This is then the challenge of 2012 and beyond. The world is on the boil and the steam of anger will not dissipate. The question is whether these protests can be channeled to etch new, better pathways of growth.

Consider this story: It’s January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don’t hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.

A dye-sensitised solar cell (DSSC) is a thin film cell that uses thin layers of photosensitive organic dye deposits on a substrate to produce power from solar energy. In 2011, this technology took several important steps towards cost effective commercialisation, with major industrial players such as Tata Steel Europe (formerly the Corus Group) signing an agreement with Australia-based Dyesol, one of the original innovators of DSSC, for developing the world's largest dye-sensitised photovoltaic (PV) module, by printing a continuous series of dye-sensitised PV coatings on steel bars.

India plans to install 20,000 MW of solar capacity over the next decade - 10,000 MW each in the concentrating solar power (CSP) and photovoltaic (PV) segments. A huge market has been created along with supportive policies to optimise the abundant direct normal irradiance (DNI), large engineering tool and technical know-how on the power blocks.