Making Evs Cheaper Than Diesel

TITLE: 1RA19AypI4Y CHANNEL: Unknown DATE: ---TRANSCRIPT--- from 300 to 12,000 electric buses in just about 2 years.

There was no business model, there was no precedent, and even in the beginning this would never fly. [music] Delhi’s come out with a draft EV policy. Are we ready for a mandate like that for trucks? We rely massively on tarmac to move our goods. Will this oil shock be the permanent catalyst for India’s green transition? Green is our Atmanirbhar. We should do this on a war footing. These days everybody’s talking about how electric vehicles will grow faster thanks to the Gulf War and the oil shock from it. But in this video, you will hear from one person who did something quite remarkable. She took India from about 300 odd buses on the roads to over 12,000 in the span of a couple of years. Some on the roads, some were booked, uh and today thanks to the model that Mahua Acharya has created, India has something like over 60,000 over 63,000 e-buses on the road or in the pipeline. Mahua, thanks very much for making time for this Earth Chakra podcast. Um let me start by talking about your journey and the work that you did with e-buses. You were part of the government for just a couple of years, and yet you scripted what can be seen as an incredible success story. You took India from 300 to 12,000 electric buses in just about 2 years and made them cheaper than diesel. How? Firstly, thank you, Chetan. Thanks for having me at this podcast, and thank you for the kind words. Um how did we do this? Um how to say it? We used every tool in the toolbox. Um we changed more at a more serious level, we changed the business model. India’s uh India’s buses, the ones that sit with the public transit agencies, have typically been owned by them and managed and run by them over the years and over the decades. That’s been the way we have had public buses in our cities. And these public transit agencies are not in the best of financial health. Public transport is a subsidized matter all over the world, not just here. And now to introduce to them a vehicle that costs three times as much, an electric bus is three times as much uh as a diesel bus, would be something quite untenable. I knew from the beginning this would never fly. Uh it’s a new technology as well. We don’t all have the capacity to deal with new technologies like batteries. We don’t know how they will function in the long run. So, the model that we used, which has been used before, it’s not something that we invented by ourselves, but yes, we developed a lot of it uh by ourselves, is a model where our transit agencies would no longer be buying the buses. Meaning, they don’t need to have the money to buy the buses flat out. They are now buying a service. So, a private bus company and a private bus manufacturer comes along, says, “I will deliver to you these services.” Meaning, “I’ll run the buses for you on roads and routes that you tell me.” And the government then pays that private operator a certain rupees per kilometer. So, a a fee that is determined through public auction. That’s the tendering thing did and determine that price. So, now you have a model where the government gets clean transport, uh modern. The technology is in the hands of the private operator and the private bus manufacturer who’s best placed to deal with it uh and handle it. The business of efficiency and quality is also left in the hands of a private party. And the government’s job is to pay on time and give the routes, meaning tell the bus companies and the bus operators where they should take their buses. What I mean by that is a little significant. Uh if this whole thing was private, then you would have a private bus company only going to this those areas where they can collect tickets, maximize revenue. But it is also the prerogative of public office that public access and public services are made available to everybody. So in this model, which goes on for 12 years, and you can assume that our cities are only getting bigger, they’re not getting smaller. And more population is coming into our cities, not less. So here you have the government who has signed up for this service and is able to add routes at exactly the same price. But this model worked, it took us a long time to build it, of course, it took us many months to build it because a lot of things were quite new. I think the most fundamental change is that the government now is no longer owning the asset, which is something that we have done for a long time. It is in many instances the de facto approach to doing uh business, especially in developing countries. We’re not special or unique here. So I think that that really helped. This model made it affordable and the public side took comfort knowing that the private entity is in charge of things like batteries, which they don’t have capacity for. Is in charge of things like efficiency and performance. Uh and the private side took comfort in that it’s a long-term fixed contract where the revenue is fixed, meaning you’ll get you’re paid a single price. And that gives investors a fair bit of certainty. They don’t have to take risks around whether you and I will take a bus uh the heat or in the cold. So, they don’t take that risk of revenue going up and down. So, I think this was the most um fundamental change uh we did. It um we could not do Of course, this is not something, you know, Chetan we do alone. We um I was in the central government. Transport is a state matter. It’s not even really on the concurrent list. Quote-unquote concurrent meaning sometimes you have topics which are split between the center and the state. So, it’s not even there. Uh yes, there’s there was subsidy coming from the center as a bit of an incentive. That’s what allowed us to get started. And honestly, that’s I think in many instances allowed me even entry into someone’s some state office uh because otherwise, this model uh requested states to sign on to a single set of terms and conditions. So, in other words, Bangalore signs on to exactly the same terms and conditions as Delhi, as Pune, as Ahmedabad, uh Calcutta. And that has never been done before because states would normally do their own transportation bidding, their own selection of vendors, their own selection of routes, their own selection of business model even. Which ones would I lease? Which ones would I own? Is their prerogative for the longest time. Now, we come along and we say uh we’re going to standardize, and it will be in your interest. That was um perhaps the biggest mental barrier we had to overcome, and that took um many many many meetings. I many meetings. Uh in a sense, that almost seems like one India, one contract. You know, you get that there’s a lot of things. We are deeply heterogeneous country. We’re also a very deeply homogeneous country. Our cities, we were told initially, I would be told again and again that my city is different from yours. And when you dig down, you know, there’s a lot of things that hold us together, including congested cities, including complaining about traffic is a single perhaps unique file in in a topic with a new with a stranger. It is, you know, there’s a lot that we can do by bringing things together and certainly things like public access, public transport, public services, it is surprisingly homogeneous and has the surprising potential for achieving homogeneity. Homogeneity is useful for investment because they want to see You can only get big if it’s homogeneous, right? Many people sign up. But investors want to see standardization. What you and I say homogeneous, they they translate in their minds as standardized. So, it’s a lot we can do in a one India kind of approach. So, staying with the success stories now, you were in the government for a couple of years, I think a little over 2 years, but what you demonstrated was that speed, innovation, adaptation to this model is very doable within the government and a lot of us often see the government as a as a slow-moving creature which really takes a long time to deliver, problems with implementation. You cut through all that, but we’ve also seen other success stories much earlier from the government, you know, eradicating polio for example, rolling out COVID vaccines, the Ujjwala cooking gas scheme for for poor households, low-income households, leapfrogging vehicle emissions from BS4 to BS6. The common thread is that an all-of-government approach does work. Can the private sector now lead this EV transition, this green transition in transport, or is massive state intervention the only way to go? So, firstly, I think Chetan, the whole-of-government approach is absolutely necessary. Definitely for things like public services, which are inevitably in the hands of two parties, public and private. The private entity’s job is to deliver that service. The public entity’s job is to is to develop the framework to make it affordable and universally accessible. So, for as long as we’re talking about that segment of things, like water, transport, electricity, uh things like that, roads, I think number one, a whole-of-government approach is uh I think there’s no other way to achieve things at scale and speed, the two S’s. You absolutely need that. We couldn’t do this bus business uh just by ourselves, and including by ourselves and the state, we had five ministries involved, including the Prime Minister’s office, to help coordinate this whole thing. It had never been done before. It was new, it was unique, we were um there was no business model, there was no precedent. Um why would people come together? It’s not in their mandate. So, they faced a lot of these things. Yet, it was in everybody’s national interest to get this done. So, number one, there are certain things in India, and us still very much as a developing country, uh need a whole-of-government approach to keep it together, to pull it together, and to most importantly develop the frameworks for it. The frameworks of um public accessibility, but commercial viability. That’s one. There is um in private, it’s difficult now to look at it from the private side. How does How do private entities achieve scale? They They do it by themselves over and over again, and they grow by themselves on their own. They get bigger and bigger on a linear trajectory. It’s not in private/corporate DNA to necessarily think about collaboration on your own business model, because you compete. So, you still need the government to come in even on areas which are distinctly in the hands of private enterprise, but the government is still the only entity that is able to bring everybody together. And there’s a bit of that, uh which we are doing now from my having finished with the government. We have set up this new uh company. It’s a mission-driven platform, and this time we’re working on uh heavy-duty trucking. So, we’re taking the hypothesis where a We’re mission-driven climate change platform. Commercially viable, which I believe if you make the business model right in India and anywhere, investors will come in. So, we’re now looking to replicate some of the design elements of the electric bus program. Instead of working with states, we’re now working with large corporate India. And we’re going to corporate India and saying, you know, it’s in all of our common interest to reduce the cost of transportation, and definitely reduce the vulnerability to diesel and diesel prices. And it’s in nobody’s interest to continue to use fossil fuels when you have a viable alternative. So, we’re now working with corporate India. We’re working with six sectors, and we’re making transportation cheaper for them and greener. And once you make it cheaper and greener, um I can’t see why CEOs would object. In fact, I would imagine and I would believe and even want to believe uh that they would welcome it. And so far, that’s exactly what we have been finding. It is definitely unprecedented because unlike with electric buses, we had chosen with electric buses only those buses that sit with the government. The business of trucks does not really sit with the government. It sits with private enterprise that moves cement, they move tires, they move paper, they move anything. They move stuff that goes on the roads. That’s entirely their private decision. But it’s been It’s been a a little over a year, about a year. And so far, I think so good. We are finding a good amount of traction with CEOs who like the idea of wanting to go green. Um it’s commercially viable. It is absolutely possible to make electric cheaper than diesel. We have demonstrated with electric buses. And the crux of the matter is to find a business model that works for private investment um and works for corporate the corporate enterprise. Meaning, it’s cheaper for them and it’s cheaper for the investor. So, this is again a little unprecedented. Uh some amount of government push and drive would certainly help. Just because I go back, it’s not really in private enterprise DNA to collaborate when you can go it alone. You know, you look for partners when you cannot go it alone. So, unless somebody tells you to do something, meaning there’s regulation on you, why would people really stick their necks out to do something that is so collaborative? It’s like playing ringa ringa roses, you know, you have to go find somebody’s hand to hold. Um and we’re trying to see if they can hold hands. I think the uh And I’m I’m pleased. I’m quite pleased so far in a year. Yeah. Uh nobody’s told me that I don’t want to hold somebody’s hand. I like the ringa roses metaphor. Hard to imagine that playing out. But staying with intent, which is your the company that you founded, I mean, you’ve gone from the government to at the very top level of government to the private sector. Uh and you’re creating intent, which is the international energy transition platform. Uh just one factoid, one piece of information. Heavy trucks, like you had your site mentions, heavy trucks carry 70% of our domestic freight, but are less than 1% electric. Just one practical question that strikes me is, do we have the supply chains? Do we have the wherewithal to actually create these big trucks? I We’ve all seen the small trucks, three-wheelers, the small four-wheelers, but the big six-wheelers, bigger than that, 10-ton trucks. Do we have that capacity or are we dependent on imports? Um we have many of the same manufacturers that make electric buses also make electric trucks. They have They They’re perhaps a little distracted with the volumes of the bus business, but it’s in fact the same companies that also make electric trucks. That’s one. So, we have that. The second is that there are a lot of new companies that make electric trucks. And third, there are new companies that have chosen not to make electric buses and say, “I’m going to now go out and make trucks.” So, there are these three all three categories. Uh the good thing for us is that they’re all domestic. We work only with domestic companies. Um there is local production. But, not everything is completely local or locally available. We have for the longest time been on a trajectory to open up borders and to increase trade, and trade is good for the market, and it’s good for the people because prices are uh prices are more competitive. So, we’re very dependent. Of course, we’re dependent as a country. We’re dependent on many countries. And so, a lot of what we do uh diplomatically, a lot of where the world is geopolitically has deep vulnerabilities for our uh certainly for the automotive sector and many other sectors as well. In the energy transition sector, we’re not by ourselves. I I wish we were. We’re a big enough market uh to give ourselves the kind of competition we ourselves need for our own people to bring down costs. But, we buy a lot of things from outside which don’t exist here. We are still importing a lot of our parts in the trucking business. It’s just that our trucking business why you you know, you you said you could see smaller trucks. You don’t see big trucks because we’ve never had a mandate on our companies to electrify their fleet. That’s That was a regulation thing I was saying. If there was a mandate on our heavy emitters, on our corporate India, mandate that your fleet has to be converted to green. It doesn’t have to be electric. I’m not wedded to electric or anything. It is today’s green and commercially deployable. It could be any sort of green. We don’t have that mandate. We don’t have a mandate on our fleet operators that if you operate a fleet outside of Delhi where the policies right now in a draft form, we don’t have any other mandate in the country that says your fleet business has to at least have some portion of green, if not the whole thing. So, things will take much more time. It’s easier to achieve scale and faster to achieve scale when you sit inside the government because it it that’s the platform that the government gives you access to. It depends on individuals and how they wish to use it. But, outside the system, in private enterprise, you have to rely on these other other drivers which is largely economic efficiency. So, yes, we’re very dependent. Thankfully, not wholly dependent. Just staying with that thing for a moment with the Delhi example. Now, Delhi has come out with a draft EV policy. It’s likely to be turned into a accepted as policy at some point. We don’t know the shape or form, but it seems like a very good benchmark at least in terms of mandate that, you know, you got to stop buying or stop making this kind of fossil fuel vehicles of a certain category and switch to, you know, green ones, electric or any other technology which is viable. Would a mandate like that for trucks, are we ready for a mandate like that for trucks right now? We should be, yes. We should be. We need a mandate like that for trucks. We absolutely do need a mandate. Uh are we ready? Well, we have manufacturers of trucking businesses. We have trucking companies. They’re not small. There’s some startups, there’s some big, there’s old legacy players. So, we have the balance sheets and we have the nimble new companies. So, we’ve got that. Uh we have the com- we have huge amount of trucking fleet in this country. I’m talking just heavy duty things, huge amount. We rely massively on tarmac to move our goods. Not everything gets on rail. So, you have these two ingredients, meaning you have a local market and you have people that need the services. If you were to bring this together, what would stop us from moving them over to green? You could say, “Well, there’s one thing is to is to make it gradual so that you don’t end up making the diesel operators a little redundant with any investment they would have made.” Fine, that’s that’s doable. No policy says become 100% change overnight. Every every uh reasonable policy uh or [clears throat] every reasonable regulation always gives you a little bit of uh warning time. So, we’re absolutely ready and we should really do it. We should do it for so many reasons. Number one, it’s it’s cheaper to do green. Second, it is in our interest. Um the business of buying things you were asking about how we’re dependent on outside borders. We buy a lot of things. We buy a lot of oil. We buy a lot of diesel. We pay a lot of money for diesel. So, it’s in everybody’s interest to bring this whole thing together. So, we’re uh completely ready. I would not be more confident of this. You spoke of the oil crisis. You spoke of oil and uh referred to the geopolitical tension. Now, this oil shock that we’ve seen, you know, in the Strait of Hormuz over the Gulf War, uh will this oil shock be the permanent catalyst for India’s green transition or do you think it’ll slide back once the situation stabilizes? Regardless of whether uh I hope it affects in a way trigger us permanently. If I were to combine the two, but regardless of whether it will stay as a permanent state of emergency or um or just goes away and we become business as usual. Regardless of that, I think it has given us all a fairly serious warning. That and a fairly serious mirror on the face that we have a lot of dependencies. Uh [clears throat] and with our way to get out of it is to simply go green. I would almost say, you know, I would say that green is our Atmanirbhar. In fact, our Atmanirbhar Bharat is equal to green and both way round. What do I mean by that? We We absolutely should ramp up our uh renewables production. We’re doing quite well. But this is this business has just showed us what happens when you don’t have enough gas, for example, LPG. Uh the shops that I’ve seen have run out of induction cooking. Um we absolutely can run ramp up our renewables and we should do this on a war footing. Same thing with our electrics. They’re They’re feeding off the grid. They’re charging on the grid. We really have to ramp up grid infrastructure. So, there’s a lot of things that we should be doing and we should recognize the emergency situation that the Hormuz blockades have caused us and remind ourselves that we’re not, you know, in an island by ourselves. We’re very very codependent on geopolitics for which arguably we may not have anything to do with or had had anything to do with. Let’s just come back to the Hormuz uh issue once again, the oil shock issue. But the on the point of the induction stove, now we’ve seen a lot happening on that front and, you know, videos have been going viral also on the adoption. But is this one of the areas where the government actually can, you know, launch a major push straight off, roll it out in rural areas, particularly you know, something like a the earlier we had earlier we had Ujjwala which was on the cooking gas, but now we can have Ujjwala for induction stoves. Is that feasible? Completely. Completely. The one of the the many things the government can do is to work at speed and scale. You know, that is just like a unique thing and a feature of the government, but it needs what I would call dogged determination. Uh it doesn’t happen We’re not an easy country, you know, we have lots of opinions and diverse opinions which one has to work with. We have lots of different circumstances that you have to work through, but without that dogged determination, you cannot get speed and scale at the same time. So, it is completely possible, of course, and yes, we should be doing this. We have done it before, like you were saying with COVID vaccine, we’ve done it polio, we’ve done it several times before at a very um on mission mode in a way. We did very well putting LPG in people’s homes. That Ujjwala scheme is very successful. We got them off firewood for the most part. It’s really now time that if we had a massive production regime for induction cookstoves, a massive distribution system uh for these stoves, but in parallel, this would all be great. Make sure that the electricity is there in people’s homes to plug it in and make sure the electricity is there when they need it to plug it in. And while you’re at it, make sure that you double down on the renewables so the electricity that you’re putting into the cookstove is green. So, when I say, you know, I think you were saying all of government, this would have so many features. It would have the renewables people, it would have production and industry there, it would have the the state agencies to get the distribution out. Uh it would have so many government entities. It would have the distribution companies, our discoms and our energy sector. So, absolutely we should do this and this is but it needs what I would call dogged determination again and again because if there’s the urgency that Hormuz has exposed should not be forgotten. And if we see if I’m not mistaken, if we see this induction push from the point of view of a household um a lot of people, I think the majority of kitchens would usually cook in the daytime. Right? That’s when your solar capacity, your solar production, your renewable production is is at is at a peak. And a lot of it, I think if the reports uh the recent reports suggest that tends to go waste or tends not to be snapped up. Right? So, do you see it practical both from an individual household’s point of view, but also from a system’s point of view? Completely. Completely. Nobody’s cooking in the middle of the night. They’re cooking in the daytime when most of our solar is actually out there. And some days ago we saw that the prices of electricity on the exchange went down to their lowest possible. Why is that happening? We just have a massive solar glut in the system. It’s great for us. It’s absolutely great. So, when I was saying that you’ve got an an induction cook stove going into people’s homes and you they are charged into the grid, the grid has to green up which means that the green power has to be available round the clock. We’re not able to store solar at the same price as solar coming into the grid like it were coming from the panel into my home. But, this is it it fits so complementary complementarily that we’re cooking in the daytime. We’ve got lots of solar power in the daytime. No better time to use it up. Same thing with our electrics. Uh same thing with a lot of our scheduling. What are the things that we do that is power consuming the daytime that we should be soaking that up until such time we completely move over to the lowest priced round-the-clock green power. Lowest price such that I would not want to get into technicalities, but low and stable green power. Low price and stable green power. So, absolutely. With oil prices spiking and the effect so far most of the consumers have been protected by I think the feeling the the effect is creeping in slowly into the Indian economy. With oil prices spiking, the temptation is to fall back on cheap domestic coal. Now, how should India actually resist this coal trap and stay the course on renewables? India has to just double I think double up the course on renewables. Not just stay the course is is we are we are converted. We are renewables is mainstream discourse. It’s a big piece of our grids. We have a uh more than 50% of our installed power, meaning the power that we have on uh on soil is renewable power. So, we’re we’re uh we’re a converted lot. So, more than staying the course, we we have to ratchet it up with the next level of ambition, which is double down on it. Double our um our targets. Uh walk on mission mode to get the transmission business up and ready to absorb everything that is produced. Um every single electron green electron that is put into the system should necessarily be round-the-clock, meaning stable. It should be available and it should be green, which means we have to work on storage. We have to store this solar power that comes in the daytime, so I can use it in the night time when the sun doesn’t shine. And the same thing with wind. I There are some areas in the in the uh country where the wind blows in the evening, sometimes it blows in the morning, but I can’t tell the wind to blow when I want it. So, I’ve got to store that in uh a battery or some kind of storage system, pumped hydro, there are many storage systems. We just have to work on that. And we That’s That’s the double down. So, the target for renewables must be alongside a massive target for storage and a massive target for transmission, meaning how do I get the electrons from the stored bat- battery or or whatever storage solution uh across through the wires and into my home when I want it. So, you know, it has been done before. Other countries have done it, but of course never at the scale that we needed. We just have this unique um um a unique situation that we have to solve for scale at the same time and different um purchasing capabilities. So, it has to be uh very affordable. But it’s been done before. So, way more than staying the course. Absolutely. Uh a similar kind of vulnerability, if we could speak about, is you know, the Straits of Hormuz has exposed India and several other countries uh as a victim of the choke point that it creates. You know, the Straits of Hormuz is a choke point, and India is a victim, as are many other countries. What about our dependencies on things like lithium, cobalt, other raw materials going into the manufacturing of the electric vehicles? Uh What are the other kind of Straits of Hormuz type of choke points that we should be careful about or try and avoid or you know, build capacity to avoid those new choke points. Um this is a two-sided kind of coin type of an answer. Uh the Hormuz and the choke points that it that it had exposed to us not just oil. Oil is what hit the newspapers and it hit the media on the front page. So it hits you straight in the in the face. Uh we’re importing so many things that come to us on ships. And many of those ships cut cut through the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping has generally become more expensive in the last one month, which means that whatever we’re buying, whether it comes from the Hormuz Strait or not, comes on an expensive ship or expensive uh ship journey. We’re buying a lot of things. Our fertilizer uh we buy a lot of input material [clears throat] that makes our fertilizers. Uh we’re buying so many things. I mean, you had mentioned lithium, cobalt. Cobalt sits in countries that we don’t necessarily have a footprint around. We have not really planned for it at the scale that we suddenly find ourselves needing needing it. Um you know, so that’s one side of the coin that we’re very vulnerable. Like like many countries in today’s uh liberalized markets. The other side is well, this has exposed to us what could happen to us ourselves. Meaning, our prices go up, demand goes up, supply goes down. Um inequality comes in and that’s just not really good for us in this growth curve that we’re on. It’s just not good for any country, but certainly not for a a country like us. So where does that leave us? If we close our borders, that doesn’t help. We’ve been there before. That doesn’t help. It doesn’t create as much of the um the dependencies or the liberal the market access. The answer is I think we have to find a ground where the investment world calls it hedging. I have to hedge my um needs. So, while I make them on my own, I need to be sure that I have access to a plan B situation that I can buy these things from or plan A is to build it out at home at the same price and the same level of competitiveness that is available in the outside world. It’s available in the international markets. It’s not all It’s not all doable, of course. It’s not something we can do. Almost give us 45 30 45 days of of a crisis. Uh it’s not completely over yet. But we just have we have no choice but to What we don’t have, we don’t have. If we don’t have rare earth, we just don’t have it. But science and technology will give us other things to build um that perhaps are comparable or one goes out and hedges this these kind of uh supplies. So, actually a good point to discuss or to bring in the social angle also, you know, how does all this actually impact people at scale? Uh in particular, I think one thing that I would like to cover is uh employment careers building careers in EV. So, in an era of where you know AI-driven job anxiety is rising, people uh fear losing their jobs to AI. Um how can this entire green sector, this transition to green energy be some kind of a job driver some kind of a place where you know new entrepreneurs young entrepreneurs can actually come up what is your reading of the of this landscape? We have money at the most basic level we are manufacturing more. With the 63,000 buses itself that have been contracted. That is the number which I can myself say is a little unprecedented even for ourselves meaning if you know we don’t we’re not very kind to ourselves normally. But even that just number at a very basic level has massive employment at the manufacturing factories. That is just plain manufacturing. Then you need people to manage these assets. So just going back to buses which is where you started you’ve got people at the depots you have people at maintenance you have service personnel you have technology people you have a lot of other things that come with it. The charging. So at the very basic level we’re consuming and there are some things we’re consuming more of and faster and for whatever it’s worth there’s a manufacturing [clears throat] industry behind it. And we have to protect that. That is a very large driver of jobs. We’ve got to protect it we’ve got to get a lot more efficient about it. And our youth that is getting into that will into those sectors will have jobs perhaps the skill levels will be a little different or maybe a little bit more fit for purpose if I were to put it like that. So I’m not concerned at all in fact on the green sector because whichever you whichever one whichever topic you pick tell me about cook stoves massive manufacturing. Let’s go to the next layer in the let’s say job ladder. There’s a lot of technology involved there. There’s a lot of uh information technology IT IT systems that are being built. There’s a lot of AI coming into that IT IT systems and it should. And then there’s a lot of other technology like storage, hydrogen. We absolutely need to work on hydrogen. Going back to your question on you know, what happens with Strait of Hormuz, we absolutely have to figure out uh the hydrogen cost barrier. We’ve got to beat that. But, that’s all domestic production. And there’s a lot of technology there. So, that second level also I’m not so worried. Let’s go to the third level. Where we were talking about induction cooking for example, I’m using it in the daytime. I want to make sure that I’m using green power to put into that uh into that cookstove. Uh that green power has to be available, which means our distribution companies have to plan for it and they have to know that it’s coming on time. And so there’s a lot of intelligence that will be consumed in our power system itself. So, again going back to the business of green, I’m really not uh so concerned. In fact, I go to the There are lots of jobs that perhaps will go away, but then there are some jobs will I think never go away. Our energy sector, our manufacture manufacturing is a given, but our energy sector is it’s not going to go away. Our freight is not going to go away. Uh in fact, it’s going to create new employment. So, I’m really not um concerned. And there’s one quick thing I’ll say there. I I spent a a little bit of my bandwidth uh over over the years trying to engage with young people wherever I can. So, with the business schools, with the policy schools, it gives me both. It gives me a little uh visibility into what young India wants. It also allows me to try and explain to them some of the new things and get them excited to move into the business of green. So, I’ve done that for um at least 15 years. And there’s one thing that I’ve seen and again and increasingly over time, they the perception of many of our youth is that the business of green is here to stay. Uh and there’s no fear of moving sectors. There’s a lot of courses I do where in the room are technology people from the software industry now wanting to make a career change, which means there’s a faith in the markets of India that I can make a second career in a totally different field and that happens to be green. So, I take a lot of inputs from that and that gives me some comfort that we’re going to be a net uh job creator um with green. Yeah, that’s really encouraging to hear uh the kind of feedback that you’re picking up from the youth. And in fact, I think on the issue of engineers also um I think India produces something like lakhs of engineers, IT professionals annually. That that’s the number that graduates and the job market in the IT sector is getting squeezed. So, I was just going to add one small quick thing. Uh since you mentioned the IT sector, Dipan. Um the onset of AI has has created a certain overhang uh in people’s minds and in our public discourse that we may lose jobs as AI comes in. While some of that may be true and happening in front of us, in front of you and me, uh the part that that we have to be mindful of, which will create in turn new jobs, is if we continue to look at AI only as a cost cutter, which is what many of us are doing right now. Many of our companies are moving moving away certainly the entry-level job because the machine has taken over that that that piece of work. If our focus is only that, we’ll be in trouble because we have so many young people coming into the workforce every single year. They have aspirations that are only going higher and higher. And in fact, if we sort of say to ourselves that all CEOs of corporate India of some size and beyond say that AI is to be used to increase growth and productivity, we’ll be in a much better place. And that means going back to your uh point on young engineers entering the marketplace, we’ll have to be skilled a little differently. So, our supply from the education institutions uh have to be a lot more fit for purpose. And we do everything we do in this country has to be through dogged determination, you know, that kind of focus to make sure that the supply coming in is fit for purpose. Now, without that, we will be in a lot of trouble um soon. Uh also, I think I mean, if you take the challenge of R&D, India’s compared to places like China and of course several places in the West, it is lagging behind in R&D investment. And this probably could be an opportunity where, you know, the traditional employees for engineers and ITs, they’re not really being they’re not really finding enough roles there. How can the entire ecosystem be geared up to tap into this for entrepreneurship, for R&D, for manufacturing, and all the other levels that you have mentioned? All of the above. For our new enterprise, our startups, I mean, if you don’t get me started there. You know, there’s a lot of work we need to do to really enable and liberalize that part of the ecosystem. A lot of our youth The good thing about what we’ve done in the last 10 15 years is we’ve given some of our young people the assurance that there’s a market. They’re not scared. When I was coming out of college, I had to get a job. That was what everybody in my um era was that was our aspiration. We had to get jobs. There’s a lot of uh new India that’s not doing that. There’s a lot that’s doing it, but there’s a lot of people that’s not necessarily doing that. They want to go try out things by themselves. We have to allow these new nimble ideal these new nimble institutions, these small little things to come come up. They cannot be held at the same level of scrutiny and regulation as large enterprise. And today they still are. So, there’s a lot of work to be done there. There’s a massive amount of work to be done, I think, just in the minds of all leaders, you know, all of us out there that if we use AI to push growth then the incoming supply of engineers, of people, of liberal arts people, all of all kinds of whatever the the uh discipline is has to come in with a little bit more um I guess closer fit for purpose, you know. Different levels of skill have to be changed. Some have to be upgraded. Some have to be made more usable in the workforce. I think your thoughts on the startups, I think uh should be uh fodder for another conversation, but very quickly, what did you mean by liberalize the startup ecosystem? What are the kind of changes that you would like to see happening say over the next year or two? This is a much larger topic, but in the next even year one or two years we’re doing a lot. I must say we’re we’re we’re helping clean out a lot of our rules to make them um safer for business to function in. We have a lot of rules that take us straight to jail that have criminal consequences. So, we’ve done a lot of work. There’s a lot of people I know who’ve been working in that in that area and I’m very glad and very happy that’s happened. But how do countries foster startups? They give a lot of reliefs. They’re not subject to the same level of regulation, same level of audit, the same level of scrutiny, the same level of compliances as big enterprise. That just won’t make sense, right? At the very basic level. So, one to two year kind of horizon what does one liberalize? It starts with the mind. You have to believe that some some startups will fail. Some start some people will try and game the system. That happens with any kind of statistical sample set, any population, anywhere in the world. But for the most part, the large majority will benefit. If our rule base, our textbook of rules our textbook of compliance hassles, papers just small small things that can get you into such it may not necessarily get you into criminal consequence but it gets you into a lot of unnecessary time wasting paperwork, which I think there’s something for us to think about there. How does [clears throat] one liberalize that chunk in the next one to two to one to three years? And that’ll go a long way. There’s lots of new companies coming up uh [clears throat] who are you know, who really should not be in the same uh same fishnet of compliances that large enterprise is subject to. Bawa, thanks so much for all this. I think there’s a lot of ground that you’ve covered in this short conversation. It seemed like a short conversation. Um and uh I invite all of viewers also, in case you found anything useful, uh do share this podcast. Uh and if you have any questions, please put them in the comments below. And Bawa, uh I’ll probably rope you into answer any questions that do come up. Uh thanks very much for making time on this. Thank you. Thanks, Chetan. Thank you for doing this. It’s it’s really been It’s been a pleasure talking to you. And I’m very happy that you’re doing these kind of podcasts and people are picking up topics such as green and getting them out there. So, thank you so much for doing this again. And thanks for having me.