India's plan of becoming the fastest-growing G20 nation may hinge on the weather
India exists at all.
By some miracle of human ingenuity and industry, a land area barely bigger than Argentina with less water than Colombia is able to support nearly a fifth of the world’s population. The record-breaking temperatures above 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the capital New Delhi this week are a warning sign, however. The magic spell that has sustained this achievement is coming close to breaking.
That’s an issue not just for those sweltering on the streets of the world’s second-biggest city, but for the path to wealth that 1.4 billion people hope to follow. India has a far poorer natural endowment of land than Europe, North America and China, the continental economies that preceded it on the road to riches. Even the fragile benefits that its citizens have managed to eke out of this unpromising soil might now be slipping further away, as climate change exposes its deep fragility and washes away the foundations of growth.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pitch in the election that ends Saturday is that his Bharatiya Janata Party has made the country the fastest-growing Group of 20 economy. “India is on the path to becoming a developed nation,” he told a rally this week in West Bengal, a region where the BJP has historically performed poorly.
The problem with that vision is that much of the work needed to reach that destination is at the mercy of the weather. India has the world’s biggest farm sector after China, and economic growth is at the mercy of the southwest monsoon rains that
