ambitious ‘Mission Zero’ vision to eliminate all “negative impacts” on the environment by that date.

It’s a search which has led it to explore, with some success, solutions ranging from recycled fishing nets to commissioning artisan women weavers in Tamil Nadu to fashion exclusive products out of finely woven strands of locally sourced materials, such as river grass, banana bark and cotton [see GF special edition, ‘Monsoons and Miracles’, p28].

So, why castor oil? First, because it’s practical: researchers found that the oil from the castor beans makes excellent source material for carpet tiles.

Second, because unlike many plants grown as biofuels, castor plants rarely compete with food. They thrive on marginal drylands, where most other crops would struggle to survive, and they only need water once every 25 days. Once in place, they help guard against soil erosion. A four-month growing cycle leaves the land free for other productive uses for two-thirds of the year.

Over 70% of the world’s supply comes from India, particularly Gujarat and Karnataka. And for the castor oil farmers, Interface offers a promising new market for one of the country’s most resilient crops. This is particularly helpful to them at a time when erratic weather patterns associated with climate change is making farming a much more uncertain business than before. As one Gujarati farmer told me on a visit there in 2011: “We don’t know what to plant and when; the weather doesn’t tell us anymore.”

The new product, known as Fotosfera, is made up of 63% yarn from castor oil and 37% conventional nylon. There are two different aesthetics to choose from: either a heavy textured surface, or a ‘microtuft’

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using less yarn. It was launched in India at the Green Building Conference in Hyderabad last October, and pitched firmly at businesses looking to raise their green game. As Interface’s Raj Menon explains: “A growing number of companies are setting high environmental standards for their offices. So, suppliers are under pressure to come up with products which meet those standards, and this is one way in which they can do so.” Fotosfera not only satisfies criteria for reduced dependence on petroleum, but it also has a strong social story – involving supply from Indian farmers into the supply chain – which has an immediate appeal to multinational companies keen to present a well-rounded sustainability picture.

In this respect it has much in common with its sister product, ‘Biosfera’, which is made of recycled yarn partly sourced from recovered nylon fishing nets.

Both products carry a small premium, Menon explains, which reflects the work that has gone into their development, as well as the added value which their sustainability performance should command.

But it’s important that this isn’t seen as an expensive product, he adds. “Moving away from petroleum should not be viewed as something which people cannot afford.” – MW

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Capital flow

Clean water, clean hands

Smart ways to save water combine ancient practice with modern technology.

Innovative ways of providing decent drinking water and sanitation are transforming rural India’s health prospects.

10% of the cost (as a way of ensuring ‘ownership’ of the scheme). To date, the project’s restoring 13 cascades, comprising 250 individual tanks serving almost 70 villages. Reviving this ancient system should enable the storage of 11.3 billion litres of water each year – allowing farmers to grow dry season crops, and so enjoy substantial increases in income.

Shrink to fit

Photo: Unilever

Lifestyle changes boost water use too. Washing clothes with detergents makes a regular chore a lot lighter for rural women, but it also soaks up huge quantities of water – all those suds need to be thoroughly rinsed out. A single bucket’s wash takes up to four buckets of rinsing. Unless you live by a river or lake, that’s water which has to be fetched and carried, and isn’t available for other uses.

Many of the detergents sold in India are made

by Unilever, which recently calculated that 38% of its water footprint came from the laundry process – particularly washing by hand in the developing world.

Globally, the company’s set a target of halving the water consumption associated with the use of its consumer products by 2020, which makes present practice pretty unsustainable. So, now it’s developed a new product called ‘Magic Water Saver’, with an anti-foam emulsion which dramatically cuts the need for rinsing by 75% – down to a single bucket. With washing accounting for one-fifth of a typical Indian family’s water consumption, that should add up to a significant saving. – MW

Photo: Martin Wright

All washed out: laundry is thirsty work in more ways than one.

Thanks to the annual monsoon, India receives large quantities of rain. But capturing and storing it so the water can last through the year is a major challenge – and one that’s becoming more urgent given the increasing volatility of rainfall patterns. As Unilever’s Meeta Singh puts it: “Water security is one of the biggest challenges facing India. Without water security, you have no food security, and that means no livelihood security.”

It’s a point reinforced by the International Finance Corporation’s Raj Ganguly: “When we export rice, we export water. Five hundred litres of it for every 50g of rice.” Part of the solution involves less thirsty growing methods, such as those being developed by PepsiCo [see p4]. But more broadly, it also means reviving a tradition of communal water conservation which is in danger of being neglected. Historically, many rural communities maintained communal water tanks, formed of earth banks with impermeable clay linings, to help capture and store rainwater. (‘Tank’, incidentally, is one of a number of ancient Indian words which has passed into English.) Often these were arranged in a series of ‘cascades’, laid out across slopes to maximise storage. But in recent years, with the weakening of traditional rural social structures, these have been fallen into disuse.

Now, Unilever is working with local communities in the Gundar Basin area of Tamil Nadu to revive both the tanks and the water-sharing arrangements that go with them. Local associations of farmers and landless families – many of them women – have taken responsibility for the work at the local level, contributing

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When former Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh complained, with characteristic pithiness, that there were “more temples than toilets” in India, he sparked a political storm with Hindu nationalists. But he also put his finger on one of the country’s most stubborn problems.

Decent sanitation is far from a given: only 14% of the rural population have access to a latrine, and diarrhoea kills 1,600 people a day, mainly children.

“This is not just a public health problem”, says Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, Distinguished Fellow at TERI. “It’s a human rights issue.” Public education programmes can help, but they stand more of a chance of making a difference if there are public toilets too. Dasgupta points to the success of the Sulabh composting toilet, which captures and processes the waste so it can be reused as a fertiliser. Over 7,000 installations are in place around the country: typically men pay half a rupee, while women and children go free. Persuading people to pay has been less of an issue than some predicted, says Dasgupta: “I think it’s not simply a question of convenience but of dignity. People are prepared to pay for dignity.”

Clean water, too, is far from a given in India: over half the population lack access to it. This leaves them vulnerable to diseases such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid. Which means that effective, affordable water purification is a vital step in improving the health of hundreds of millions of Indians. The Pureit device, produced by Unilever, provides “as safe as boiled” water at a cost of around 26 paisa (about a quarter of a rupee) per litre. It does so through an innovative combination of a microfibre mesh, carbon trap and programmed chlorine release to kill germs and bacteria and clean water to international drinking quality standards.The water then goes through a ‘polisher’ to remove chlorine traces and and other odours.

A study by the National Institute of Epidemiology in the slums of Chennai showed that households with a Pureit had 50% less incidence of diarrhoea than ones without. Around 30 million people have gained access to safe drinking water by using Pureit since 2005.

Meanwhile, Unilever is extending its programme to encourage hand-washing, while simultaneously marketing its Lifebuoy products range. Health workers travel round schools staging demonstrations using a powder called ‘glo-germ’. It works like this. The

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children wash their hands with water alone, and then the powder is sprinkled on their palms. The health worker shines an ultraviolet (UV) light, and the hands ‘glow’ where traces of dirt remain. Then they repeat the process with the soap, and the UV test comes up clear. It has proved a persuasive tool for people who had assumed that no visible dirt means no germs.

The scheme focuses particularly on children on the basis that they will ‘infect’ their families with good practice. It uses a range of tried and tested behavioural techniques (‘make it easy, make it desirable, make it a habit’) to help hand-washing become second nature, and so far the evidence suggests it does indeed take hold. Follow-up studies show that pursuing good hand hygiene practices can result in 25% fewer cases of diarrhoea and 46% fewer eye infections, compared with a control group. And children who do so miss over 25% fewer days from school due to illness.

The initiative has its distant roots in the early days of Lifebuoy in the 19th century, when William Lever, one of the company’s founders, launched it as a means of eradicating cholera from the slums of British cities. During 2010-2011, a new rural outreach programme known as ‘Khushiyon Ki Doli’ (‘Caravan of Happiness’), took hand-washing messages to remote areas, reaching around 30 million people. – MW

Make it easy, make it desirable, make it a habit

A Pureit purfier in use in the home.

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World City – future city?

A new gated community promises to be a model for sustainable living. But is it for everyone?

Oliver Balch reports from Chennai.

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Photo: Martin Wright

doubting the appeal of communities like this to the 21st century’s rising stars. Unusually, however, this 1,550-acre “holistic development” sees commercial shops and industrial units located side by side with residential housing. And dominating the landscape beyond is a mass of glass-fronted offices, auto component manufacturing plants and hanger-like textile factories – betraying the township’s location within a ‘Special Economic Zone’, or free-trade haven.

If this sets it apart from the standard gated community, so do its eco-credentials. The development boasts the first off-grid solar power plant in Tamil Nadu: a 75kW installation, which can be expanded as needed. Wastewater is treated on-site and then used for all the City’s landscaping needs.

Hence the lush lawns and verdant public spaces, so different from the desert-like scrub outside the gates. Rainwater harvesting comes as standard on all industrial units, and groundwater recharge pits fed by storm water drains should make the community ‘water positive’.

Energy efficiency is a major focus, too. Mahindra has a target of cutting energy for street lighting by 50% on 2009 levels by 2014. Already, three-fifths of the streets are lit with LEDs. Energy-efficient lighting is also standard in all the houses, every one of which

Photo: Mahindra World City Developers Ltd

Biodiesel is produced from the city’s plastic waste stream

Rush hour is hellish in downtown Chennai.

Famed for its auto industry, India’s Detroit has a population of five million – and rising. Economic reforms two decades ago have seen the middle class explode. Chennai’s clogged freeways testify to this unprecedented socio-economic shift. So do the growing number of gated new townships springing up alongside. But one of them is rather different.

Mahindra World City sets out to take the gated community concept – safe, separate, exclusive – and give it a sustainability spin. A “self-sustaining island of excellence”, no less, was the mandate given to the architects by the man behind the idea, Arun Nanda, former chairman of real estate developer Mahindra Lifespaces (part of the Mahindra and Mahindra conglomerate).

The ‘excellence’ part is immediately apparent.

The $500 million development is approached by a boulevard lined with vertiginous palm trees, dotted with signposts for roads with names like Sixth Avenue. They point to tidy rows of identikit duplexes and condominiums, replete with matchbox lawns and a country club, along with shops, a private school and a hospital. There are lakes and even a forest on the fringes. It may not be everyone’s idea of desirable living, but there’s no

is pre-certified as either Gold or Premium under the Indian Green Building Council [IGBC] standards.

Mahindra is currently working with IGBC to develop a Green Township rating for the project as a whole.

The site also has a solid waste recycling plant. This in turn produces manure for landscaping (from organic waste) and biodiesel (from the plastic waste). This fuels the development’s back-up generators, saving 6,000 litres of diesel per month.

All these features serve to reduce energy and water charges, representing a “feasible business case” in terms of long-term payback, according to project spokesperson Subrata Sengupta.

But is it replicable? Sengupta insists it is. He points to a similar project in Jaipur. Located in the water-scarce state of Rajasthan, Mahindra’s second World City pursues the same “holistic” vision. Their environmental profiles are similar too: a target of 100,000 new trees, two-thirds of total water requirement from recycling, LED lighting, 60 million litres of rainwater harvesting, and so on. In addition, however, the Jaipur project boasts a state-of-the-art, sensor-based water transmission and distribution system – as befits a township on the edge of a desert.

It’s recently become one of two Indian projects supported by the Clinton Climate Initiative.

As a model for a specific type of urban development, the World City concept certainly works.

Its genius is mixing business and residential clients together. If companies can be persuaded to set up shop, then their workforce – and others – should gradually follow. Of course, much depends on willing policy-makers (business investors would find the City less compelling without tax breaks on exports) and economic conditions more generally.

Mahindra’s Head of Corporate Sustainability, Naresh Patil, admits that “more consumer education” is needed to bring home the benefits to prospective buyers. But there’s a sliver of an incentive from the State Bank of India, which offers a 0.5% interest reduction on loans for a World City home on the grounds of its green credentials. “It helps grab people’s attention, and we hope that once they’re installed and happy, they’ll spread the word – peer-to-peer marketing, as it were.”

From an environmental perspective, enclosed systems like the World City have much to commend them. With everything governed by a homogeneous, centralised process, it’s far easier to manage issues like onsite power generation and water capture and reuse.

Transport and waste can also be centrally controlled.

It’s more on the social side that questions lie.

Mahindra has laid on training and employment opportunities as a way of integrating surrounding villages. As yet, however, there are no plans to provide social housing within the gates. Low-income Indians, therefore, remain shut out. With the country’s urban population set to expand by an estimated half a billion over the next four decades, this lack of inclusion will prove problematic in terms of scaling the City model.

As a powerful illustration of world-class sustainable urbanisation, however, India’s town planners have much to learn from Nanda’s concept of holistic living.

Oliver Balch’s book, India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation, is published by Faber.

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The rating game A new green rating scheme assesses how buildings perform once people are inside.

As India’s surging new cities compete for potential residents, words like ‘green’ and ‘energy efficient’ are increasingly bandied about in advertising copy – often with little practical meaning.

Ratings schemes like LEED add credibility, and are particularly popular with corporate flagships, such as ITC’s vast new Grand Chola Hotel in Chennai.

But valuable as it is, LEED only covers a building’s potential performance – as opposed to what actually happens when people start inhabiting it.

Now TERI has set up a complementary scheme under the rather inelegant acronym GRIHA: Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment. It covers everything from water and energy use to health and safety for workers during construction. The building gets a provisional rating on completion, but the final one depends on an audit carried out a year after its occupants have moved in.

Mili Majumdar, Director of TERI’s Sustainable Habitat Division, is particularly proud of its role in improving building site safety. “We do visits unannounced: check whether the workers have got decent sanitation, whether they’re being provided with drinking water, and so on.”

The scheme tries to avoid a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which has led to some daft decisions in pursuit of points. “If a building’s only going to be used by office workers who go home by six”, says Majumdar, “then there’s no point putting a solar heating system on the roof, just to win a point towards a good rating.” Or take groundwater recharging: “an excellent idea in many parts of the country, but definitely not desirable where the water table is practically at the surface!”

When it comes to overall costs, she says, “the economic case for energy conscious buildings is pretty persuasive. Installing thorough insulation, heatreflective glass and so on can add 5-7% to capital costs, but your running expenses will be cut by 30-40%, so there’s a direct trade off. The maximum payback period should be three to four years: after that it’s all net savings”.

Despite such obvious advantages, only around 1% of all new Indian buildings are green-rated – and just 0.25% have a GRIHA mark. So why doesn’t everyone do it? In part, it’s the old story that the people developing the buildings are often not going to be occupying them: the ‘split incentive’ issue.

“There’s also an understandable resistance to ‘red tape-ism’, adds Majumdar.

For its part, the Government is taking tentative steps to set minimum compulsory standards for all new state buildings, and redirecting incentives at developers themselves – for example, by allowing a larger footprint for greenrated buildings – is also on the cards.

Overall, though, says Majumdar, as energy costs rise, so credible green ratings will have increasing appeal as a marketing tool.

“When it comes to grabbing people’s attention, there’s nothing like telling them they’ll have more money in their pockets.” – MW

TERI University: costs down, comfort levels up.

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Cool running India burns a lot of energy to stay cool. It needn’t.

Martin Wright chills out.

The Torrent Research Centre in Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s new political capital, is an energy miser. It consumes around 54kWh per square metre, compared to an Indian average for new buildings of 280-500kWh. It’s similarly miserly when it comes to carbon emissions, accounting for just 72kg per square metre (compared to an average 380-670kg per square metre).

The key is passive solar design, which drastically reduces the need for both conventional air conditioning

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and artificial light. By using passive downdraught evaporative cooling, it brings indoor temperatures close to bearable even on the hottest summer days.

Costs were 13% higher than the conventional equivalent – but such were the savings on energy bills that this was recovered within a year.

Indeed, they were so dramatic that the entire capital will be repaid within 13 years, from the energy savings alone.

– Darryl d’Monte

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Transport of delight

Ahmedabad’s rapid transit is the envy of other cities, says Darryl d’Monte.

Photo: Utpal Padia

Draught includer

we hit on the principle of ‘radiant cooling’”, which draws heat from the room to walls cooled by water circulating through embedded pipes.

“The principles of physics were very compelling”, explains Parikh, “so we were keen to try them out on our new Hyderabad campus. Now we knew that even if we proved them in practice, people would be sceptical: they’d say, ‘ah well, it worked for Infosys because it was a particular sort of building in a particular place, it probably wouldn’t work for us…’”

But in the Hyderabad campus, Infosys had the perfect testing ground: a building divided into two huge wings, identical in every respect. One was fitted with conventional air conditioning, the other with radiant cooling. “They were ideal experimental conditions”, says Parikh: “real buildings occupied by real live people.” The difference was dramatic: the wing with radiant cooling consumed 38% less energy – and detailed ‘comfort surveys’ showed staff much preferred it, too. The capital spend required was actually 1% less than the building’s conventional twin. “Financially”, concludes Parikh, “it’s just amazing.”

Harvesting the cooling effect of the earth can be a productive way of keeping comfortable, too. At TERI University’s elegant new campus on the southern fringes of Delhi, so-called ‘earth air tunnels’ make use of the fact that the temperature 4m below the surface is equal to the annual average above ground. So there it’s 25.6°C at all times, even though the temperature outdoors might be a burning 45°C in summer and a chilly 4°C in winter. Drawing air up from the tunnels helps keep buildings cool in summer and warm in winter. Together with a north-facing façade, thick walls packed with insulation and ‘evaporative cooling’ produced by the effect of water trickling down specially designed towers, this all helps to reduce the need for artificial aircon.

Indeed, the design is so effective that the student hostels do without it altogether – a rarity in modern accommodation – with the temperature never rising above the 20s even in the hottest of summers.

Combined with a design which makes maximum use of natural light, it means the campus’s energy bills are 40% below average.

Photo: Mahindra World City Developers Ltd

Anyone familiar with stepping from the street into an Indian office block on a hot day will know that it’s like walking from a furnace into a fridge. Air conditioning is also one of the country’s more voracious consumers of energy – accounting for 30-40% of domestic consumption.

Keeping buildings cool enough for comfort is uncontroversial. But the quest for ever chillier indoor climes, achieved by turning hot air cold at eye-watering expense, is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny.

Unsurprising, given the rapid rise in electricity prices…

The good news is that there are a number of innovations under way which enable people to stay cool in less costly ways, and some of these look as much to the past as the future.

Infosys, which has achieved more than most in terms of cutting energy devoted to air conditioning, learned a lot from past masters, says its Head of Green Innovation Rohan Parikh. “Nearly half our energy was being consumed in cooling or aircon, so it was an obvious priority. We started off by saying to ourselves: ‘Air conditioning was only invented 100 years or so ago, so how did people manage to keep cool in the past?’ That led us to look at ancient monuments, old buildings, caves, even. And so

For anyone stuck in one of India’s interminable traffic jams, a bus rapid transit (BRT) system sounds like the answer to a prayer. Cheaper and easier to implement than a full scale underground metro, BRT has proved a striking success in cities such as Curitiba in Brazil and the Colombian capital, Bogotá. Its former mayor, Enrique Penalosa, together with EMBARQ, a non-profit specialising in transport solutions, is advising Indian cities on how to go down the same route.

The basic principles are the same: reserved lanes for buses, designed for rapid on-off boarding, with a simple pre-paid ticketing system – imitating the essential features of a metro at a fraction of the cost.

But it hasn’t been a smooth ride. The first BRT system, launched in Delhi in 2008, drew strident criticism from motorists incensed at losing their pride of place on the road. It was even challenged in court (unsuccessfully) in 2012. Since then, some ten other cities, including Mumbai and Pune have launched their own schemes, with mixed results.

The striking exception has been Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. Here the concept has been implemented with gusto. Sleek new buses run at regular intervals down segregated tracks in the middle of the road, with regular ‘stations’ allowing passengers to step on and off on either side of the bus. Known as the Janmarg (‘Peoples Route’), this system also features dedicated lanes for pedestrians and bicycles.

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Janmarg currently has 45km of corridors crisscrossing the city, plying 83 buses that cater to nearly 135,000 passengers every day. It has resulted in a noticeable reduction in congestion and pollution, and unlike most public transit elsewhere in India, its success in slashing journey times has even attracted some business people out of their (chauffeured) cars.

Officials claim that a stunning 57% of the city’s motorists and two-wheel drivers have switched to the network. Independent studies put it at a more credible – but still impressive – 12%. But that number should grow as the network expands. When complete, one-third of the current population, will live within walking distance of a BRT station.

The scheme is the fruit of a unique public-private partnership model. The implementation of the project was handled by the state-run Ahmedabad Janmarg Limited, while private service providers retain the ownership, operations and maintenance of the specially designed Tata buses.

Janmarg is already being held up as a model for others to replicate. It won the Best Sustainable Transport Award from the Washington-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and was featured as a public-private “lighthouse activity” at the 2012 climate conference in Doha.

It has even attracted some business people out of their chauffeured cars

Darryl d’Monte is a Mumbai-based journalist, former Resident Editor of The Times of India, and chair of the Forum of Environmental Journalists in India.

Green Futures January 2013

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Can a rickshaw save a tiger?

Foraging in the forest risks a fatal encounter with a tiger

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A solar-powered rickshaw might sound like a quirky indulgence. But for the people living on the fringes of the vast Sundarbans Forest in West Bengal, it could just be the symbol of a better way of life. And one which, moreover, helps boost the chances of survival for India’s most precious wildlife haven.

The Sundarbans is an area of thickly forested islands on the Bay of Bengal. Spanning the border between India and Bangladesh, it’s famous as the last redoubt of the Royal Bengal Tiger. But there’s more to it than that. Its richly complex ecosystem is home to a range of threatened species, from deer and birds to fish and flowers, many found nowhere else on the planet. And the thick mangrove belts which cloak the shoreline provide a life-saving defence against tropical storms. Without them, the devastation wreaked by hurricanes such as Aila, which struck in 2009, would be many times worse.

The Indian Sundarbans alone are home to over 4 million people, making a living from farming, from gathering honey, nuts and other produce from the forest, and fishing in its rivers. (Although the core of the Sundarbans is a protected reserve, there’s a ‘buffer zone’ which people are allowed to visit for work, but not make a home in.) It’s a precarious way of life at the best of times, and it’s one under

Green Futures January 2013

threat. For the locals whose basic living depends on forest products, that threat can be all too immediate, in the form of a close and sometimes fatal encounter with a tiger.

But there are wider, less obvious dangers, which are threatening both the tiger and the islanders.

Erosion and siltation are clogging the rivers, leading to growing salinity of the area’s soils as the flow of freshwater is reduced – a problem compounded by rising sea levels as the effects of climate change kick in. As the soil gets more salty its productivity falls, forcing people to make greater demands on the forest for a living – and so expose themselves to more tiger attacks. One common recourse is to clear mangroves for ponds, which in turn opens up the surrounding areas to more severe flooding.

Reducing pressure on the forest is an essential first step to conserving the tiger and its habitat, and that means boosting prospects for local people to have a decent living. Now a new conservation NGO, Mlinda, is exploring ways of doing just that. Its focus is sustainable consumption and production, as a means of safeguarding threatened environments, while at the same time improving the quality of life of local people. The two are intricately linked, believes co-founder Liesl Eisenbeiss. “Environmental solutions will only be sustainable if local people have

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Photos: Stockbyte/Thinkstock; Martin Wright

Solar power could be bringing brighter prospects for the people of the Sundarbans, and for its wildlife, too.

Martin Wright reports from West Bengal.

a real stake in them, and can see an improvement in their own livelihoods”, she says.

After consulting widely, Mlinda hit on transport as a ‘point of entry’ to put its principles into practice.

For millions of people on these remote islands, reachable only by small ferries and with no tarmac roads, the only way to get around is on noisy, uncomfortable and highly polluting diesel boats and rickshaws. Unlike the ‘autos’ found in most Indian cities, these ‘vans’, as they’re confusingly known, offer nothing more than a flatbed consisting of a few planks on which to sit, behind a motorbike engine with rudimentary steering.

So Mlinda started experimenting with an alternative: an electric rickshaw that would be clean, quiet and comfortable – and could be charged by solar power. This would help boost the market for clean rural electrification in an area which is still dependent on diesel and kerosene for basic energy needs.

They chose Brojobalavpur, a typical ‘fringe’ island close to the forest, as a testing ground, and Mlinda’s local team, led by ex-army engineer Vijay Bhaskar and development specialist Sudeshna Mukherjee, set to work. They spent a lot of time with the local rickshaw drivers’ association, finding out what would and wouldn’t work for them and – crucially – how much they would pay for it. (This was a slow and delicate process: like cabbies everywhere, Brojo’s rickshaw drivers are shrewd operators.)

Local people were consulted too, and designs shared and argued over. Given the chance to shape their daily transport, there was no shortage of suggestions: have proper seats – facing each other – and a roof; and a step up to make it easier for the elderly to get aboard. The drivers, for their part – like potential electric car owners the world over – had some ‘range anxiety’. If they run out of diesel, they can call a boy to bring some more in a bottle. What happens if the battery suddenly dies on them?

“They asked a lot of very detailed questions: they thought of things that hadn’t even occurred to us”, admits Bhaskar.

The next stage was to build a prototype and test it in practice. Mlinda commissioned a concept model, and brought it to the island by boat. “At first it was a bit weird”, says Ashish, one of the drivers who tested it out. “But after a while I loved it. It’s so easy to handle, and it’s quiet and smooth. My arms don’t ache at the end of the day.” The passengers loved it too: it rapidly became the rickshaw of choice, and people were soon asking if they could hire it out for weddings.

As a next step, Mlinda plans to commission a fleet of 30 ‘solar rickshaws’, to carry out a thorough pilot programme. If all goes well, then they will be in a position to place an order for around 3,000 – and the transport infrastructure of the Sundarbans will be transformed.

Mlinda is clear that, ultimately, this has to be a self-sustaining operation, and is confident it can be so once economies of scale kick in. Islanders are so impressed with the electric vehicles that they’re happy to pay around 20% more by way of fares. And with the price of diesel rising inexorably, the drivers can see the appeal of solar as ‘fuel’. Now Mlinda is working with car companies and the government to come up with a pricing structure which will be viable for all concerned.

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The rickshaws, of course, will need recharging.

Which is where Mlinda’s wider plans for the Sundarbans come in. Without mains electricity, most people depend on kerosene for lighting; the poorest make do with candles, or spend the evenings in darkness. So Mlinda is helping local schools set up ‘Joint Liability Groups’, effectively a form of government-recognised micro credit union, which allow them to access a mixture of loans and grants for solar power, via a state rural development bank. Already two schools have come on board, using the energy to light classrooms and boarding hostels, and the aim is for them to double up as rickshaw-recharging stations once the scheme’s fully under way.

It’s proving popular with pupils, too. One of them, Priti, told me: “It’s tiring reading by kerosene; your eyes ache and you get smoke in them. This is much better. Whenever I want to read, I can just turn the light on!” Mlinda hope to expand the scheme to other schools, including the study centres where children come to do homework in the evenings. And they’re looking to set up micro credit groups with some of the poorest islanders, so that they too can afford solar [see ‘Smaller grids, smarter grids’, p18].

If all goes well with the rickshaws, the next step will be solar ferries. Meanwhile, the drivers are getting impatient, badgering Mlinda’s team as to when they can expect the finished product.

“Is there anything you don’t like about it?”, I asked them. “Yes”, replied Ashish, “sometimes it is too quiet.

It needs a louder horn!” – MW

People were asking if they could hire the solar rickshaw for weddings

Ready to upgrade: rickshaw driver Purna’s keen to shift to an EV model.

Green Futures January 2013

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India: Innovation Nation is a Green Futures Special Edition, produced in association with Hindustan Unilever Limited, Interface and Mlinda.

It is published in partnership with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi, on the occasion of the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2013.

Editor: Martin Wright Managing Editor: Anna Simpson Production: Katie Shaw and Ulrike Stein Research: Emily Murrell, Elena Polisano and Lucy Tooher Consultant: Anna da Costa Design: The Urban Ant Ltd With thanks to Jenny Hammond, Isabel Sloman and Polly Wheldon at Forum for the Future and Annapurna Vancheswaran, Isabelle Megre and all at TERI. Printed by Pureprint, using their environmental technology and vegetable-based inks, on 100% recycled and FSC certified Cocoon Silk paper, supplied by Arjowiggins Graphic.

Published January 2013. © Green Futures Reg charity no. 1040519 Company no. 2959712 VAT reg. no. 677 7475 70

Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) is India’s largest Fast Moving Consumer Goods company touching the lives of two out of three Indians. HUL works to create a better future every day. We help people feel good, look good and get more out of life with brands and services that are good for them and good for others. www.hul.co.in Mlinda searches for and supports changes to modes of consumption and production: ideas that can scale, influence change and be shared by all. We work on shifting mind sets away from short-term attitudes to long-term values. We target individual behaviour as well as systemic change in business and finance. www.mlinda.org Interface is a global leader in the design and production of carpet tiles. Interface was one of the first companies to publicly commit to sustainability, when it made a pledge in the mid-90s to eliminate its impact on the environment by 2020, now known as Mission Zero. www.interface.com

Across India, entrepreneurs large and small are already beginning to come up with solutions to the needs of the 21st century.

At Forum for the Future, our aim is to help these businesses respond to sustainability challenges today and in the future. We are working collaboratively with key actors to harness Indian creativity and innovation in order to help put the economy on a more sustainable footing. www.forumforthefuture.org/india Green Futures is the leading international magazine on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Founded by Jonathon Porritt, it is published by Forum for the Future, a non-profit working globally with business and government to create a sustainable future. www.greenfutures.org.uk www.forumforthefuture.org

Subscribe to Green Futures Keep up to date with the latest news and debate on how to make the shift to sustainability in print and online, by subscribing to Green Futures: www.greenfutures.org.uk/subscribe or contact our subscriptions team direct: Tel: +44 (0) 1536 273543 Order India: Innovation Nation online To order more copies of India: Innovation Nation, or to download a pdf version, visit: www.greenfutures.org.uk/innovationnation We’d love your feedback on India: Innovation Nation. Please email our editorial team at: letters@greenfutures.org.uk

By printing this publication on Cocoon Silk 100% recycled paper, rather than a non-recycled paper, the environmental impact was reduced by: 1,123 kg of landfill, 122 kg CO2 and greenhouse gases, 29,317 litres of water, 2,760 kWh of electricity and 1,825 kg of wood.

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