Budget may propose ₹10k cr plan to cut carbon emissions

NEW DELHI: The Union budget may announce a scheme to help cut the nation’s total projected carbon emissions by 1 billion tonnes and reduce the economy’s carbon intensity to less than 45% by 2030, two government officials aware of the development said.

The scheme, tentatively named Roadmap for Sustainable and Holistic Approach through National Energy Efficiency, or ROSHNEE, is expected to run for nine years till 2030. It may initially have a corpus of around ₹5,000 crore, with a total outlay of around ₹10,000 crore till 2030 and is aimed at helping India meet the climate commitments made at the Conference of Parties (COP-26) summit in Glasgow.

“The scheme is in the works and may also have a component for energy efficiency financing,” said one of the two government officials cited above. At Glasgow last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070, meet half of India’s energy needs from renewable energy by 2030 and raise non-fossil fuel power generation capacity to 500GW by the end of this decade.According to the Union government, India is the only major economy with actions in line to keep global warming below 2°C of pre-industrial levels and the only G20 country whose energy transition is consonant with this goal. Queries emailed to the spokespeople for the ministries of finance and power on Tuesday night remained unanswered till press time.“India expects developed countries to provide climate finance of $1 trillion at the earliest. Today, it is necessary that as we track the progress made in climate mitigation, we should also track climate finance,” Modi said at COP-26.

This comes at a time there hasn’t been much traction on the Green Climate Fund set up to provide developing nations $100 billion annually by 2020 to counter climate change.

“The proper justice would be that countries which do not live up to their promises made on climate finance, must be pressured too,” Modi added.