India defines its energy security as the three As of Availability, Access and Affordability. The last two are anyway contingent upon the first. B stands for a Bubble, cabined, cribbed and confined by four Cs that hem in our poor policy makers. What are the four Cs threatening not just our energy security but also future growth?

The first is Coal, a resource we have so much and yet so little of. The single biggest fuel source of India accounting for half its energy use, producing two thirds of our electricity- yet a third of our population goes powerless and the remainder struggles with questionable access.

Even if the dreams of the Mungerilals who wrote the XII Plan document are realised, annual coal production of 795 million tonnes (MT) by 2017 leaves a yawning gap of 185 MT as imports.

That brings us to the second C, the Current Account Deficit that constitutes the fiscal wall our finance minister confronts each budget, making it impossible to plan beyond the immediate here and now, severely restricting the room to manoeuvre that our elephantine democracy needs.

India imports 76 per cent of its oil, 34 per cent of its gas and 20 per cent of its coal. With the fourth largest coal reserves in the world, why import coal? Because scouring global markets for fuel imports we invariably run against the third C, China, a country with double our coal reserves but six times our production. China's phenomenal growth has been fuelled almost entirely by coal. In coal, China now plays international markets, switching between domestic and imported, depending on where the price advantage lies. India, struggling with sheer availability, remains a price taker.

So last month, sights fixed on the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) and plunging coal prices, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) declared a ban on burning coal with an ash content more than 16 per cent in booming eastern cities that have the focus of its fight against air pollution.

India burns coal with an ash content of 45 per cent. So we find ourselves running up against the Fourth C, Climate Wall, the increasingly strident demand that China and India clean up their act. In an unprecedented grab of global carbon space, China used two decades of the post-Rio Summit slack to build up the largest coalfired capacity in the world. If there was one late last night coal train leaving the station in 1992, China clambered onto it. We missed it. Now China is far better prepared for any post-Kyoto framework.

As the NDRC places restrictions on the kind of coal China is willing to burn, it can be counted on to progressively be less of a willing accomplice in future climate talks. India's strategy of hanging on to China's coat tails will not yield dividends for long. Simultaneously, a shale gas boom in the US brings in a more aggressive votary for climate action across the Atlantic. Therefore, sooner rather than later, India will find itself increasingly isolated.

However, we have chosen to go about breaking these four walls, armed with little more than a bubble, the bubble of our hyper-inflated notion of the ownership of resources. Reams have been written in judgments by the Supreme Court, in painstakingly voluminous reports by the CAG, and in much ink-spilt editorial columns, all saluting the ownership of precious natural resources vested in the people.

The legal obfuscation confuses the distinction between a reserve and a resource. Mineral reserves are by themselves valueless. For ownership to have value, the mineral must first be discovered-that is, established as a reserve. It must then be efficiently extracted, and finally used productively to derive maximum value through its best possible usage. Only then does it become a resource. This needs investment, technology, human ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Entities that best combine these confer maximum value upon resources to bring maximum benefit to the people.

If uncorrected, the errors of yesterday will become tomorrow's blunders. The primary error lay in the half-hearted amendments made to the Coal Nationalisation Act, the last coming as recently as 2012. Fixes for the errors lie with the executive and the legislature, not with the judiciary.

Let us get rid of our habitual distrust of markets. Resources are best allocated by efficiently functioning, well-regulated markets rather than by government committees rationing fuel linkages with never-to-be-produced coal reserves.

In the hyperbole about what to do with coal blocks, the fact is that the real danger lies in our coal reserves turning valueless. They will be valueless if we don't extract them, they will be valueless when rendered un-burnable by climate action a few decades from now.

Having missed one train already, are we now going to squabble at the bus stop and miss the last bus as well?

Sunjoy Joshi is Director, Observer Research Foundation, Delhi