Being jack of all trades and master of none, I have the habit of reading almost about anything I can find over a piece of paper or over the internet. I realized the world can be weirdly ignorant place. Hailing from Assam, I end up comparing a lot of the current affairs that are happening around the world with my home state, even though I have been living outside Assam for the last 9 years now. Few months back, I read about a man named Jadav Payeng, hailing from Jorhat, Assam, who converted about 1360 acres land into a thriving forest singlehandedly! Yet, the trees and the green cover of Guwahati, my home town, seem to be diminishing more and more each time I visit the place. Recently I read about a newly developed technology where a team demonstrated how to charge their cell phones from a plant. Yeah, a living plant! In that case, our Assam would have been the 'Plant-energy' producing hub of India! But the availability of electricity in Assam remains a nuisance, not even touching the fact that Assam itself already has a huge capacity of hydro-electric power!

Going beyond Assam, electricity remains a problem for India as a whole. While the world talks about energy producing techniques from oceanic tides, new designs of turbines to increase its efficiency of generating electricity,  going into space to tap solar energy, creating constriction materials out of otherwise polluting elements in the air like CO2 and other GHG's, wind turbines placed in layers over ocean surfaces, generating energy by tapping the kinetic energy from the movement of water through rivers and in oceans, generating energy by tapping lightning, producing drinking water out of thin air by just cycling your bikes! What does India talk about? Increasing capacity of its coal and nuclear plants and farmers committing suicides due to draught!

One single kinetic wave power generating machine generates 6 MWs of energy, as claimed by its developers. India has a coastline of 7517 kms which can be utilized, if not entirely, for placing such machines and tapping tidal waves and movement of water in the ocean and imagine the amount of renewable energy we could generate! The average sunlight Germany receives is around 1700 hrs and India is around 2700 hrs. Germany produces about 40,000 MWs of solar energy whereas India produces around 7000 MWs. Germany, on 8th May, had to pay its citizens, if not literally, just to use the excess energy that Germany produced, and mind it, it was renewable energy! India produces 150 million tonnes of waste everyday whereas Sweden's waste management is so efficient that it imports waste! India, being a wealthier country with a history of eco-friendly practices and one seemingly belonging to a pro-environment society has a crop yield much lesser than many of the Middle East and African countries which are mostly desert. Israel, mainly a desert country, has better clean water supply system than India, a country with 10 major rivers, 2 seas and an ocean and 7 major mountain ranges supplying fresh water year-round to its surrounding areas!

Just thinking of what India might become if she focuses on the right technologies rather than fossil fuel and nuclear energy, makes me confident enough to say that India has the potential of being the leader in the development of these amazing, environment-focused, sustainable technologies. The future is filled with more interesting, challenging technologies and innovations to surprise us which are not just more efficient than the ones present, but also friendly to our planet. India has reached Mars, and we can surely lead the way towards a wonderful future here on Earth as well.