India can achieve Viksit Bharat and Net Zero without trade-offs

In 'Eyes Now on Viksit, Net Zero Later' (Edit Page, Oct 16), Bjorn Lomborg argues that India's ambition to become a developed country by 2047 and its commitment to net zero emissions by 2070 'work at cross-purposes', and presents an 'immense trade-off' in which trying to achieve both will make Indians poorer. But data he quotes and reports he cites reach almost the opposite conclusion.

NITI Aayog's study, 'Scenarios Towards Viksit Bharat and Net Zero', estimates that net zero needs $8.1 tn additional investment over the next 45 yrs. Lomborg divides this by today's GDP and concludes that India must spend 4% of GDP every year for half a century to achieve net zero, more than it spends on education or health. This is fakery, not analysis.

The $8.1 tn is spent in an economy projected to grow to $30 tn by 2047, and keep growing thereafter. So, cumulatively, additional investment comes to 0.8% of GDP, 70% of which is required after 2050. Lomborg's '4%' would be correct only if India stopped growing after 2025.

Similarly, his comparison of net-zero investments with schools and hospitals equates apples with oranges. $8.1 tn is capex on solar, EVs and green steel, assets that earn revenue, most of them financed by banks, private capital and foreign investors, not by government budgets. A solar plant pays for itself, a primary school doesn't - and shouldn't. Claiming that a rupee of private capital is a rupee taken from a child's classroom is intellectual dishonesty.

Worse, he has got his arithmetic wrong. Even if India's spending on health and education stays at today's share of GDP till 2070, the additional net-zero investment is at most ¼th of either. So, his claim of net zero seizing money from health and education is false.

He applies the same sleight of hand to every number he touches. Heat, he says, kills fewer than 90,000 Indians a year, while cold kills more than 6 lakh. So, concern about rising heat is misplaced. The figures come from a 2021 Lancet Planetary Health modelling study, whose conclusion he has reversed.

The authors' summary reads: 'Deaths related to hot temperatures increased in all regions from 2000 to 2019, indicating that global warming due to climate change will make this mortality figure worse in the future.' This conclusion is substantiated by GoI's data, which counted 19,693 reported heatstroke deaths and 15,197 cold-exposure deaths during 2001-19, with increasing mortality from heatstroke.

But mortality is only part of the cost. The Lancet Countdown estimates that India lost 247 bn potential labour hours to heat in 2024, 124% more than in the 1990s, resulting in income loss of $194 bn. Agriculture and construction accounted for 86% of the lost hours. These are costs of rising heat borne by the very workforce that will build Viksit Bharat. Yet, Lomborg trivialises the issue.

He similarly misrepresents 'Climate Change Economics' study to suggest that net zero could cost India over 20% of GDP a year. That figure comes from a scenario in which the world, India included, reaches net zero by 2050, 20 yrs before India's target.

Finally, Lomborg dismisses India's net-zero efforts because it would lower global temperature by only 0.16° C by 2100. This is the classic divide-and-rule tactic: measure each country's contribution in isolation and conclude that nobody's action matters. This is how he has justified inaction by the US, Europe and China in the past.

NITI's report is a development-first analysis. Its conclusion is that India can become a developed economy in the net-zero scenario by decoupling growth from energy and emissions, cutting fossil-fuel imports, strengthening energy security, cleaning its air and building the industries of the future. Where the report does flag a problem - a $6.5 tn financing gap, much of it needing concessional finance and grants from developed countries - Lomborg is silent.

If Lomborg wants to promote Viksit Bharat, he should go to Washington, Brussels and London and argue that the rich world, which built its prosperity on fossil fuels, should reach net zero faster and help finance the gap for those who did not. Otherwise, India does not need a lecture on trade-offs from a man who cannot read the report he cites.