TERI got Rs 56 lakh to run UN climate meetings

New Delhi-based NGO Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri, got funds from the Environment and Forest ministry to conduct meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body he chairs, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 30, 2010, 23:52:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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New Delhi-based NGO Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri, got funds from the Environment and Forest ministry to conduct meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body he chairs.

The IPCC is a UN body comprising scientists from more than 100 countries that provides inputs to policy makers on combating climate change.

Between 2004 and 2006, the environment ministry allocated funds amounting to about Rs 56 lakh to TERI for conducting IPCC meetings to discuss the impact of climate change, show documents made available to the Hindustan Times.

Or, TERI gained monetarily from work relating to the global body that Pachauri heads.

“There is no conflict of interest,” Pachauri told Hindustan Times in an e-mail response. “The first IPCC chairman, Prof Bert Bolin received substantial financial support from the gover-nment of Sweden for his funct-ioning as chairman. The seco-nd chairman, Dr Robert Watson, was in the White House when he was elected chairman and then moved to the World Bank, where the bank not only paid his salary but also provided all support for his functioning.”

But Ashish Kothari, founder of the NGO Kalpvariksh, which filed a Right to Information application to ascertain the money given by the ministry to TERI, said there was definite conflict of interest.

“In the context of TERI benefiting from IPCC findings, the government needs to consider the wider issue of conflict of interest involving ministry officials, companies and NGOs,” Kothari said.

Apart from meetings, the government also gave money to TERI to employ staff and set up secretariat support and communication facilities for the IPCC office in India.

Kothari said the government should have asked an organisation not linked with the IPCC to host these meetings.

“The ministry allocated the work to TERI, after obtaining approval from the finance ministry, as the institute was well versed with the requirements of IPCC,” said an environment ministry official not authorised to speak to the media.

Pradipto Ghosh, environment secretary at the time of allocation of these funds and now a TERI fellow, said there was nothing out of place in the allocation of funds. “TERI has been receiving funds from the ministry before and after my tenure,” said Ghosh.

The revelation comes soon after reports that TERI got projects on the basis of IPCC’s faulty predictions on the impact of climate change in the next 30 to 50 years. Some of the predictions, such as Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035, have been found to be wrong.

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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