New Institutional mechanism on green development soon: Budget

New Delhi, Feb 29 (UNI) Taking note of the urgency of measures for reducing carbon emissions to arrest global warming, the Government today announced the creation of a permanent institutional mechanism for promoting sustainable development and green technologies.

Presenting the Union Budget for 2008-09 in the Lok Sabha, Finance Minister P Chidambaram said the details of the mechanism would be announced shortly.

Such a mechanism would coordinate the activities of various agencies working for greening the process of development, he said.

It may be noted that the National Action Plan on Climate Change will be in place in June, as announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently. The last budget had announced setting up of a high-powered Experts Committee on Climate change. The committee is going to submit its report soon.

The Finance Minister said though India was not mandated to cut emissions under the existing international arrangements, and formulated its policies on the principle of ''common but differenciated responsibility'', it, however, realised the need of taking measures in its ''own self-interest''.

''We can promote clean technology products; we can review fuel emission and efficiency regulations; we can replace wood by solar energy; we can encourage use of gas which is the most benign hydrocarbon; we can set up trading platform for carbon emissions; we can build sustainable greenfield cities; and we can do more,'' he said.

''In order to explore and implement these and other ideas, the Government proposes to establish a permanent institutional mechanism that will play a development and coordination role, ''he said.

The Report of a UN Climate Change body IPCC released last year had established beyond doubt that climate change was being caused by global warming induced by human activities. Since then, governments the world over have started incorporating in their plan documents the policies and taking other measures to reduce the emission of carbon and other greenhouse causing gases.

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