AMIDST the opulence of the Asian Development Bank's (ADB) annual meeting, the representative of at least one government -- a large, poor country in South Asia -- was discovered staying in a hotel room that cost over $1,000 a night.

The big prize, more than anything else, was Power. The power sector. A seminar organised by a giant French utility with dealings worldwide became the magnet for people who were attracted to this moneymaking growth sector. Two trillion dollars in the next decade was the carrot. In an unabashed bid to woo the foreign dollar, an Indian "team" consisting of leading industrialists, power ministry honchos and industrial financiers took turns on the podium, extolling the liberalisation process in India's power structures.

I listened in vain for the word "environment" to be mentioned with some seriousness. It was, but in terms of an "investment environment". And so I watched the power engineers and the big business sit back and watch the countries grovel and undercut each other for investment. Build, build, build more. Not a word about increasing efficiency in generation, transmission, distribution. Not a word on end-use efficiency.