Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: March 2, 2008GURGAON, India — It is Friday night in the mecca of new Indian ambition.
The New York TimesThe air is thick with the construction dust of new glass-fronted high-rise buildings. The traffic moves so slowly that commuters can gape all they want at the Burberry advertisement that lights up the facade of a shopping mall. In the din of car horns and cranes, Sucharita Rastogi, 27, a business school graduate, waits wearily for her office van to pull up and take her home; it will be at least a 90-minute crawl. "Mind-wise," she says, "we are exhausted, sitting, waiting."

A beacon of India's red-hot economy, this new suburb on the edge of the capital, New Delhi, is also a symbol of India's fast-growing hunger for energy. By the government's own estimates, energy consumption in this country of 1.1 billion is expected to quadruple over the next 25 years, inevitably expanding India's emissions of greenhouse gases.

At the moment, it is a mixed blessing that Gurgaon remains an island of air-conditioned malls and roaring, round-the-clock office towers, and that behind this brightly lighted boomtown lies a vast nation of darkness and cow-dung-fueled stoves.

Almost half of India's population has no access to the electricity grid, and many more people suffer hours without power. Nearly 700,000 Indians rely on animal waste and firewood as fuel for cooking. As a result, India's per capita carbon footprint remains a small fraction of that of the industrialized world — the average American produces 16 times the emissions of the average Indian — and in turn empowers the central Indian argument for its right to consume more, not less, energy in the future.

India has consistently bucked pressures to set targets for reducing emissions, arguing that it has neither been a significant polluter nor yet able to spread modern energy to millions of its poor. Instead, it has pledged to ensure that its per capita emissions never exceed those of the developed world.