Govt to adopt low carbon growth route

To meet the target of 20-25 per cent reduction in emission intensity for a unit of Gross Domestic Product by 2020, the government has decided to adopt low carbon growth pathway from the financial year 2010-11, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 5, 2010, 24:29:05 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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To meet the target of 20-25 per cent reduction in emission intensity for a unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2020, the government has decided to adopt low carbon growth pathway from the financial year 2010-11.

An expert group headed by former Planning Commission member Kirit Parikh will recommend the profile of cleaner technologies for the government to adopt in a bid to achieve the emission intensity target — listed in the Copenhagan accord — in the next 40 days.

“The commission will announce constitution of the expert group on Tuesday,” Environment & Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh told HT. Nitin Desai, former under-secretary to the UN and member of the PM’s Council on Climate Change, will also be member of the group.

Ramesh and plan panel’s deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia had a detailed meeting on the low carbon growth strategy on Saturday. “A decision has been taken to initiate low carbon growth parameters from the next financial year,” the minister said.

The commission in the mid-term appraisal of the 11th Five-Year Plan, which ends in 2012, found that India had reduced its emission intensity by 17.2 per cent between 1990 and 2005. Based on this, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the 20-25 emissions intensity reduction target by 2020 at the Copenhagen summit in December 2009.

The government is looking at several clean coal technologies for introduction in energy sector to meet the target. “The expert group would recommend the technologies which India can adopt in the coming few years to improve efficiency of coal fired power plants,” a senior commission official said.

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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