Going Green Green Electric Motorbikes in India
Green Electric Motorbikes Accelerate India.
There is a relatively cheap, environmentally friendly way of going about and ferrying goods for people in the developing world, the electric motorbike. The primary manufacturers and producers of these green motorbikes are the emerging Asian economic giants namely China and India, which are affectionately referred to as the world's factories.
India and China have grown their economies tremendously and very rapidly within the past three decades or so, lifting millions of their citizens out of the unforgiving grip and humiliation that is poverty. This, they have achieved mainly through trading their way out of the poverty trap by engaging in industrialization by setting up all manner and types of manufacturing plants. For instance China's exports of manufactured goods have grown 30-fold in the past 25 years alone, quite a momentous achievement by any measure.
This tremendous growth in their economies has had the resultant effect of creating a veritable and impatient middle class that wants to own its own set of wheels so to speak. And that is the genesis of the problem because if all is left unchecked the newly minted middleclass of these two countries is upwards of 600 million people strong. If each of these teaming mass of humanity is to opt for fossil fuel burning means of locomotion the total pollution in terms of green house gasses they will emit will simply be monstrous with serious repercussions to our fragile, already damaged atmosphere.
Enter electric motorbikes as the only viable sustainable solution, China often castigated for its poor environmental standards and record is literally cleaning up their act. This they are doing in the area of electric motorbike production with 10 million being sold annually as compared to a lowly 50,000 in India where petrol is king. This problem is being addressed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank. Towards this end the IFC is pumping a loan of US$25 million intoElectrothermIndia Limited.
Electrotherm India Ltd is an electric motorbike manufacturer with a manufacturing plant in India's Ahmedabad. Ahmedabad lies within the poverty stricken Kutch region of Gujarat in Western India. The company will use the US$25 million IFC loan in expanding its electric vehicles production. Part of the funds will also be used in improving its furnaces and in the building of a 30 megawatt power plant to boost its competitiveness and energy efficiency.
IFC South Asia senior manager Sujay Bose had this to say, "Our investment will support the nascent electric vehicles market providing affordable transportation to low and middle- income households". The growth of the electric vehicles market will also, "help reduce pollution in urban areas" that is according to the IFC. This solution can and should be replicated all over the developing world especially in the urban areas where the electricity grid runs. This will go a long way in helping to reduce the amount of Green-house gas emissions into the atmosphere by a very large and significant margin thus helping to mitigate the effects of global warming.
