Jairam for shift, not surrender

Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh has suggested a nuanced shift in India’s climate change position in a note to Prime Minister Manomohan Singh.

Updated on: Oct 19, 2009, 23:58:41 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh has suggested a nuanced shift in India’s climate change position in a note to Prime Minister Manomohan Singh.

But the minister denied that he wanted to junk the Kyoto Protocol and had agreed to emission cuts under an international obligation, as reported in sections of the media.

“There is no question of India agreeing to emission cuts targets or junking the Kyoto Protocol,” Ramesh told Hindustan Times, after a meeting with the prime minister. “We want emission cut targets only for the developed world for 2020-2030 (not for developing nations) and a distinction between the developed and the developing countries as stated in the Kyoto Protocol.”

In the note on the agenda for India’s preparations for Copenhagen (in December this year) that has dismayed climate change negotiators and activists, Ramesh expressed willingness to talk on international mitigation commitments, provided they were supported by finance and technology.

In a deviation from India’s stand on the per capita approach, Ramesh in the note had suggested “a per capita plus” approach, claiming that convergence of only per capita emissions alone is not a sustainable basis for the negotiations.

India had maintained that it would not accept any greenhouse gas reduction targets till its per capita emissions reach the level of developed nations such as United States’. India’s annual per capita emission is 1.1 tonnes as compared to 20.1 tonnes for the United States.

Ramesh’s note speaks of a domestic law on climate change management, which has emission mitigation targets for efficiency in the energy sector and non-fossil based energy supply by 2020-30. The proposed law, which the Environment ministry wants to introduce in the winter session of the Parliament, would for the first time quantify India’s emission reduction targets.

“The question of subjecting what we do to reduce our emissions from our own resources will not be open for international scrutiny,” he said. “The information will be available for discussion and not verification.”

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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