After a period of two decades we finally dominated a global meet. This column has advocated that India play a role with the BRICS in the G8. In the L20 volume, we saw a special role for India in energy and water negotiations. India went to Copenhagen with a strong position. With an if-then technical stance carefully crafted in the weeks and months before the meeting, we were not being luddites and were an important actor in the unfolding dynamic. Nothing was given away beforehand, but we had a domestic plan and were in fact not only an energy-efficient country but had all the intentions of being one in the future. The critics either didn?t understand the basics or were being obstructive. In fact, our stance put us on commanding heights.
We were together with the UK, Japan and some other countries at the top of the rankings in terms of energy consumption per unit of output (almost 40% of the big energy users like the US, China and Canada) and our teams of young modellers had after a long time been commissioned and had produced futuristic counterfactuals. The days of interactive and genuinely dynamic energy policy modelling as a preserve of the OECD countries were over. As someone who had, in the bleak period, played around with poor substitutes of such models with energy photo pictures at different moments of time, I am happy.
Unlike some other large countries, our reform was initially home-driven and the reform of large industry in the late eighties explicitly targeted energy efficiency in big energy-guzzler segments like steel, cement, fertilisers and petrochemicals. As scale expanded and capacity utilisation went up, we really did well in energy consumption per unit of output. All this should give us credibility. We would play our role in negotiations with the US and OECD, and champion the BRICS in the G77. China always played this role and, therefore, it was a little surprising when it declared a somewhat strong bilateral position with the great powers just before the conference started. In a way it was not at all surprising that it soon decided to show great solidarity with India, reflecting again the strength of our position. This became more pronounced towards the end of the summit in Copenhagen.
Some of our commentators and ?experts? have this great ability to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of victory. The great penchant for speaking in different voices even when the whole responsibility is on us to present our strengths and to use them to sell a structure of the future around which we can negotiate?and beyond the bounds of which we will not go?is the hallmark of their style. A leading press agency reported that India and China walked out with Africa and the G77 and our minister was the spokesperson, but one of our interlocuters made it known to a section of our media that we followed China in a walk out, with Africa.
Instead of per capita absolutes we can also negotiate at the margin in terms of changes because our performance in terms of change has been good. So we would win with a little ingenuity if we develop and fight for formulae in terms of energy intensity of output, which is a marginal and not an average concept for it is additional energy per unit of value added and set the bar, in terms of which our head start is an asset. Like the Swiss tariff formula in the WTO, we could develop tools that are forward-looking and to our advantage in terms of incentivising the distance covered towards the bars set in averages, which would be higher than our base positions.
We obviously will not fall for the MRV business (measurement, reporting and verification) and have to tell the West that for a long time the Scandinavians would only discuss our annual plan with them as a condition of their aid. I remember doing that with the Swedes in Yojana Bhavan. Surely they can play with us in a less invasive manner, without insisting on getting into our bedrooms. In an earlier version of this article, while the meeting was on, I said that: ?Another interesting way of doing it is to work with a mechanism of the type the annual WTO Trade Review is.? It turned out to be prophetic. As we showed in the Annual Trade Review under Mary Whelan, we can tolerate bitter discussions but no strong-arm stuff.
Getting into the last stretch we should win this one in addition to the ODAs.
The author is a former Union minister