[Answered]“India could use green technologies to galvanise its faltering economy, create new jobs and become a climate leader.” Comment.

Green technologies encompass various aspects of technology which help reduce the human impact on the environment and create ways of sustainable development. Social equitability, economic feasibility and sustainability are the key parameters for green technologies. India’s recent push for renewable energies and green technologies by pushing for solar, wind and nuclear energy can go a long way and can help in Indian growth story.

How Green technologies can provide an economic push?

Since Green technology requires more involvement it also empowers people. It helps people as it can be diffused much more easily in remote areas due to its discretised nature.

1. Reduce input cost: One of the basic aims of any corporation is to reduce the cost incurred at the input side. Green technologies like green buildings, energy efficiency measures, green manufacturing etc have qualified as energy and resource savers. This not only helps the corporations to slash their input costs but also serves as an avenue for them to fulfil their social responsibilities.
2. Manufacturing: Manufacturing firms can achieve significant benefits by green manufacturing. In manufacturing, green technologies can help in reducing waste and pollution by changing patterns of production and consumption. This not only reduces the environmental footprint of a product but it also makes production an environmentally sustainable and economically cheaper activity as inputs from source are reduced by design.
3. Energy: Power generation is another sector where green technology might create wonders. Green energyi.e. solar PV, biogas production, wind power etc. can provide more employment opportunities to people and can be applied to provide energy solutions to communities in remote areas successfully.

4.Trickle effect: The fact is that all the green technologies take into account the needs of the people and environment, thus it is no wonder that an achievement in one area trickles down to other areas also. E.g. In India people have used alternative green power generation technologies and have not only fulfilled their own energy needs but have also sold their energy to the grid thereby making significant income.

5. Rural benefits: Green technologies can have great impact on communities of the areas. Provision of bio-gas plants to rural households can empower communities and to increase their productivity. It was seen during distribution of solar lanterns through certain programs e.g. TERI’s Lighting a Billion Lives Campaign. It is clear that people have benefited from it by not only using the outputs personally but also by trading it.
6. Creation of avenues: Green technologies have the potential to give birth to sectors which were previously not thought of,particularly at the time of economic slowdown.For example earlier waste management was only limited to waste dumping. Today waste management is a $25 billion industry in south Asia alone. Thus resulting in cleaning up of environment, employment generation, reduction in toxic and green house gas emission and thus has multiple benefits.
7. Green Farming: Green approaches to farming have been proven to be not only healthier for humans but also productive for the soil. It leads to higher productivity over sustained periods of time contrary to the inorganic farming practices which lead to decrease in yield after a certain period of time.

Thus we can see that there are many benefits of using green technologies. Employment generation, human empowerment, rural development, environmental improvement, energy security, health improvement, decrease in resource depletion are only a few benefits of green technologies, many more will manifest themselves as time passes.Green technologies have been applied in many sectors however they have not been still put into full fledged use e.g. in the energy sector they are still “alternate sources of energy”. More push is needed to make it priority of the present.