What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth

"This will never work in India."

That's what Indian truck manufacturers said about electric freight. Now they build the trucks.

Something is going on here at a speed the rest of the world has not yet noticed. Solar capacity has gone from under three gigawatts to more than 160 in ten years. Across the same decade, 171 million people moved out of extreme poverty.

But in eastern Delhi, a woman who has lived beside an open mountain of garbage for fifty years asks Tom Rivett-Carnac for one thing: tell the world about us.

So, in the second of three episodes from India, Tom goes looking for what is really driving this change, what it looks like up close, and whether it can deliver for the people who need it most.

A cement executive who set a net zero target in 2018, when nobody else in his industry had, will give you the business case that green is profitable. Ask him what is actually driving him and he gives a different answer. Truck drivers on the Bengaluru highway who can now hear well enough to talk in the cabins. A nine-year-old with a bicycle. This is the largest transition of its kind anywhere on earth, and it is happening right now.

With Delhi-based journalist and filmmaker Adnan Bhat on the ground, and Dia Mirza, Shyla Raghav and Prachi Shevgaonkar on what it all adds up to.

So what does it look like from the inside? And what happens to the people it hasn't yet reached?

Disclosure: the electric freight programme in this episode, Laneshift, was founded by The Climate Pledge, which Global Optimism co-founded with Amazon, alongside the city network C40.

Learn More

⛰️ Read how Delhi's garbage mountains became heat bombs for the people who work them, Al Jazeera on the waste pickers of Ghazipur, a landfill now roughly as tall as the Qutub Minar

💧 Watch The Waterman of India, Decode Mediacom's film on Dr Rajendra Singh, whose johads and check dams have revived five rivers across drought-hit Rajasthan

🧊 Watch Sonam Wangchuk build an automated ice stupa, the artificial glaciers that freeze winter water into towers and release it when Ladakh needs it in spring

🌾 Learn more about Andhra Pradesh's natural farming programme, which has moved more than 1.7 million farmers off chemical-heavy methods and won the 2026 Food Planet Prize

🏗️ Understand why cement is so hard to clean up, from Chatham House

🗳️ See what Indians actually think about climate change, the Yale programme's opinion maps covering 634 districts

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

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Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

India Producer and translator: Adnan Bhat

Show Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan

Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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