India readies for D-Day

The ministry of environment and forests has drafted a comprehensive legislation encompassing all aspects of climate change that it plans to put in place post the climate change talks in Copenhagen scheduled from December 7-18.

“The draft National Greenhouse Gas Mitigation plan is ready, but it involves inter-ministerial discussions and a consensus on it. Though we cannot mandate it for now, I believe a comprehensive legislation is better than a piece-meal legislation,” Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh told Business Standard.

Yesterday Ramesh unveiled an action plan, which could help the country cut its emission intensity (emissions per unit of GDP) by 20-25 per cent by 2020.

The strategy, which he referred to as a “piece-meal” one, related to India legislating mandatory fuel efficiency standards for vehicles by December 2011; having a mandatory green building code for energy conservation; amending its Energy Conservation Act for energy efficiency certificates; ensuring 50 per cent of all new power capacities based on clean coal technologies; maintaining the country’s forest cover at 10 per cent; and ensuring that a proportion of the country’s agriculture comes from methane-reducing technologies. The ministry intends to also cater to small-scale industries, which, it feels, need to “gear up”.

The comprehensive legislation, said Ramesh, “is modelled on Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act, and will encompass the domestic legislation that I had proposed three months back”. It would include converting some of the nationally-appropriate mitigation actions (NAMA) into nationally-accountable mitigation outcomes (NAMO) that “will convert each action into an accountable performance target and the ministry will be accountable for it to the Parliament”.

“NAMO will give Parliament a central place in our accountability. This will take accountability to our legislature before we become accountable internationally,” said Ramesh.