7 July 2023
Financial Times
interviews
Welcome back. I’ve been
enjoying The Big Con, a new book by Mariana
Mazzucato and Rosie
Collington, which accuses the giant consulting industry of “warping” the global economy and weakening both
businesses and governments.
Readers
in the consulting business may consider this attack unfair (see this wounded response from the head of the
UK’s Management Consultancies Association).
But the book’s warning of governments’ excessive reliance on external
consultants (as Mazzucato described to me last year) is worth taking seriously.
This
week we got new details of a troubling scandal in Australia. PwC is accused of taking confidential information
gleaned by helping the government with its tax plans — and then
using this to tout for business with companies. Google was among the companies that received information (it said
this had no impact on its handling of tax matters).
As
Mazzucato and Collington suggest, the atrophying of governments’ internal capacity is probably the biggest
reason to worry about their massive use of global consultancies. But their warnings of the latter’s
conflicts of interest are also important
— and harder to dismiss after the disgrace of PwC Australia.
For
today’s edition, Kenza caught up with Sumant Sinha, the head of India’s biggest renewable electricity
producer ReNew Power. And I look at an underexploited
way for companies to boost both worker welfare and their bottom lines. Have a great weekend.
— Simon Mundy
‘You can pretty much bury’ 1.5C, says Indian renewables boss
It is something of a
taboo to question the landmark commitment that countries and investors made in Paris in 2015 to strive to keep
global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial
levels.
But as this target starts to slip out of reach — the world registered the hottest day on record earlier this week — tongues have started to loosen and Moral Money’s contacts have been expressing more scepticism.
One renewable energy
boss did not hold back when I met him in London recently alongside my colleague Rachel Millard.
You can pretty much bury that target,” Sumant Sinha, the chair
of
India’s ReNew Power, said of 1.5C. And even 2C is “looking a bit
dicey”.
So what is the
alternative? A single global target for the annual installation of renewable
energy could be more effective than a “woolly” temperature goal, Sinha argued.
“At the very least, we
should say that any future demand growth anywhere in the world has to come from renewables,” he told Moral Money.
Western countries, where energy demand is growing
more slowly, should be held to
a tougher commitment to replace existing energy sources with renewables, he added.
As the boss of India’s
largest renewable energy provider, Sinha has skin in the game. He aims to lead India’s drive to install a massive
50GW of renewable energy a
year, and says 95 per cent of India’s increased energy demand is already being met
by renewable companies like his own.
One way the government is going about this is by auctioning grid capacity contracts with anexplicit requirement for providing both wind and solar energy at the same time — so-called “sculpted bids” that reduce problems with battery storage capacity and on-off energy provision.
India played a key role
in scuppering a plan to “phase out” coal at the Glasgow climate conference
in 2021, which the British president of COP26 Alok Sharma famously fought back
tears when announcing.
Despite this, Sinha
defended Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s climate record, arguing he had a “soft spot” and “innate desire” for
renewables. At the Sharm el-Sheikh COP27 last year, India offered to phase out
all fossil fuels, he claimed, but was
met with disdain by western countries which had been pushed into reliance on gas by the war in Ukraine.
“Everybody said ‘how on Earth can you expect us to live without oil and gas?’ So there is a bit of hypocrisy
there.”
Low take-up of renewable energy in the global south is partly due to a perception that it is expensive, Sinha argued. “They need to understand how renewables works, how to get
it installed, how to manage it in the system and so on . There’s a transmission problem of translating this
experience from places like India to the other
parts of the developing world.”
He drew parallels
between this sense of historic injustice and the position India adopted nearly a decade ago in
relation to developed countries: “You guys all used fossil fuels to get here . . . it’s my turn.”
ReNew has been prolific
in raising money through green bonds, most recently in a $400mn
issuance in April that it said was four times oversubscribed. But another controversial position by Sinha is
that such forms of green finance are not hugely useful. None of these issuances saved more than one 20th of
a percentage point on the cost
of debt. “Maybe it broadens the pool of investment . . . but
nobody is willing to cut you any slack on the financials.” (Kenza
Bryan)
An opportunity hiding in plain sight
Over several months in
2017, an international team of academics ran a study to see what would happen if they
distributed eyeglasses to tea pickers on a plantation in Assam, north-eastern India.
The results were
striking. For workers who needed them (which was most of those aged over 40), glasses improved
productivity by more than 20 per cent. “Among all the things we can do medically to
help someone be more productive, vision interventions
beat pretty much everything else that’s out there,” Nathan Congdon, a Queen’s University Belfast
professor who led the study, told me.
The human welfare impact
of vision correction, of course, should be reason enough to do it. But for companies seeking ways to boost worker
wellbeing and profits at the
same time, this looks like an easy win.
A growing number of international
companies appear to be waking up to this opportunity.
Clothing producers Levi Strauss and VF Corporation are among the businesses that have partnered with
VisionSpring, a US-headquartered social enterprise,
to roll out vision interventions for workers in their supply chains.
For workers in many developing countries, getting a pair of glasses would normally involve taking time off work and travelling to an optician or hospital, and paying more than a week’s wages for a vision test and a pair of glasses. Vision Spring offers free vision tests and sells glasses for as little as $0.80, paid either by the user or by their employer.
In the first quarter of this year,
VisionSpring sold more than 480,000 pairs of glasses,
mostly in India, Bangladesh, Uganda and
Ghana.
To
drive further growth, it is
hoping to persuade multinational companies of the economic logic
— beyond the
humanitarian grounds — behind its work.
For
agricultural workers in the tea and coffee industries, or in
manufacturing sectors such as garment production, the value
of the increased productivity from vision
correction dwarfs the cost, VisionSpring chief executive Ella Gudwin told me.
Smart
investors “would take that trade all day long”, she said. “Then the question is, why hasn’t it happened yet? One
of the things is eyeglasses are often considered a health intervention. And if eyeglasses have to compete
against maternal mortality or
malaria, it will not get the resources.”
In its partnership with VisionSpring, Levi Strauss’s company foundation has funded free eye tests for about 50,000 workers in its supply chain in India, Bangladesh and Vietnam, and bought glasses for those who needed them, said Kim Almeida, director of programmes at the Levi Strauss Foundation. Factory managers have reported improved levels of performance, she said.
Factories
can also enjoy major benefits in staff retention, Gudwin added, noting that
experienced workers are forced out of their positions in huge numbers as
their vision deteriorates with age. “So you have
the cost of recruiting new sewing machine operators — when all you needed
was $5 to get your senior operator to stay
with you,” she said. (Simon Mundy)