The Clean India initiative goes far beyond its social remit into a business opportunity, for Indian and overseas companies alike. With the full weight of the government behind cleaner, greener infrastructure, there is no better time to invest in this sector.
Internationally, green is considered the colour of money because the US dollar, the most widely used currency in the world, is green. The Indian rupee is not green by any stretch of imagination but green could soon mean big bucks in India.
The Narendra Modi government has invested a lot of political capital on greening and cleaning India. In a nutshell, the government wants to:
- Improve sanitation and cleanliness across India
- Clean the Ganga and some other polluted rivers
- Cut carbon emission and control atmospheric pollution
- Generate an additional 175 GW of solar, wind and nuclear power by 2022
Taken together, these represent a multi-year, multi-billion dollar opportunity for Indian and foreign companies to contribute to India's development and earn handsome returns for themselves.
Improving sanitation and cleanliness across India will need to leverage the latest waste management technologies. Urban India, in particular, faces a daunting task in this regard especially as planners have to simultaneously tackle the problem of mass migration into India already overstretched cities.
In most cities, most notably in Mumbai and Kolkata, as well as in several other urban centres, waste piles up and is often burned, causing air pollution and spreading diseases.
To encourage cleanliness and improve the health of its citizens, the government has unveiled plans for the following:
- To discourage open defecation, which is a major problem across India, every household should have access to toilets connected to an underground sewerage system;
- All schools, especially those for girls, should have adequate number of toilets;
- Every household, office and commercial enterprise should be connected to a city-wide waste disposal and management system;
- Put in place a comprehensive sanitation plan that is monitored daily;
- Put in place adequate technical and institutional systems for the collection, transportation and disposal of waste;
- Put in place systems for the segregation of organic and inorganic waste and solid and liquid waste too enable recycling of this material at multiple decentralised locations;
- Build and maintain adequate and efficient sewerage systems as well as flood management systems to ensure adequate as large parts of India get heavy rainfall that exacerbates problems associated with waste disposal and management; and
- Make use of technology to ensure that the above systems can be monitored on a real time basis and any deficiencies are plugged in the quickest possible time.
It has been estimated that this alone can generate business worth more than $10 billion per year and provide massive opportunities for domestic and foreign companies with expertise in these areas.
Taking note of the failure of previous efforts to clean the Ganga, the Modi government has come out with a comprehensive plan to rejuvenate the river by involving local communities that depend on the river for their livelihoods, thus, ensuring that they have some skin in the game. It has taken pains to ensure that corporate bodies and local citizens groups that participate in the clean-up effort are rewarded financially. For this purpose, it is working out an innovative financing model whereby the government will provide a small amount upfront but the rest of the costs will have to be met from 15-20 year annuities.
A large part of the technical knowhow and machinery to clean this 2,500 km long river will have to come from abroad, mainly Europe, which has considerable expertise and experience in this field.
The Government of India has recently signed a three year agreement with GIZ, an arm of the German government, to adopt river basin management strategies that Germany used to clear rivers like the Danube and the Rhine of pollutants.
There are opportunities for other European and US consultants, firms and equipment suppliers with experience in this field to partner with Indian government agencies involved in the Namami Gange initiative.
The Modi government has planned to increase to 40 per cent the share of renewable energy in India's total generating capacity and cut emissions by 33-35 per cent of GDP by 2030.
Though a large part of the more than $100 billion required for this initiative will come from private investments, the government will still have to spend a considerable sum of money to turn this vision into reality.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley has increased the cess of coal production from Rs 200 per tonne to Rs 400 per tonne. This is expected to raise about $4 billion per annum (at the current rate of coal production) and will go mainly towards the National Clean Energy Fund.
Already, firms from the US, UK, Germany, France, China, Japan and South Korea have committed billions of dollars of investments in this sector or have expressed interest in doing so. Given the level of interest among investors, power minister Piyush Goyal has said it may be possible to meet the targeted capacity even before the 2022 deadline.
Thus, the efforts of the government to clean India, clean the Ganga and clean up the environment present a multi-billion opportunity for companies and consultants with the requisite expertise.
