We recently spent a week in Delhi, our second visit this year. If you ignore the jet lag, is always a pleasure spending time in India, as so much is being done – both from top down and grassroots up – to try and cope with a long list of challenges. There is a ‘can do’ attitude which is great. And a real contrast to the bureaucratic fog, waffle and cynicism we are used to in Europe.

Another big contrast is the way that business leaders, politicians and academics over there are prepared to work together to tackle problems without first making sure they get on the payroll or have the consulting contract signed.

You might think this is all a bit of fluff, but the other week in Delhi we spent the best part of three days around a table with several company owners, senior academics and industrial managers whose sole purpose for being there was to help us work out how to put low cost sustainable electricity supply into rural Africa, using local bio-waste (grass, leaves, twigs, coconut shells – basically rubbish that is not being used for something else).

Note carefully – this was no ‘think tank’, no collection of £750k per annum luminaries giving speeches, no Now-or-Never, Traffic-Stopping-Climate Change Summit. This was a group of people, most of them with engineering backgrounds, teasing out a solution to an engineering problem. The proposition – ‘this is working quite well in India, and they should maybe do similar things in Africa’ – was not a patronising one, at all. My take on the proposition was – ‘this is working quite well in India, and maybe we should be doing similar things in the UK’.

Okay, there were no politicians in our group, but you get the point. Okay, maybe they see an opportunity down the road to sell some of their equipment. The fact is they pitched in. They showed up. They shared their expertise with no retainers being paid, no promise of future orders, no post-meeting press release designed to raise their green credentials.

Indians seem to really like getting together and tackling a problem. It is an attitude we like. Our latest project relies heavily on this. In partnership with SCC India, TERI University, the Delhi Technical University and Amrit Non-Conventional Energy Systems, we plan to put a biomass briquetting machine ‘on the road’, collecting a small portion of the estimated 40,000 tonnes of grass, leaves and tree clippings that are taken from public sites in Delhi and dumped every year in landfill, or burned.

These machines are cheap and easy to maintain. They fit neatly on the back of trucks that are already touring the city collecting the waste. The briquettes burn well and will be delivered to prisons and schools in the city, replacing charcoal, gas or diesel currently being consumed in stoves to heat meals. Prisoners will get a bit more food (their food allowance of 16 Rupees a day includes 4 for heating; the estimated 2 saved by using the briquettes will go towards buying more food – note to readers, 2 rupees is just under 3p); the schools will have a small reduction in the bill for heating school meals; the public institutions should benefit as they don’t need to send the waste so far (current regulations forbid dumping or burning within Delhi Municipal borders); the waste collection company benefits somewhat from the sale of briquettes; the community benefits from a reduction in pollution and an increase in the amount of renewable energy sources available.

Where’s the flaw in this scheme? By all means write to us and let us know if you can spot one. The only one I can see, from a ‘London’ perspective, is that THERE IS NOT MUCH PROFIT IN IT. Everyone benefits, but nobody gets rich.

Another flaw: it is a pitifully token effort, a flea bite on the climate change ‘elephant’.

But, give us time. Judge this project when we have taken our write-up to the Municipality so as to persuade them and / or the local business community to invest in 50 of these machines and utilise all 40,000 tonnes of the stuff; judge this project when we have taken the Delhi Municipality case example to other large cities in India, to persuade them to do the same; judge this project when a million tonnes or more of bio-waste is being collected and turned into renewable fuel; judge this project when we have begun something similar in Africa.

And this is the point of my first blog entry – we could learn something from this, here in Europe. Because there is little profit (cash) in something, we cannot be bothered to do it; because something seems small in scale, we think it is trivial and we ridicule it. My sense is that we are wrong and those over there in Delhi are right.