 Rwy'n dechrau i siwr yng Ngindogol, sy'n gweld wrefriaeth analeysu hyffordd iawn, y ffordd dylwgen i roi'r ffordd a'r rhan o'i dod i'r pwyllteisio sy'n gweithio ymweld y tro mwy fyrdd y cyfnod, y mae yw cyfnod, ac wrth gwrs, sut amlwg cyfeirio a'r prinsenol yw i'r prinsirau arlau, so that they make less of an impact on the climate and on the way we use resources in the longer term. I'm now going to hand over to Ramesh, who is the head of the Jannagra Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, and who is now going to introduce our second distinguished speaker and to chair much, if not all, of the rest of the session. Thank you, Tony. We have a full session today, and we are already running a few minutes late. So without much ado, I just want to make a couple of comments before I hand off to Mrs Dixit. The first is at the end of Nick's extraordinary presentation, he talked about the need for change and the need for leadership, and much of the leadership will come from our political institutions and they are going to be the central actors in making this change happen. And as far as the theme of cities are concerned, we have, like most other countries, a complex political tapestry in India. We have a federal system, multiple organisations, multiple political institutions, not very clear lines of demarcation between how these institutions at the local, state and federal levels interact with each other, especially on such a complex subject as the environment and climate change. And probably Delhi is among the most complex of these ecosystems, just given the number of political institutions that are there in Delhi, both at the union government, we have the state government which is headed by Mrs Dixit, we have the Delhi Development Authority, the municipal corporation of Delhi, the Delhi Contourment, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, and these are just a small handful of agencies that are responsible for the destiny of that city. I will now hand over to Mrs Dixit to hear about her views as one of the central leaders and the work that she's been doing and her vision for how cities and states can address the issue of climate change. Mrs Dixit needs no introduction, she's the chief minister of Delhi. Importantly, the first chief minister of that state to have been elected for a second term, so clearly re-elected with a popular mandate, has done a lot of things to address the issue of climate change and bring women in. She's represented India at the United Nations as well. So Mrs Dixit, over to you. That's all right. Thank you. A very good morning to all of you, very distinguished participants to this, what I would consider a very, very important meeting organised by the London School of Economics to discuss climate change and what our collective and individual contribution towards this can be. I'd especially like to thank Mr Birdit for having invited me and Mr Stern for having given this very wonderful and lucid presentation. When Mr Birdit wrote to me, he asked me three questions around which I assume that he wants me to speak. First question was what were the challenges that I saw in front of me nine years ago when I came into, first time into government. The challenges were enormous at that time. Delhi was a city or looked like a city which was going to decay under the weight of its migration which is about half a million people every year. A city which was going to disintegrate because there seemed to be no one agency as has already been mentioned here which seemed to be responsible for what is happening to Delhi. The federal government sits there. We have an elected government which I represent. We have a municipal corporation which looks after about 97% of Delhi's municipal work. It has a very small, with a very efficient New Delhi municipal council which does not have an elected body. It's a nominated body. It has the cantonment board which looks after again a small part of Delhi. But the government which I am supposed to represent and the municipal corporation of Delhi, my government looks after practically the whole of Delhi. Not practically, it does look after. It's supposed to be in charge of that. And the municipal corporation of Delhi looks after 97% of municipal administration. It is an elected body and which is not directly under me, that is the state government. It comes under two ministries of the government of India, the Urban Development Ministry and the Ministry of Home Affairs. So it's a very complicated system that we work in. In a complicated system it's very easy to pass the buck. I cannot do it because somebody else will not allow it. Or why should I feel motivated because it could be somebody else's job. However, when we came into governance in 1999 practically because it was December 98 when we formally took over, we found the situation absolutely horrifying. One Delhi was about the most polluted city in the world. It was not as developed as other cities which it would like to compare itself to. London, New York and even Bangkok and Malaysia and Singapore and all. It has enormous amount of money. It is a heritage city. It's a beautiful city. It's a city of poverty but not the kind of poverty that you find in the rest of Delhi, of India. So there are poor people. There's a tremendous shortage of housing because it's almost impossible to cater to half a million people coming into the city. And because there is a shortage of housing, either houses are developed by the land mafias on unauthorisedly constructing colonies where there is no availability of the basic civic services or the service providers of the city settle down in what we call the slum areas, what you call the slum areas and what we call the Chagijopri clusters, a site which is familiar in Bombay also. Now, so our first priority has to be how we can give decent living accommodation to all those who not only live in Delhi but who also come from outside Delhi. Can we make holding areas for the construction labour that comes into Delhi so that they can live under a decent roof, have some drinking water, have electric supply and minimal cleanliness at least and sanitation? Now these, to me, still remain the challenges of Delhi because unless we are able to cater to these 40 million, we are 16 million in Delhi and out of these 16 million, at least 4 million people live in these kind of conditions where they do not have proper housing, proper sanitation, proper drinking water and proper power supply. If out of the 16 million, 4 million are going to live in that condition, that city is going to find it difficult to come up to the standards which all of you are going to talk about and discuss. But I'd like to share now the happier side of the picture that in spite of this, in spite of Delhi having no natural resources at all, not even a water resource, it has managed to grow up into a city which changed its transport system, its public transport system. The only city in the world which has a fleet of vehicles, particularly public transport, in fact all public transport, whether they are taxis or the tuk-tuk's or whatever it is, which is driven by the CNG gas and that is about 100,000 vehicles because before that the emissions coming from diesel and petrol, which was not of the kind of standard that we have today, the Bharat III and the Bharat II norms, the Euro II and the Euro III norms, it was awful, the smog was just awful. So one step which contributed towards easing Delhi's environmental concerns was this introduction of the CNG fuel for public transport. Then there was the introduction of the metro which came around the same time. Today we have about 80 kilometres or 72 kilometres of the metro running around Delhi, absolutely a clean system, no emissions whatsoever, which is going to by the year 2010 become about 200 plus kilometres. That will make an enormous change. Thirdly, we started increasing our green cover. Our green cover was a mere 37 square kilometres in 1998-99. Today we can with humility but with pride share with you that it is over 375 square kilometres of green cover in Delhi. That's why we boast of the fact that Delhi is one of the greener cities of the world and certainly the greener city in India. We also have originally in the topographic of Delhi about 300 water bodies which were ruined because the land mafia took over them, filled them up, started building over them or the water dried up and nobody could take care of that. We started a campaign about four years ago, three years ago, when we said that we must restore as many as we can of these 300 water bodies and I'm happy to share with you that today about nearly 200 water bodies have been rejuvenated and are great sources of water supply, washing and giving underground water to the areas where they are. How did this happen? In the kind of multiplicity of authorities that we have, the kind of pressures that we had, the kind of a society that most societies are selfish, looking only at their own achievements or their own requirements, not bothering about the others, an enormous wastage of electricity, enormous wastage of water, enormous and shameful theft of electric power, shameful wastage of water resources that if a tap is kept, particularly if a community tap is kept leaking, it goes on leaking the whole 24 hours of seven days a week or months on end, water keeps flowing out, a Yamuna River, which is supposed to be the lifeline of our city, completely devastated because it's highly polluted, not only because the sewers that come in from the city itself, but also from industrial units and Delhi has been a great trading centre and a great industrial centre also. So these were the challenges that we found in front of us. How did we overcome many of them and are on the way for making people realise how they have to conserve water, how electricity has to be conserved, that you cannot have consistently a growth of 9% to 10% every year or electric power users, you have to stop somewhere that growth because we cannot put up cool plants in our city because they are polluting, we have to borrow power from outside and power is not easy to get. My first lesson which I learnt, can I have a glass of a little bit of hot water please? Thank you. Somebody will do it. A little hot water. I'm terribly sorry. This is the climate change taking place in Delhi. Thank you. The first lesson I learnt when I became the chief minister of Delhi was by a farmer, an undereducated farmer who came to see me and told me, I will first say it in Hindi and then translate it for you in English. He said you will never overcome the power problem. So I said why? He said for the simple reason that wherever there is a heater, there is no meter and wherever there is a meter there is no heater. I thought it was the simplest explanation how people exploit something that they know is for free. And then dawned upon me that the reason why Delhi's electric power consumption goes on rising at the rate it does is that nobody wants to pay for it. Nobody has to pay for it. Nobody is asked to pay for it. It's so easy to hook on a wire and thieve the power. It's so easy to put on a community tap and let it run the whole day because you're not having to pay out of your pocket. So let the water just run away. Good clean water. Or use good clean treated water to wash the street in front of you, to wash your cars and clean the trees that are in front of you. Good clean treated water. So we started a campaign of how do you conserve energy, water, transport, petrol, et cetera. And how do you contribute towards personally making Delhi into a greener and a cleaner city. So we started this movement and as a government you know movements are not always successful because people by and large are suspicious of governments. The governments are always considered as those who are ruling and therefore far away from those who are ruling. We started a system of development through partnership which we in our language called Bhagidari. It was an interactive system between our bureaucracy because eventually we, you and I, political people may have lots of grandiose ideas, we have good dreams, we have wonderful aspirations, but the implementation has to be done by the bureaucracy. So we started by making that bureaucracy which works in a kind of closeted framework with directly with the people. The people to understand what are the constraints of a bureaucracy, how it functions, what are its responsibilities. And for the people to understand, and for the bureaucracy sorry to understand, that when people come to us looking for succour, either health or they come to us looking for education or they come to us looking for more water or they come to us looking for a better road, don't shoo them away, don't shy away from them, listen to them. They probably have a suggestion which you do not know because you are planning inside an office, a government office, which is closed, interact with them. If a community or an area thinks that a road is much more important than fencing a garden, then please do the road this time, you can fence the garden in the next plan or the next year around. So this interaction between the people, the bureaucracy and of course the political leaders helped us enormously. And Delhi received in the year 2006 or was it five, the United Nations award, best award for the best governance, new practices in governance in the world. Now thank you, thank you for appreciating this, but I say this with a great sense of humility. Now we went forward and today Delhi does look a cleaner city, it certainly looks a green city. Why does it look a green city? We plant one million trees every year, but when we came into government we found that one million was a figure which was there in the papers, this department did that much, this department did 100,000, this department did that much. Now the logical conclusion was that if over the past so many decades, Delhi had been green at this rate, we should have had far less people and more trees in Delhi, but that was not the case because the figures were official figures. So we involve people, we involve school children. Today in Delhi we have about 1800 eco clubs running in our schools where the children grow trees, nurture plants and in our government we do not gift each other with flowers, we gift each other with plants. And you see, I proudly say that every Delhiite now has a green finger. The challenges in front of us remain exactly what they were when we took over because shortages are there, demands have written, we are speaking about developed countries and underdeveloped countries. The developed countries were probably reached a pinnacle of their demands, but the developed countries are still aspiring. We are still fighting to get to the standards of Europe, of America or even the Southeast Asian countries. And our demands are much more because we are much larger, we are much bigger, we know that we are aware that our glaciers are melting, we are aware of all these things, we want to get credit carbons, but so the challenge is the same as it is anywhere else in the world. The nature may be somewhat different. We also will be very proud of the fact that one of our own citizens who runs Terry was given the Nobel Prize this year for his work in climate change. The nice part of it is that people are beginning to feel aware that you cannot draw water out from under the earth without putting some water back. Water harvesting is important. You have to use solar panels to heat your water and the other big consuming electric power systems. That is happening also. Therefore there is an awareness, perhaps it's not as enough as it ought to be, but awareness can only come around if we also emphasize production as much as we emphasize on conservation. Conservation to my mind is the key if you want to stop the kind of climate change that is happening right in front of our eyes year after year, we can see it almost every year changing. The winter pattern has changed, the summer pattern has changed, the monsoon pattern has changed. The fuel, we are going to try and bring a monorail in Delhi so that we can have a clean system of travel, added on cleaner system of travel, but Delhi is difficult. It's a tough city, it's a herited city, it's got layers upon layers upon layers of growth over thousands of years to make them all modern, to change them all for the requirements of a modern clean city. A city which will contribute towards making the climate better for humanity and for all the animals and the flora kingdom, I think that would be our greatest contribution. We are aware of it, you'd be surprised to know that Delhi has at least a variety of 100 to 150 trees. It has a variety of birds which could run to 100 to 125. We have two parks which are biodiversity parks where people are learning things. So we are moving, but I sometimes wonder, is it fast enough? What we are doing, is it enough? Or is everybody getting involved in it, becoming aware of the responsibility that each one of us has, not only as a government, as a society, as scientists, as leaders of their communities, but as NGOs to make a better world for the future generations to come. Thank you very much. Thank you Mrs Dixit for talking about the challenges of political leaders in taking this important issue of climate change forward and also for sharing not only the issues of vision, but how do you bring the entire city, the residents of the city and various stakeholders to also participate and take ownership over the future.