PM: India to decrease GDP emission intensity by 20%

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Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai during the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit in New Del

Putting to rest all controversy on India’s stand on the climate change debate, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasised on Thursday that India is set to reduce the emissions intensity of our GDP by 20 per cent between 2005 and 2020. To put this in effect, Dr Singh said, “we have set up a National Action Plan on Climate Change which will have eight national missions to look into different areas of sustainability and energy efficiency.”
Speaking at the 11th Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, Dr Singh spelled out that “India’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan spanning the period of 2012-17 will focus on specific initiatives required to ensure we follow a low carbon growth path.”
He further outlined that chartering a low carbon growth trajectory will not alone be sufficient to meet this challenge which crosses all natural boundaries. “Even if India was able to eliminate all its greenhouse gas emissions, we will not make a significant difference to our climate since our emissions account for only four per cent of the global emission,” he explained.
A global coordinated policy should have evolved at the UNFCC meet at Cancun which unfortunately was able to throw up only “modest results”. Hitting out at industrialised nations, the Prime Minister reiterated that although India and China have come up with a slew of measures to reduce missions, “clear commitments were required from the industrial nations in order to contain future temperature increase to no more than 2ºC.”
India had put in place both a regulatory mechanism and was also following the polluter pay principle. “Last year, we introduced a cess of 5 per cent on the use of coal both domestic or imported to build the corpus of a National Clean Energy Fund,” he stated.
Dr Singh also outlined the eight National Missions in the areas of energy efficiency, solar energy, sustainable habitat, water, sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem, agriculture and strategic knowledge of climate change. The last of these missions called Green India will see the regeneration of six million hectares of degraded forest land.
Dr Singh was awarded Teri’s Sustainable Development Leadership award for 2011 for making this crucial subject an integral part of his government.