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Hurrying up the climate deal
WSN Network
 Hillary
Clinton was in India and she spent a good deal of time to stress
that New Delhi cannot hide behind the developed country carbon
footprint versus developing country carbon footprint sizes argument
anymore. The problem of climate change needs to be fixed and India
has to play a part. The confort zone has to end, otherwise the
results will be cataclysmic in scale. Clinton focussed to stress,
though not overtly, that
New Delhi
cannot perpetually hope to play spoiler to garner some concessions.
It is high time
that India accepted its role and becomes a responsible global player
in trying to control the damage to our planet. It will have to make
sacrifices to get a workable deal going.
Not only have
successive governments not prepared
India’s
people and industry for inevitable changes; but their own
preparation for the actual creation of any international mitigation
system has quite a distance to cover. When world leaders sit across
the table from each other at the Copenhagen conference later this
year, it is essential for
India
to bring something to that table. That should certainly include an
accounting of what the costs to India of greening its economy would
be, as well as how it intends to process the governance of the
greening process; nobody is going to commit money or assistance
without knowing those. India will need to show that the world’s
efforts to head off disaster will not be met with stonewalling then.
The rest of the world will not accept that as behaviour concomitant
with the status to which
India
aspires. Nor will India’s people, once seized of the urgency, accept
that from their government. Nor will posterity forgive.
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'You're lucky to have been
elected president'
WSN Network
MUMBAI:
Ramilaben Rohit, a shy farm worker from Anand in Gujarat, had never dreamt that she would be the envy of US secretary of
state Hillary Clinton. So when Ramilaben, wrapped in a red and
beige patola saree, told Hillary with a toothy smile that she
had been elected by 1.1 million artisans as president of the
Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), Hillary smiled:
"You're lucky to have been elected president, I didn't have the
same luck.''
"She said she
would now call me `My Madam President','' smiled Ramilaben. Over
a steaming cuppa of espresso and dry fruit (parcelled all the
way from women in Afghanistan who have been trained by SEWA),
Hillary attempted Hindi with "namaste'' and chatted with 50
artisans from Anand, Patan and Kheda at the Hansiba Creations
outlet on Nepean Sea Road. She also reached out to over a 1,000
other share-holder artisans who were huddled around laptops in
their villages, logged on to skype.
She spent a
little over an hour at Hansiba and did a bit of shopping, which
left the US consulate poorer by Rs 44,400. Her shopping bag was
stuffed with a stringy red corset for her daughter Chelsea, a
yellow quilt, an orange organic-dyed kurta and a deep green
bandhani dupatta. "Hillaryben wanted to know how we wear our
dupatta. There in the US, they have scarves which are shorter,''
chuckled an artisan. |
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22
July 2009
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