India is committed to Climate change, but its consumption basket must resemble the worlds’

Food is what it all started from, when economists tried to measure calorie intake per capita, as a proxy measure for poverty. Later ‘per capita’ became a great way of showing how much things were ‘good’ or ‘not good’ as comparators of extremely unequal things.

Popular rhetoric made a beeline for the “per capita consumption”, from food to energy to housing, even metals did not get spared, as if people ate or consumed them. Today it pervades the field of climate change as well.

The most bizarre of statistics in the ‘per capita’ field is that of energy consumption for Iceland (66000 kg equivalent of oil units per capita), which is ten times that of U.S. and 100 times that of India, which is no small wonder. It has to be as the energy produced in Iceland is consumed in making Aluminum, which the meagre population of 360,000 hardly consume and gets exported to continental Europe. The sheer size of the per capita consumption of energy in Iceland means nothing as it would baffle people not knowing the nuances of the underlying issues. See the data 

Food on the other hand is a very good example as it is not entirely unequal when we compare and we could even remove all variations by introducing calorie measures. How many calories of food does a man or a woman need per day? The data is glaringly simple: U.S. is consuming 3770 calories while India is at 2300 calories. See the per capita calorie consumption

In the year 1971, U.S. per capita calorie consumption (2450) was even higher than India’s current number.

Is it not natural that the Indian per capita consumption of food must go up? Well, it is a paradox that it is actually going down as India has progressed, which is a cause for great concern and it can only change if the intake of cereals can be replaced with more proteins. But that would require economic advancement as the poor would need a richer consumption basket of food and processed food with high proteins in particular, which the government’s subsidized food schemes are devoid of.

To create a decent consumption basket, after food, locomotion becomes an important item and the measure, vehicles per 1000 persons, gives us a view where India stands. If we take out the outliers Iceland, Monaco or Lichtenstein, we get to U.S. with the highest number of vehicles per 1000 people, which is a staggering 809 for the year 2011. India stands at a paltry 18. See vehicles per capita data

Surely India needs to add more vehicles. So will be the case for electrifying its villages, which are yet to be electrified, or has to add concrete to the homes which do not have any.

All this will consume energy and surely India would not stay in the paltry 660 kg of oil equivalent per capita of energy consumption. It is so low not just because it has so much lower movement of goods and people within the country or that its people consume so much less, but because as an industrialization index, it is far lower in the pecking order. Just compare manufacturing value added for India and you will see that in absolute terms it could be in better leagues than U.K. is, which may not particularly be a very good example to compare with as U.K. can no more be said as an ‘industrially intense’ country and it also has so few people on the other hand to get to a comparable per capita measure. So per capita value added in manufacturing for India would be almost $310, which would be one twentieth that of U.S.  

Surely all this data is pointing to the inevitable that India needs to grow and expand to a decent share of the world’s consumption basket. If its population is one sixth of the world, at least it should aspire to consume a decent fraction of the world’s energy from the current irrelevance.

Energy consumption is linked to the wastes it would create and it would depend on the source of energy as well. But isn’t the current data very glaring that the per capita CO2 emission the world over is skewed entirely towards the developed block of nations, with U.S. topping the list with 16.4 T per capita, followed by Russia with 12 T, Japan with 10.5 T, EU with 7.4, China with 7.1 while the world average is 5T per capita?

India on the other hand is at 1.6 T of CO2 per capita. See data given in COP21

Is it very wrong that India, while being committed to the grave task at hand is still going to continue to increase its carbon footprint from the current 1.5 Billion T of CO2 per year to 7 Billion T in the year 2030? Is this increase very wrong? Do the country not need this bare minimum increase to increase its basic consumption basket which would include more than the basic food or living in concrete buildings instead of in dwellings of all kinds or moving by vehicles instead of by foot?

India is committed to climate change dictates, but it also committed to providing basic amenities that its citizens have every right to enjoy.

India is committed to Climate change, but its consumption basket must resemble the worlds’.