TOO HOT TO WORK
It’s not just plant life that suffers. While factory and office workers can go through the day in air-conditioned comfort regardless of the temperature outside, about 93 per cent of India’s labour force is in less organised jobs where no employer guarantees decent working conditions.
When the mercury heads above 40 degrees Celsius, farmers and urban labourers have little option but to down tools or face potentially catastrophic heatstroke.
That hampers the vast amount of construction work that development will require. Upper middle-income nations (the club which India would like to join) typically derive about a third of economic growth from fixed-capital formation – building things, in simple terms. India trails Vietnam and Bangladesh on this measure, and is light years behind China.
As of late 2022, India was reckoned to have only about 30 per cent of the urban infrastructure it will need by the end of the decade. The sodden monsoon is already a soft period for construction work, since cement needs dry air to set properly.
Three consecutive years of record heatwaves mean that the hot summer months from March to June are increasingly affected, too, further squeezing the period when building sites can operate effectively.
India is responsible for very little of the carbon emissions that are rapidly making its climate unbearable – but it must take responsibility for the future.
Cheap solar power has only recently started showing signs of being installed at the rates needed to hit the government’s renewable power targets. Despite higher costs, China connected about 4.5 gigawatts of panels for every gigawatt India did in the first quarter of this year.
Public charging stations for the electric vehicles that could help clean up the choking pollution of India’s cities and reduce its dependence on imported oil are too few and far between. The 12,146 in operation to date are equivalent to less than 1 per cent of what the country will need by 2030.
Every side of politics wants India to become the affluent nation its people aspire to. The bridge to that destination, however, is weakened with every scorching summer and exceptional monsoon.
For a country that hopes over the coming decade to industrialise without carbonising, the risk is that it may end up in the worst of both worlds: Trapped in a carbon-intensive past, prevented by its own scorching heat from building the economy of the future.
