The Union environment, forests and climate change ministry has set up five inter-ministerial groups that shall project the changes in schemes, programmes and laws required for India to achieve its greenhouse gas emission intensity reduction targets under the Paris Agreement.
The thematic inter-ministerial groups, with some representation from industry groups on board, are expected to present their reports by the end of the year.
"We need to understand what additional steps we need to take. This could include mapping existing programmes, tweaking them, starting new schemes or even changes in the legislation. The committees will help guide the decisions of the government," said a senior government official, on condition of anonymity.
India had committed to reducing the emission intensity of its economy by 33-35 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. To achieve this target, it had made international commitment on two sectoral targets as well.
India has committed to achieve 40 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030 and create a carbon sink of 2.5 to three billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.
The Paris Agreement, once operationalised, will also require a mandatory reporting of inventories and data on action taken to achieve these targets. The data and information will be open to international scrutiny.
The government does collect data and build inventories on these lines, but the level of accuracy and sourcing of data would have to be brought in alignment with rules that are set in place in future under the Paris Agreement.
The committees, now set up by the environment ministry, are to each go into specific elements of the Paris Agreement such as emission reduction, adaptation and finance.
The emission reduction targets and the commitment on greening the power sector are expected to have substantial consequences for the power sector, including financing the changes.
Some of the measures to ramp up use of renewable energy have been made in the past few years, including the recent increase of renewable power obligations.
The power ministry has also begun looking at the critical issue of financing balancing power for the renewable energy supply as well as financing models that could provide cheaper credit to the fledgling industry trying to compete with lower interest rates in developed country markets.
"There are a host of things we would need to do and these maybe in the nature of incentives, policy changes or regulatory mechanisms.
The entire energy policy would require being oriented to these commitments, including the international regime for transparency and reporting that will come into force," said another senior official.
On the adaptation side, too, the government will need to tweak or substantially upgrade the state action plans, which were formulated before the Paris Agreement and remain preliminary in nature. "The first generation of these state plans is not up-to-mark. We are in the process of asking states to take a relook and plan to hand-hold them to improve upon these. The national objectives will have to find a coherent reflection in the state plans," said the official.
