In the News
Interview Uday Khemka
Alliance; Vol 12, No 3, Sep 2007
Uday Khemka interviewed by Caroline Hartnell
Excerpts
Uday Khemka comes from an Indian family that has been in business for about 100 years. The Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation’s mission has historically been nothing to do with climate change but has rather focused on poverty and development issues, microfinance and so on. How did it come to be involved in climate change, Caroline Hartnell asked Uday Khemka. It happened about three years ago, he explains. ‘We started to realize that everything we were doing was fundamentally affected by this issue and could be literally washed over by it.’
Why climate change?
Three images in particular cause him sleepless nights. The first relates to the Punjab — ‘our bread basket’ since India moved away from being a food deficit country in the 1960s and 1970s. But India depends on the monsoon, ‘and there is a serious danger that monsoon patterns will change. What happens if the Punjab starts to look like the desert country of Rajasthan? Well, the answer's very simple: a billion people starve. So what am I doing talking about microfinance?’
He is also haunted by the thought of what will happen to India’s river systems if deglaciation in the Tibetan plateau continues at the present rate. There will be a few years of flooding, he says, ‘and then the Ganges and other big rivers will become rivulets and a billion people will be without water.’
The third image that haunts him is of ‘huge waves coming and smashing against our coastal populations and drowning us’. In a country like Bangladesh that is mostly below sea level, this is a real threat. ‘So we had no option but to dedicate an enormous amount of our resources to climate change.’
What to do about it?
It seems that the Khemka Foundation has adopted two ‘missions’. The first is to influence what is happening in India. As far as Uday Khemka knows, it is the only private foundation trying strategically to move India on the issue of climate change. It is working on three levels. The first is the policy level, where it is supporting the first ever integrated energy strategy for the country. Second, ‘you need a groundswell of popular support if you are going to influence politicians. We’ve partnered with the Bollywood awards, which reach millions of people.’ The third area is business and technology. ‘In my view,’ he says, ‘it is only business that can solve this problem, but it must be given the right incentives.’
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