Tough Indian line on greenhouse norms

India will not abide by any international commitment to mandatory reduction of greenhouse gas emission but wants technology transfer from the West, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 1, 2007, 03:35:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India will not abide by any international commitment to mandatory reduction of greenhouse gas emission (GHG) but wants technology transfer from the West to voluntarily reduce GHG, according to the proposed national strategy on climate change,

The strategy, framed by the Environment Ministry in consultation with the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, will soon be circulated to several government ministries, seeking feedback. “We expect to finalise the policy before the Bali negotiations on the post-Kyoto Protocol regime starts in December-end,” said a senior government official.

However, a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change said that they had not seen the draft report yet. “We have been told that a copy of the report would reach us within a fortnight,” the member told the Hindustan Times.

Government officials said the draft policy clearly emphasises on the Indian approach of measuring world GHG on per capita emission rather than country-wise emission, as being propagated by the developed world. Although India is the sixth largest carbon emitter in the world, it has one of the lowest per capita emission rates. Both the United States and Europe have much higher per capita emission rates.

In addition to it, India’s economic growth of about 8.7 per cent has not led to a notable rise in energy consumption — it has seen a 3.7 per cent growth in energy usage. India’s carbon dioxide intensity is the same as Japan and better than developed nations like Germany, according to former Environment Secretary Pradipto Ghosh.

The strategy also talks about the measures India has taken to reduce carbon emission. “It (the draft policy) says fuel price is higher in India in comparison to the US, therefore, India cannot be forced to meet carbon emission reduction targets,” the member said.

The country’s first policy document on climate change was prompted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report, which was released earlier this year. Ghosh, the lead author of the policy, said that it would include additional responsibility on adoption. He also emphasized that it would require higher allocation, than the present two per cent of GDP to tackle “multi-level climate variability”.

The Western propaganda of carbon capturing and storage (CSS) to check carbon emission from thermal plants has not convinced the government. “Only if the technology is utilized in large-scale power plants everywhere in the world can we consider it,” said Surya P Sethi, principal advisor of the Planning Commission, when asked about the future of CCS in India.

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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