 of Rupmati Kandekar, and we thought she was going to be in what New Delhi? We were wrong. She's in New York. That's far away too. Welcome to the show, Rupmati. It's nice to see you. Aloha, Jay. And another option that you could speak with you, and very childish one in that. So, yeah, let's sort of get a handle of what you're doing these days. You were with the United Nations in New York, and you've written a book on reforming the United Nations. How does the United Nations feel about your book? It's a part of their process, isn't it? It's long overdue for the United Nations to be reformed. It's still in the structure and infrastructure of the 1945 agreement by which the countries came together. It needs to represent the dynamics of the international society, contemporary politics. So it's still not representative of that. I compliment you in writing a book about this because it should have happened before. Somebody should have written a book about it. Thank you so much. Well, so, and the last time we spoke, we spoke about the Hills. He wrote a book about in the Hills, Dragon in the Hills, I think it was, and that was about the physical fight of the Indian military and the Chinese military up on the hills above Northern India, which is actually not resolved, is it? No, it's an undefined border, which will never see agreement because it's absolutely underdeveloped. It's in adverse climatic conditions where you have snow and the Himalayan terrain. How can you guard such a post any country and two countries who have previously been involved territory? So for them, it's a more difficult situation due to the present underlying animosity in between them. So there is an underlying tension due to the non-definition of the borders. And as we discussed in our previous program, the late Pandit Jawahara Nehru left it undefined. So it was a basic tenant of state sovereignty, which he left, that he left the borders undefined. And because of that, India still continues to suffer because of the uncertainty in that area. Are you still active? You were the director of the Global Relations Forum. Is that still active? Is that part of your presence at the United Nations? It's more working with the European Union Smart Cities project that they are indulging in. So we work, we research about the cities of India, which need to bring in these Smart Cities programs sponsored by the EU. And it's a collaboration between India and EU. So Smart Cities in meaning which they've gotten renewable sources of energy, you have better infrastructure, all that will come in to India. So that's a very progressive initiative of the European Union delegation to India. Well, just touching those points with you, it's clear that you fit within the model of thinker that understands we have gone along past Thomas Friedman now. It's not that the world is flat, but the world is completely together like it or not. We are interdependent like it or not. And that takes us, you know, to COP26, doesn't it? Because unless we act together, we will all regret it. It will affect all of us every single one. So Mr. Modi went there and he shook everybody up. Yeah. Everyone knows what he said. And the question is whether it's rhetoric or real. He said that by 2030, you would be off, or you would cut fossil fuel use in half or emissions in half. By 2070, you'd be down to net zero. Now, that's pretty ambitious. Can you talk about it? Yeah. Now, it was a shocker for the world, isn't it? For India to come and take the global stage by storm in the COP26. We didn't expect him to come and talk about this. But you see, there is a lot of practicality in what he speaks. He gave a 10-year later deadline than most countries would say. He could have easily said it's 2035. We will be net zero emissions. But he set a practical pathway that it's 2070. It's a long way across, but he set it. So the practicality of this man to lay down a plan is commendable, and India is the only country which in print and media has delivered its promise in the Paris Agreement. So we can take his word for that. And if you see, there are two initiatives that he took in for these promises that he made. He has spoken about the Indian Railway, cutting down its emissions by 60 million tons a year. And he's talking of the LED bulb, which is cutting down emissions by 40 million tons a year. So that makes 100 million tons. So that is what he's talking about, that he is doing the work. So it's not just the hollow promises that leaders bring in. He is delivering on his promises. So in India, we know that this initiative is very, he starts it in small ways. Jay, I'll tell you one thing, that he has started a campaign in India in December 3rd last year. He said that they developed one smart city in every state of India, which is either the state capital or the tourist city. So it serves as a role model for other cities to see that how they are using renewable energy. So that display and that a lot of seeing that a city functions by renewable sources is the way he functions in India. And to make a billion people follow you, you need this kind of advertisement. So he is contributing by making a billion people follow the guidelines of mitigating climate change. So you suggest that maybe this will be painful in some way to the people of India. And for example, a couple of things. One is right now India, of all the major nations in the world, and clearly India is a major nation in terms of population and productivity and all that. India uses less energy per capita than the US by far, less than China, less than all the other major nations. It's down to a pretty small amount. And so if you wanted to cut fossil fuel down on the tons of carbon down on a per capita basis, which is what he's talking about, the per capita basis is not that much relative to these other countries, they have a greater burden per capita. But the other thing I just wanted to mention is that India does not have India has some solar up in the I guess the northeast somewhere in a desert there. I forget the name of the desert is something like yes, big desert. And as a huge solar facility, it does not have a lot of other resources. And it is dependent on coal. And in fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was only a year ago that Mr. Modi was expanding coal operations. He was selling national leases to coal producers. He was drawing investment, which he was unsuccessful in actually achieving the investment he wanted. But he was drawing investment for the development of coal. Now it's one year later, and he's talking about cutting coal, am I missing something? That's right. They have all switched to the sustainable finance, isn't it? They're not going to finance any more coal projects henceforth. Now, the dependence of coal in India is mainly because the railway system in India is massive, massive. I mean, the entire population travels through rails. And we had a coal based railway system. Electricity was provided through coal. Now, India is blessed with solar energy like the entire part nation of India, it falls in the solar belt where we receive the solar energy for most part of the year. So this is what the solar alliance that he is initiated and taken leadership is in indulging in. So to cut the dependence of coal, it took a long time to change the infrastructure. We have automobiles. We don't have electric cars. Now, the companies that are coming in, the cartels that are dissolved that you cannot do this any further, they have said they did. This can happen. We need electric cars. We need cities which are dependent on renewable sources. These are guidelines which are given by the government in such a way that they have to follow it. It's not possible for them to now take a route and still depend on coal. Well, that's good on a couple of levels. One, as I mentioned that India didn't have other energy resources like oil. There's no oil in India, huge country, huge population, but no oil, which means that India is at risk to the oil markets in the world. If the oil markets go up, then all the fossil fuel cars will pay a lot more for fuel. So it's a good thing to get away from that, as it is in Hawaii. We don't have any oil here either. And we have to buy our oil from Indonesia and the like. So that's a good thing. It means that the oil, rather the electric car manufacturers, and I want to ask you about that, in India will have a boom because the law requires now that people get off fossil fuel. Somebody's going to have to produce a lot of electric cars. Now, China's trying to get into that market. Domestically, it has a lot of electric cars and trying to get into the European market. But what about India? Is China trying to get electric cars into India, or does India have its own automobile manufacturing facilities that will retool to electric cars? They've already been instructed very strictly to get into the electric vehicles sector, like the Tata Motors. You have Volkswagen. All these people are consciously making an effort to change their dependence from oil to electricity. We do have electric cars, but now you see the spending capacity of the Indian men to buy a new car and get rid of his old oil car is going to be a factor which is going to hamper this, bringing it into the normal stream. It is going to take time, but when a person goes to buy a new car, he will think now that I can buy an electric car because they're trying to make it not only oil-independent, they have to make it affordable for the Indian masses. The buying capacity, the dependence, it can't be an expensive electric car if it has to succeed in India. The only thing I mentioned earlier is the per capita use of fossil fuel in India is actually lower than in other countries, but the general rule, and see if you agree with me about this, is that if you provide cheap energy or ubiquitous cheap energy to a given community, to a given economy, it grows. Successful economies always have cheap and plentiful energy, so if India is able to pull that off, to do a lot of renewable energy, energy that's not subject to oil markets, energy that comes from solar, what have you, and provide more energy for entrepreneurs, for startups in India who are capable of starting new businesses, then productivity in India will increase dramatically along with Modi's initiative to move into renewables. Am I right? Yes, see the current capacity of India to depend on renewable energy is 145 watts. The target set for 2030 was 450 watts. In this summit in the Glasgow, he said that I will increase it to 500 watts, gigawatts, gigawatts. So you see there has gone from 145 to 500 is almost a tripling of the target. So you see what a big difference is going to make, and the new locomotives which are being manufactured, once they get, and I told you the major, major dependence of India on coal is through its railways. So once they are modernizing the railway system, you find that the entire system, entire dependence on fossil fuel reduces to a large extent. And it is possible for him to do this because they have actually been pointed the exact places where they can make a difference. Railways, LED, cars, cities which are electricity, which are being going to be powered by solar energy is free, they're having grids, they're having solar, solar energy is tapping into in such a massive way. You even have small temples or houses which are now shifting to solar panels rather than the normal electricity consumption methods. So is the expectation then that the rooftop solar will be there? The key to this initiative that is that people will be either expected to spend the money or the government will incentivize or maybe both so that the solar we're talking about going forward is on individual rooftops or will it be utility-scale solar where the utility does a big solar farm as we talked about in the desert in the northeast? It is being affordable solar energy. You'll see that this coalition for disaster, resilient infrastructure that he has initiated with the UK, Australia, with the small island nations. Modi's contribution to this, India's contribution to this is that we are providing know-how of solar technology to the small island states. So they can, so this same know-how is being implemented in houses of India. But it's a traditional society. It needs time to change and that time very rightfully he has pushed it by a decade, two decades and it's not wrong because it needs time to enlighten people. You have to now leave dependence on fossil fuel and make sure everything in your house is on renewable energy. Well, the very interesting is that India is not only dependent on coal right now and traditionally as a primary source of energy. It's that a lot of people are involved in the coal business. Mining the coal, mining, it's a big mining product and delivering the coal and involved in all the equipment that makes the coal work as providing energy and so I would suspect that it will be painful and it might even have political pushback on it when people realize they're going to be out of work and their coal companies are going to have to fold in favor of clean energy companies. There was a very interesting piece in the national public radio earlier today about this problem for people who have for generations, because coal is an old fuel. It's not only old in the ground, it's old in the production. People whose generations behind them have been involved in coal for many, many years. They're going to have to give it up. What effect do you think that's going to have both in terms of their economics, their ability to earn a living and also to their political pushback? When anything modern comes into traditional, it causes a friction, isn't it? So now when you're going to break in on the indigenous methods of livelihood, there is going to be an outcry. But when you see how they are rehabilitated into other sources of livelihood, or when you see the benefits of benefits, you cannot convince anybody it's going to give you a good air because I'm getting my energy from coal. Okay, I'm fine with it. Why do I care about later on? But to educate them to say that, okay, you give up this source of livelihood, you get into this hydroelectric car, you build the solar panels, you do these things for us, it's going to benefit you in the long term. And coal workers, coal mines, these are people who are, you know, they have cartels. They have huge cartels. To get rid of the cartels, they have to first target those industries which are dependent on coal. So if you cut the demand for it, the supply automatically stays redundant, doesn't it? Yes. So that's the way he's going for it that you have to stop manufacturing fossil dependent car. You have to stop using coal for household purposes. When that reduces, automatically the demand for that will reduce. He cannot target the source. So he's targeting the demand for it. One very interesting aspect of his initiative last year was that he wanted to develop coal resources in India in order to export coal. And the investment was largely directed at mining coal and shipping it off to other places. Now, if he is interested in reducing climate change, which is what this is all about, then he's got to stop exporting coal too. So all the revenue that India might have earned in the export process will have to stop. Is this going to have a negative effect on the economy? Is this something that India can tolerate? India, the export of coal of India is not that substantial as other exports or it's not going to affect the economy as much. Now, he has to deliver on what he says, isn't it? He can't make hollow promises like he said, others make hollow promises. So he has to reduce this, stop this mitigated and he is going to do this, but this coal export is a danger to the entire world, isn't it? Coal burning anywhere, the fumes are going to go and affect somebody in another place. So it's like our pandemic, which we discussed, it's not going to affect only one person. One person is going to affect everybody. So you have to understand climate change is omnipresent. Yeah, ubiquitous. So, you know, in 2009, we started with COP 15 and it's been a long time. It's been more than 10 years, some 12 years already. And, you know, one of the things that people complain about in terms of COP is that you get political rhetoric from national leaders who are going to be out of office very soon and they can make promises which their successors may not be able to deliver. And I wonder about, you know, my feeling from this discussion is that people generally will follow Modi. They like him. They like him for this. This is a good leadership point, not only for the country, not only for India, but for the world. He has distinguished himself here in the last day or so by, you know, by making this assurance. However, how long is he going to be in office, Rootmati? And, you know, you are a free society. India is a democratic country of major democratic principles, you know, one of the great democracies in the history of humanity. As a matter of fact, then you have the ability for an uneventful transfer of power. The United States may have lost that, but India still has it. If you win an election, you get the job. So my question to you is, how bound will Modi's successors be to follow on the promises he made yesterday? Now, now if you see this in five days, we just left the cup. Some it is, it is going on till November 12th. You don't have a single big leader sitting over there. They all left. So the promises that have to be made have to be delivered by the successors, like you rightly said. So now about Modi being in power, you see it, India, whom 77% that it's existed, we did not have a comprehensive timeline set for us. There was no guideline. And this is the first that we have guidelines that you have to do this, you have to do that. The infrastructure is changing. You know, you have basic amenities reaching common man. Modi is not just being elected on a political rhetoric. He's been elected on the development work that he does. There is a lot of flaw in his ideology or whatever you want to say. But you cannot deny the fact that he works for the infrastructure and development of India that has happened going far and few in between the dynasty politics that took place before this. When you think for the country, however bad you are, however, I may not agree with you, there is a country that is going to develop because I get basic amenities. And that's what is keeping this government in power. They are developing basic railway stations, bus stations, roads, bridges. You have all this happening everywhere. So it works. It works for the common man. And, okay, you're paying more for fossil fuels, everything that works. Yeah, it hurts. But then what works is more than what hurts. That is the reason why he's. Well, there's another element too I want to explore with you and it's this. So he goes to Glasgow and he makes these statements and he is elevated immediately by global media to be a leader in climate change. I don't think there was a newspaper across the world that didn't report his initiative to get off fossil fuels net zero by 2070. I mean, this was global news and he distinguished himself in doing that for sure. And he distinguished India in doing that for sure. And then you take India, which is 1.234 billion people and everybody in India knows he did this. I mean, every newspaper, every media has made it clear to everyone in the country that he did this. And I think that not only has he distinguished himself on the global stage of climate change, but also in India. And I think I would guess that he has generated a pride, a pride among the Indians that now they are associated with this very important global ideal. And they can be they the country can be leaders and will be leaders in reaching the goal. Am I right? Do people feel that way? Do you think? For sure, for sure, Jay, because you see the Mr. Modi has got leadership qualities, isn't it? Now he has gone on a global state and he's announced two huge initiatives, which he has initiated himself. The Solar Alliance started in the Paris Agreement five years back. Now it has got more than 100 member states. He's talking of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure. These two initiatives show that a person can come up and make a difference. And he's saying the point that I liked about his speech was when he said that the countries who do not follow these guidelines punch them. Can you do that? Can you punish anybody for climate change? But he is saying that you can do this, put pressure on the countries to follow it. He called on the North-South divide between the developed and the underdeveloping countries and said the developed countries have to contribute close to one trillion dollars. So that is a call. And when somebody takes a stand like this, such a strong stand on basis of developed countries, talking of small island nations, hobnobbing with the developed countries to build alliances, you see that there's a comprehensive persona that he portrays. That spelled success for India on the oil stage. And climate change is a place where you have a lot of color promises. And to see a leader talk of timelines, deadlines, practical ones, even if they're later than the normal thing, he spoke practical. And he gave results, what is happening. So that was the difference between leaders who just speak and leaders who act. Yes, everyone is asking that. Who are the leaders who give us rhetoric and who are the leaders that give us action? And there's a big distinction in terms of the way the world looks at those leaders. And I suggest to you that he has distinguished himself and in the process distinguished India as a place of action on the climate change stage. I will also suggest this, see if you agree with me, that as in when he completes the task or at least gets on the road, you know, it's a long way, it's a long way to completing the task, but it gets on the road and does the things that have to be done illegally. And in terms of, you know, national development, he will change India. He will be a remarkable figure in Indian history. He will change the country in terms of economics, in terms of politics, in terms of self perception and all perception of the global place that India occupies. Am I right? Do you feel that too? Absolutely. It was stunning headlines, which showed that India has a leader who can take you on the global stage and it was not just stunning in the way he portrays his ambitions. You can call it ambitions, but those ambitions have got a solid concrete practical plan which is in line. That's why you cannot, now how many leaders represented their countries, but how many stood out? How many could have the same bargaining power with developed countries and the same alliance with non-developed countries? So that kind of a two-way or two-pronged influence that he has is very rare. And if he succeeds on this climate, it's going to benefit everybody. You must be proud. Are you proud? Very proud. You know, I wanted to ask you one more question about it. We started out discussing, you know, your latest book, reforming the United Nations. And in fact, you're intimately familiar with the United Nations working there. And so, I guess, you know, the question really is, how does what happened, it didn't happen, so to speak, and still not finished, it still has a few days to go. But what is happening at COP26, how does that affect the United Nations? How will it affect the United Nations? No organization in the world should be as concerned with climate change as the United Nations. And there have been many criticisms. I'm sure you covered it in the book of the United Nations and its ability, its collective will to do something about climate change. Will COP26 affect that? COP26 becomes a milestone for the United Nations as have all the main summits. You know, it provides just a guideline. But you see the alliances and the bilaterals that take place on the backdrop of the UN are the ones which actually make a difference. Now, this solar alliance was formed in the United Nations General Assembly, sidelines with India and the Caribbean, Karikom and the Pacific nations. It didn't happen on the UN platform. So, what the UN is doing is just providing a platform, only sole intergovernmental comprehensive platform for the countries to come and talk. But the effectiveness of policies takes place in the bilaterals and multilaterals that take place on the sidelines of the UN. So, that is where, now, even you said these, because we do not have a mechanism for implementation in the UN. They just say it, but there are no punishments or no, you cannot be penalized for not conforming to the guidelines. That becomes a picking point for the UN. You just say it, but you don't see that it is done. You know, that is the point, that is the drawback of the setback for the UN. Yeah, it's always been and is subject to these international politics involving strategical moves like by Russia and China. So, you know, they sort of pull the rug out from under a legitimate, well-intentioned initiative, and regrettable, but maybe between COVID and climate change and the follow-up on COP26, the United Nations will be able to step up a little more. I'm hoping that. I know you're hoping that. So, we have to get back together again. Rupmati, we have to discuss this going forward. This is something to watch. It is an existential threat. Humanity is at risk, and you and me, we can talk about that. Maybe we can save the world, Rupmati. So, what message would you leave with our viewers? It's like the same thing that we said for the other discussions that we always have comprehensive issues, which are so comprehensive. They are global, but affect you on a personal level. So, climate change is going to, it's not a threat that will affect future generations and our children and this and that. It's existential. It is about now. It is how much, you know, you can see the adverse effects of climate in every place that we are seeing today. So, we have to mitigate and we have to do our little part in trying to depend now on renewable sources of energy. Do that bit to work. Let's hope. Let's hope. We are all together now, like it or not. Thank you so much, Rupmati. Rupmati Kandagar out of New York today. We so enjoy talking with you and we hope to do it again soon. Always a pleasure to. Aloha and namaste.