India on the Move: the subcontinent is buzzing with mobility, and poised to assume leadership of the global bioeconomy

Part 1 of a Digest series on India’s projects, progress and emerging bioeconomy leadership.

By car, motorcycle, auto-rickshaw, truck, tractor, bus, train, camel, elephant, or on foot, India is on the move.

From the effervescent hornblowing of the traffic that pours through its cities and interconnecting highways like a hot magma, to the trumpets of new policy formulation emerging out of Delhi, to the dings of iPhone alerts as innovations pour out of the southern tech strongholds of Pune and Mumbai. You can see it in the swathes of sugar cane in the northeastern reaches of Uttar Pradesh, in the oceans of oilseeds in Maharashtra and Rajasthan, in each brickworks combusting biomass waste to generate heat, in the early stages of a biogas revolution based in press-mud, India is vaulting into the leadership of the global bioeconomy. 

Everywhere, there’s mobility in India, rich and poor, consumer and business, traditional and modern, conventional and innovative.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were the new Tiger Economies of Southeast Asia and East Asia who wrought manufacturing miracles hat hammered down the price of automobiles and consumer electronics as new dynasties such as Sony, Samsung, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, CJ Group, SK, LG became household names and prepared us for an equally transformative wave of manufacturing in China in the 90s and 2000s.

The momentum has shifted south and west to India. Nowadays, there’s hardly a help-desk or an IT project that doesn’t connect to the subcontinent; local industry is producing 70,000 different chemicals; groups like Tata are widely known on the world stage now.

But why? Why is India on the move? It’s not hard to see: India has the first giant post-modern national economy.

Each day, the major Indian newspapers are packed with bioeconomy news and perspective.

What and why?

The modern world was based on a revolution in mineral extraction including our fossil stores of energy. Today, fossil extraction is, to many, unsustainable. But it’s more than that: the practice is simply not endurable. The crisis of skyfill, the resource conflicts that rise up over the inequitable distribution of mineral resources. Oil, gas, diamonds, coal, gold, silver, iron, zinc, nickel, lithium, water, copper, tin, aluminum, the list goes on, the inequities have built up. 

We have lived according to the dictates of an “all of the Below” economy, applying resources of financial and physical engineering to add value to mineral through supply-chain and the pursuit of efficient physical extraction. Then, we form cartels. 

Some are downstream. Picture the 19th century and capitalists in their top hats and fine houses. They were the owners of everything downstream from the point of extraction. Refineries, railroads, ships, stores, banks.  Sometimes, the upstream forms a cartel. Think diamonds from South Africa, or oil from the Middle East. Those can be even more painful, for minerals are not distributed, as plants are, generally in accordance with population. It is luck of the draw, fortunes for the few, misery for the many.

Fleets of trucks, cycles and cars choke the roads and emerging freeways, with their fulsome horn-blowing as they eco-locate the traffic around them.

The Post-Modern Economy is different. It is not about “All of the Below”, it is about “All of the Above” — that is to say, energy, materials, chemicals, food, fiber and so forth are produced above the ground.

The Post-Modern Economy’s two scoops of good news

There’s good news in the Post-Modern Economy, two scoops of it.

First scoop? The wind blows everywhere, and the sun shines everywhere. There are nuances of wind curves, moisture and solar angles that make this place or that a little better than that place to build renewable energy production, but the inequities therein are entirely minor compared to the problems of mineral distribution. It is the same with biomass — with just a few exceptions of dry and cold, biomass grows everywhere.

New forms of energy for mobility can be seen everywhere, from rising ethanol blends to compressed biogas and electric charging statiions for the emerging EVs.

Yet, the second scoop of good news is even more important. By and large the people are where the biomass is, distribution is more just; the resources to run a Post-Modern economy are affordable and at hand. In the Post-Modern economy, there will be fewer resource conflicts, less disparity between rich and poor, fewer trade bottlenecks such as the Strait of Malacca or the South China Sea. Inequity will not go away, but it will abate, and it will be easier to abate, for the Extrcation economy creates the tensions and inequities that are hardest to abate.

Why India, and when?

India’s vast stores of gold and diamonds have long been extracted and carted off to foreign capitals. India has few resources of oil, natural gas, lithium, nickel or what have you, commensurate with the size of its economy. India has two unparalleled assets, their biomass and their imagination. 

India’s G20 presidency this year was celebrated in the cities with kilometers upon kilometers of hand-painted “talking walls” that exhorted sustainable actions, and welcomed G20 delegates

It’s no surprise that India’s economic growth is terrific, 7.6 percent this year, no economy of this size can compare to it. The vitality can be seen everywhere. In the past few weeks, the Digest team has traveled through as much of India as we could. High level meetings in the policy center of Delhi, tours and meet-ups in private research labs and national laboratories, with entrepreneurs, investors, incubators. We have explored the sugarcane and oilseed producing regions in depth, the farmer co-ops, manufacturing plants for fuels, chemicals, fertilizers, energy and food. We met with school children, ordinary workers in the major cities and regions, shopkeepers, traders, drivers, and scientists.

We see a country bustling like a bee, a people fiercely competitive yet cooperative in a way summed up in the incessant honking on India roads by which drivers negotiate their point As to point Bs with poise and cacophony. Fleets of motorcycles, mini-taxis and a barrage of trucks make it clear that India must look beyond “electrify everything” to power its vibrant trade and the movement of its peoples.

Tradition and the urgencies of the Post-Modern economy meet and align on the streets of the cities and the country roadways.

It is built — all of India is built — on a Post-Modern base of sunshine, sky, water and intelligence, for those are the enduring resources. From the sun comes the wind, from the atmospheric CO2, water and sunshine comes the biomass. Little of the modern India is based on the Mineral economy or is required to be so — even computers are trending towards biobased circuitry and DNA-based data storage, and India’s electric resources to power its vast IT industries are bound to be supplied by electrons from solar, wind and biomass, in the end. It’s the way forward for the Global South.

‘Electrify everything’ the last hurrah of the Mineral Extraction Economy

The Extraction Economy is far from gone, Actually, the drive to “electrify everything” it its last hurrah — the highly engineered rare-earth based components, the expensive vehicles affordable to those who sit atop that bottlenecks in mineral supply, the tipping of the economy towards a growth in electrical production that is sure to keep fossil fuels around for longer than needed. 

Yet, in India, we have seen the future, an economy not based on extraction but harvesting, and it works.