India’s claim on spending for adapting to climate change is inflated, a report by a non-government organisation (NGO) said on Tuesday, reports Chetan Chauhan.
India’s claim on spending for adapting to climate change is inflated, a report by a non-government organisation (NGO) said on Tuesday.
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The Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change had said the Central government had allocated 2.6 per cent of the GDP in 2006-07 for climate adaptation through its 114 schemes.
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“The allocation is in fact less than what was said in the national plan on climate change,” said Yamini Mishra, executive director of the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), the group that analysed government spending on climate adaptation in the last four budgets with International NGO Oxfam.
More than half of India’s one billion population is vulnerable to climate change with the entire Himalayan region, the coastline and Central India in a zone of high climate impact.
The study, Adaptation to Climate Change in India, said the government allocated just 1.7 per cent of the GDP through the 146 Central government schemes in nine sectors, such as health improvement, drought control, risk management, agriculture innovation, irrigation and disaster management. The 2.6 per cent for climate adaptation, as claimed in 2006, was achieved in the budget of 2009-10, the report said.
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.
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