Tom Friedman [ Author: The World is Flat ]
 in his column in the New York Times writes about going for a spin in New Delhi and how he was amazed at what he saw during the course of the spin.

He is invited to join by two researchers who were planning to travel in a plug-in electric car also powered by rooftop solar panels .The two young women tell him they had just driven it all over India “to highlight the solutions to global warming being developed by Indian companies, communities, campuses and innovators. It was their hope, they said that it will also inspire others to take action.

India, according to one of the women is full of climate innovators, so spread out across the huge country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are working right now.

The two of them, we understand wanted to find a way to bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation. There’s no time left to just talk about the problem, they said. The two women thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. one of them knew. They persuaded him to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with longer-life batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge — and to lay on a solar roof that would extend them farther.

Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.

They say that the trip opened their eyes to just how many indigenous energy solutions were budding in India - "like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the kind of recycling in slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place, like the Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go."

At Rajpipla, in Gujarat, when they stopped at a local prince's palace to recharge their cars, they discovered that his business was cultivating worms and selling them as eco-friendly alternatives to chemical fertilizers.

Friedman writes, “After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation”.

"Why did this tour happen?" asked one of the ladies.

Well ... the world needs crazy, unconventional ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not going to work anymore.

It can't get more unconventional than this, "President Bush has a plan. He says that if we need to, we can lower the temperature dramatically just by switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius" - on fighting global warming.

Pic courtesy : crca.caloosahatchee.org

L.Ravichandran
ravi@chennaionline.com