Copenhagen: India will not agree to a concept of "peaking" year as there is a huge backlog of development in expanding rural electricity in the country, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said, as he ruled out compromise on previously stated "red lines".
On his first day at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, Ramesh also said that India's national voluntary domestic measures to tackle climate change were not up for international scrutiny and progress on these measures would be checked by country's Parliament.
India was here to facilitate a legally binding deal and "has come here to play a constructive, facilitative, leadership role to ensure and effective and equitable agreement," Ramesh said.
"But at the same time we will not agree to a concept of peaking year for India because we have huge backlog of development particularly in expanding rural electricity supply," he said.
The Minister highlighted that not only was India announcing voluntary target of reducing carbon intensity by 20 to 25 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020 it was also taking a "nationally accountable mitigation outcome," which means that implementation and progress on these domestic measures would be checked by Parliament, civil society and media.
"There is no place on Earth that has domestic MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification) as boisterous, intensive an aggressive that in India."
Ramesh stressed that all action supported by international finance was subject to MRV but unsupported action was exclusively India s business.
Only an hour earlier, the US Chief envoy, Todd Stern, told another press conference that it the mitigation part of the draft text issued today by the Chairman of the Ad Hoc Working Group for Long Term Cooperative Action, Michael Zammit Cutajar was "unbalanced" because it did impose sufficient mitigation obligations on developed nations.
Ramesh expressed confidence about resolving the issue with the Americans stating that options like engaging in national communications once in two years but at the same time he emphasised that India would not make compromises on its previously stated positions including "peaking".
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The Indian minister spent day one at COP 15 meeting with his counterparts - environment minister of Algeria, Cherif Rahmani, US envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern, and UK Secretary of State for Environment Ed Miliband and Zhenhua Xie, Vice Minister, National Development and Reform Committee, and the Danish Environment minister.
Ramesh told journalists here that his discussions were focused on the various drafts of potential treaty from the Working Groups on Kyoto, the African group and Alliance of Island States (AOSIS) that have been circulating.
"In all these discussions I have had the basic objective was to highlight not only what India has done in recent weeks pro-actively, voluntarily but also to underscore the basic positions India will not compromise on even as it engages in constructive negotiations," he said.
The Minister especially highlighted that he had a good meeting with Rahmani who was also chair of the African group, which is a subset of the G77, and there was a good chance of producing an integrated BASIC draft with the African group.
The four BASIC countries- Brazil, South Africa, India and China have circulated a draft of a treaty text at the start of the conference, which has been contested in the group especially by Least Developed Countries and Small Island States that said that it did not reflect their special vulnerabilities to climate change.
Further, the Minister said that while India and China were coordinating very closely at Copenhagen, the two countries should not be compared in terms of emissions with China being number one and India being five. "We are not in the same boat," he said.
Later on Saturday, Ramesh will attend a ministerial meeting with his counterparts from different countries that will continue till Sunday.
"We will agree to any global goal by 2025 providing that goal makes clear what the equitable burden sharing arrangement is," he said.
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