CLIMATE change was the purported theme of the recent summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Thimpu. Instead an India-Pakistan rapprochement hijacked the agenda.

Countries most at risk in the region, the Maldives and Bangladesh, pressed for firm commitments to combat global warming but all they got was a promise to inquire into the issue. Wake up, South Asia, and smell the carbon. Time and tide wait for no man.

South Asia is inured to disasters, both natural and man-made. But now man's excesses are provoking nature's wrath. Entire nations — the Maldives, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — are poised to go under. Inland terrains are not above it all either. Melting glaciers, rising oceans, widespread flooding, mass migration — such promises to be the fate of a region boxed in by snowcapped mountains and deep seas. Monsoons, already fickle, could play even more truant. No matter how resilient, the region is just not equipped to cope with devastation of this magnitude.

But few in South Asia are losing sleep. Active on the world stage, India within itself confines climate to a high-brow discussion. Tiny Maldives' leadership is plunging to the ocean depths to grab attention but can only make so many waves. Pakistan has other things on its mind. A river water dispute with India has taken centre stage with little realisation on either side that this is just a portent of looming disasters.

Here then is a prescription for the region

— India has emerged as South Asia's principal spokesman on climate change. Saarc needs to supplant it with a unified regional approach. At last year's Copenhagen climate conference, India partnered with Brazil, China and South Africa to represent the developing world. Missing from the mix were Pakistan and Bangladesh, each equivalent to Brazil in population and three times South Africa. Collaborating on climate with its neighbours will engender tremendous goodwill for India. They in turn must not convolve the agenda with festering sores. A breakthrough here has overflow potential to heal old wounds.

— Articulate in layman terms how people's lives are affected by global warming and what can be done to mitigate it. Conspicuous consumption has marked its arrival in the subcontinent. Most people remain blithely unaware of any impending catastrophe.

To throttle emissions, lifestyles would have to be altered and ostentation tempered. Consumers will have to pay their share for remedies such as cap-and-trade, carbon and petrol taxes and renewable energy equipment. They must become aware. Here too a shared approach would be more effective than countries going solo because local mores and attitudes have much in common.

— Clamp down on power theft by installing smart electricity meters. Power cuts are crippling the economy and making life miserable. Approaching 50 per cent, power theft in the region is amongst the highest in the world. Electricity is not manna from heaven that every other plant provides it for free. Smart meters are digital versions of the spinning electric meters ubiquitous today.

Each costs around Rs8,000, in terms of Pakistani currency, and virtually eliminates fraud by detecting when a meter is tampered with or when a wire is illegally hooked to a distribution line. Italy has already installed some 30 million smart meters. The Italians spent an equivalent of nearly Rs25,000 crore on them but are also saving Rs6,000 crore every year, thereby recouping the investment in only four years. All of Europe and much of the US are now following suit with hundreds of thousands of smart meters.

Moneyed classes in the subcontinent consume electricity worth thousands of rupees, if not more, every month but only a fraction pay what they owe. Often the meter reader is paid off. His pickings trickle upwards to the powers that be. By automatically transmitting meter data to a utility, smart meters do away with manual labour and ensure accurate billing. An investment in them could easily pay for itself in less than a year. Lacking though is the political will to approve them.

Surely for once the ruling elites can swap their greed for society's benefit. Not only will utilities be compensated for what they produce, the overall economy too stands to benefit. Sweden is gaining a third of a per cent in annual GDP with smart meters. Imagine the possibilities in far more inefficient South Asia. The need for new power plants, which are mostly fired by coal, would also be curbed, avoiding expenditure and lowering emissions.

— Adopt emerging technologies, institute time-based rates and make procurement transparent. On the horizon are new carbon-fighting technologies such as energy-efficient appliances, electric vehicles, solar farms and carbon capture and sequestration. And just as cellphone companies offer cheap rates at odd hours to free up networks at peak usage periods, so too can electricity consumption be modulated through time-based tariffs. Both pecuniary and environmental benefits result.

South Asian countries typically offer only a single rate for electricity and need to imbibe global best practices in intelligent rate design. Finally, MNCs supplying much-needed infrastructure are wary of the subcontinent's opaque purchasing ways. The European Union has adopted Internet-based procurement to facilitate transparency. Saarc should consider something similar, at least for carbon-battling equipment. Otherwise small countries would struggle to attract vendors. Everyone would benefit from economies of scale.

Were the intra-regional cooperation on climate to succeed, South Asians could be rightly proud of a singular moment in their history when they unveiled a united face to the world, instead of incessantly washing their dirty laundry in public. Faced with an existential threat from the Soviet Union, age-old adversaries England, France and Germany came together. Then what stops South Asia from staging a climate concert to transform a common destiny?

The writer, a director of the Smart Grid Initiative at General Electric from 2008 to 2009, has worked in the clean energy industry for a decade.

sunil_sharan@yahoo.com