I've taken three short-haul domestic flights in the last month, working for Greenpeace. It's terrible. I've done a lot of overnight buses, too, attractively hunched in the back row with a scarf wrapped round my head and a bottle of whiskey to smooth out the spine-crushing jolts of pot-holed roads, but on those three occasions deadlines meant overland wheels just weren't an option. You feel a bit of an idiot refusing a plastic bag and opting for the vegetarian meal in the departure lounge of a domestic airport.

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It’s a surprising finding, this roomful of African women soldering circuits.

In dry, hot Tilonia, where sunlight slanting through risen Rajasthani dust turns the air a soft pink, the few outsiders you see are European or from elsewhere in India. Nothing much grows here because of the drought-like climate - this year the monsoon season brought rain only twice - so herds of goat, buffalo, sheep and cattle crowd the roads, driven on foot every morning to find pasture. Women walk tall as columns across the flat plains, two pots of water balanced on their heads. They wear their brightly-coloured saris over their faces to shield from the heat, veils of hot pink, crimson red or egg-yolk yellow on the dusty landscape.

“We had no doubts about coming here,” says Belle, a 45 year old grandmother from Kisumu Village, Kenya, her head wrapped in a printed cotton cloth. “We were very courageous. We thought, ‘Yes! We can do it. We are African women!’ We wanted to make it to India and we did.”

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Right now, fifty-five Greenpeace activists are standing on top of the houses of Parliament in Westminster. Amongst them is the head of public engagement from the Greenpeace India office, who travelled to the UK to take part in the action and highlight the need for greater international cooperation in the lead up to Copenhagen. 

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Excerpts from an old book I found while poking around a book fair in Bangalore. The casing was that lovely old hardback with embossed gold writing on the spine, and the sentiments within were equally archaic. 

'COAL', by F. H. Wilson, was published in 1921 in London.

Introduction:
"Great Britain undoubtedly owes her wonderful position among the great nations of her world to her vast store of that natural source of energy - coal. Without a cheap and plentiful supply of the mineral the industries of this country could never have attained their present prosperous condition and importance, and as a substitute equal in every respect to coal has not yet been discovered it can truthfully be said that the maintenance of the commercial supremacy of Great Britain depends on her coal mines."

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I visited some villages in rural Karnataka this week where people are living without electricity. After nightfall we drove to Mahime Village in Uttara Kannada, a coastal district of Karnataka State and left the car at the side of the road. On foot we picked our way along a dirt path through the forest, splashed through a creek and uphill until we reached a house. The muted blue of the mud walls glimmered in the yellow light of the small kerosene lamps as we picked leeches off our feet and Sarojini Rama Naik, the wife of the house, burnt them with embers from the fire.

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It's easy to imagine how erratic rainfall patterns and rising temperatures can impact the lives of farming and fishing communities, and we've collected seemingly endless stories attesting to it. But the societies directly affected by the vagaries of the monsoon extend far further than that. Winding inland from the coast to the banks of the River Nila in Kerala, a traditional pottery community is also being threatened.

The Kumbhara community migrated from Andhra Pradesh over two hundred years ago, searching for an ideal location to practice their age-old skill: pottery. They found it on the banks of the River Nila in Palakkad, Kerala and settled there, seamlessly weaving their existence into that of the tributaries. Every year the monsoon rains would swell the river, flushing nutrients into the adjacent paddy fields and depositing mud and clay onto its banks. The potters would gather this clay and use it to make their wares – rich terra cotta utensils they then traded with the other river communities.

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This week the India announced its National Solar Mission, a detailed plan of the energy the country intends to generate from solar technology between 2010 and 2040. The plan is undeniably ambitious, proposing that India will produce:

- 1 GW of energy from solar by 2012,
- 6-7 GW by 2017,
- 20 GW by 2020,
- 100 GW by 2030 (or 10-12 % of total power generation capacity)

20GW by 2020 is a whopping figure, especially when you consider that it’s only eleven years away, and an almost negligible 3MW (0.003GW) of the energy on the national grid currently comes form solar sources.
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