PMO to take a call on RK Pachauri’s future in climate change council

The Prime Minister’s Office is likely take a call soon on the future of RK Pachauri in the prime minister’s council on climate change following the registration of a sexual harassment case against him.

Updated on: Feb 27, 2015, 24:32:21 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Prime Minister’s Office is likely take a call soon on the future of RK Pachauri in the prime minister’s council on climate change following the registration of a sexual harassment case against him.

RK-Pachauri-resigned-as-the-chairperson-of-Intergovernmental-Panel-on-Climate-Change-IPCC-following-accusation-of-sexual-harassment-HT-file-photo

Pachauri, director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), was re-nominated to the council by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year and he participated in its first meeting in January this year. He had been member of the council since its inception in 2007 by former PM Manmohan Singh.

“We expect Pachauri to resign on his own after he stepped down from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and went on leave from Teri,” a senior government official told Hindustan Times. “If he fails to resign on his own, I think the PMO will remove him”.

Two environment ministry officials told HT they were waiting for a direction from the PMO as the members of the council were nominated by the PM. Informally, the ministry has expressed a desire that Pachauri should step aside from the panel till a court of law takes a decision on the charges against him.

Former solicitor general of India Indira Jaisingh said the government should sack him to ensure impartial probe.

The engineer-turned-environmentalist, 74, has not resigned from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation with whom he had been associated since 2009 as member of a high level panel on peace and culture. The UNESCO office in Delhi refused to comment, saying a decision would be taken at the body’s headquarters in France.

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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