To harness clean energy, India to seek foreign funds

Taking a step ahead in its fight against climate change, India has selected four projects to seek funding from the international Clean Technology Fund (CTF) supported by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

Updated on: Oct 6, 2011, 23:55:05 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Taking a step ahead in its fight against climate change, India has selected four projects to seek funding from the international Clean Technology Fund (CTF) supported by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

The fund has been initiated to help the developing countries adopt the sustainable growth pathway in an attempt to check carbon dioxide emission growth. India aims to maintain its economic growth rate of 8% in the next decade and will adopt cleaner technologies to achieve its goal.

In the first set of four projects, the government has identified improving regulatory mechanism for hydro projects in Himachal Pradesh, augmenting national mission on energy efficiency and solar mission and partial risk guarantee for energy efficiency technologies.

The environment ministry believes that hydro power potential of Himachal Pradesh can be increased to 70% from the present 31% in the next decade by improving the existing regulatory and approval process. For this, the ministry is seeking loan from the World Bank.

“The intent would be to implement a framework that would spur hydropower development from the current level of 31 % to 70 %, within 10 years, which would be a remarkable achievement that could serve as a model for other hydropower states in the country and in South Asia,” said the government’s policy document on clean technology fund.

The government wants money from the fund to provide concessional financing to support specific programmes under the National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency. The money will be utilised to support efficient equipment programmes under which India plans to develop highly energy efficient fans having a market of 10 million every year.

As the cost of energy efficient fans would be high, the government intends to use the CTF to enable the consumers to get this electrical appliance at an

affordable rate. “The financing will have significant transformative impact,” a ministry document said. To encourage players to develop efficient appliances for consumers, the government will start risk guarantee fund. It believes these appliances have a potential to save 10,000 MW of power every year.

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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