PM's panel rejects climate action plan

The Council finds gaping holes in the paper made by the 3-member panel, for the Bali conference, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 27, 2007, 03:29:02 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change has refused to accept the much-touted national action plan on climate change in its present format before the Bali conference on action to combat global warming.

It was said the plan would provide direction to India’s strategy at the conference but the PM’s council found gaping holes in the strategy paper prepared by a three-member committee which has RK Pachauri, head of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, as one of the members. The other members are environment secretary Meena Gupta and former environment secretary Pradipto Ghosh.

In the absence of a consensus on the action plan, the council gave a direction to the stand India can take at conference that will be hosted by the UN. The council was unanimous that there should be deep winding targets for developed nations and India should ask for clean technology transfers in the energy sector without any riders.

“The new global partnership should be based on equity and India should raise the issue that the developed world has not cut carbon emissions as per the targets specified,” a council member said.

The members also urged Manmohan Singh to see that India takes a lead in the global initiative on climate change while taking new initiatives to check the domestic impact of climate change. “We need to look for out-of-the-box solutions,” another member said.

The 30-page action plan put India’s development expenditure as part of the investment on climate change mitigation and adoption. It also said that improving the lives of India’s poor is best way of checking the impact of climate change. The programmes for climate change mitigation in the 11th Five-Year Plan were also part of the paper.

But many members had issues with the action plan and sought revisions. The PM agreed and asked the committee to incorporate the suggestions of the members and bring the revised action plan to the next meeting.

In the 11th Plan, the government wants to treat climate change as a separate sector. “There would be allocation specifically for climate change to concerned ministries such as the Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Environment Ministry,” said V.L. Chopra, member (environment), Planning Commission.

Chopra, however, said there was a need to develop an “inter-disciplinary mechanism” to ensure a concerted effort to deal with climate change concerns. The Earth Sciences Ministry would be the nodal ministry to look into the science of climate change, he added.

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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