All should get energy by 2030, India tells UN panel

The country on Tuesday asked the United Nations to ensure universal energy access by 2030 and wanted right based approach enabling legal entitlements to be part of the UN charter on sustainable development. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 17, 2011, 20:37:35 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The country on Tuesday asked the United Nations to ensure universal energy access by 2030 and wanted right based approach enabling legal entitlements to be part of the UN charter on sustainable development.

The country provides legal entitlements through laws such as Right To Information, Right To Education, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Forest Rights Act.

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh told a UN panel on sustainable development at Helsinki on Tuesday that the country’s rights based approach in service delivery and citizen empowerment can be key component of the committee's final report.

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon had constituted a high level panel on global sustainability in 2010 headed by President Jacob Zuma of South Africa and President Tarja Hallonen of Finland having 20 members from across the world including Ramesh.

Ramesh was of the view that the right approach can provide important lessons to both the developed and the developing world on inclusive paradigm. That can be enabled through equity and justice in sustainable development

He also emphasized on mainstreaming biodiversity and increments in per capita income in sustainability discussions meaning that every human being should have a right to basic standard of living, which should result in bridging the disparities.

To emphasise on equity principle, which is the country's mainstay in climate change negotiations, Ramesh presented a paper prepared by Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment and Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

The paper said traditionally equity was seen as a social issue and environment as a green issue but the two were linked as development means using resources in such a way to meet needs of the future generations. The lack of connect between the two, the paper says, has resulted in battles in the developing countries over developmental activities such as mining, dams and factories.

It also said that the polluters were better-off than the pollutees, thereby calling for justice in the concept of sustainable growth. Ramesh also emphasized that equity can enhance sustainable growth and it can be achieved through right based approach.

The country also presented a paper on new global indicator for sustainable development based on equity and on data that is not captured in Gross Domestic Product and Human Development Index.

The paper also says that there can be targets for sustainable development like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) and consumption should be basis of the new index, rather than production.

The logic presented for this is that consumption measures welfare whereas production can be bound for export like China produces a lot for US markets. But, it cautioned that low consumption should not be a benchmark as it restricts development. Access to food, health, education, water and energy have been suggested as metrics for the new indicator.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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