Sustainability and development to be at the heart of India’s G20 presidency

There are upsides and downsides to development in a decarbonising world, he said. The upside is that much of the required infrastructure is yet to be built and can therefore be tackled with net zero in mind: India suffers from few ‘stranded assets’. However, it remains the case that most of today’s cheapest energy sources are also the biggest carbon generators. ‘India has signed up to the challenge of using new technology to try and achieve a similar quality of life [to that in the richest countries],’ said Bery, acknowledging that it is the more difficult path. Bilimoria commented that, ‘It’s a transition: not an on/off switch.’

In common with other developing countries, India has benefited from a number of leapfrog technologies, allowing it to develop public digital platforms rather than having to depend on ‘walled garden’ platforms provided by the global technology companies. These go hand in hand with a powerful innovation culture that starts with ‘tinkering labs’ in high schools and continues with systemised and supported incubators, creating the third largest start-up ecosystem in the world.

Dean Dutta observed that young people in India are increasingly entrepreneurial and that the ‘bottom-up, democratised way of digitisation’ described by Bery is capable of driving large-scale change. Soumitra himself was in India in last month attending the B20, the official G20 dialogue forum with the global business community, where he called for global collaboration between businesses, entrepreneurs and universities to create ‘clusters of excellence and bolster the response of governments around world in tackling crises’.

He thanked Bery for his insights as well as his leadership within NITI Aayog, which is important both inside and outside India, and hoped that he would continue to strengthen links with Oxford in the future.