No less important is maintaining the crucial differentiation between the developed Northern countries and the developing South in responsibility for combating climate change.

This principle is under attack. There are cracks in the G-77+China group of developing countries. At the same time, India is under pressure to take strong voluntary climate mitigation measures. It's also called upon to defend the right to development, which is vital to its poor majority.

Just before Copenhagen, environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced a 20-25 percent reduction in the economy's carbon emissions intensity by 2020 (over 2005). India would also report its domestic mitigation actions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat every two years—instead of every six years, like other developing countries. This triggered charges of “capitulation” to United States pressure and led to a Parliament walkout by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left. It also widened rifts within the Indian climate delegation. Two negotiators threatened to quit. Mr Ramesh persuaded them to stay on. But the damage was done. The world knows that India's climate stance doesn't enjoy fully consensual domestic support.

Reduction in India's emissions intensity doesn't amount to a cut in overall greenhouse emissions. Total emissions will continue to grow because the GDP will more than double by 2020 at existing growth rates, even as the consumption of resources per rupee of output falls by 20-25 percent.

Reducing emissions intensity is a welcome shift from India's earlier stand which was inflexible and overemphasised the per capita emissions norm to the exclusion of all else. But the shift was executed ham-handedly—without enough deliberation among policy-makers, including the negotiators themselves. It's also true that India shifted its stand under pressure from the US following bilateral discussions last month between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama. Indeed, a White House statement blandly says China and India “for the first time set” carbon-intensity reduction targets “following bilaterals”.

The truth is, the US evolved a special strategy towards the Plus Five emerging countries (China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) some months ago. It knew it couldn't get them to agree to legally binding emissions cuts. But it could get them to undertake emissions-intensity reductions, and report their mitigation actions every two years, which only the developed countries are meant to do. The US succeeded in achieving both its objectives. China agreed to reduce its carbon emissions intensity by 40-45 percent by 2020. Brazil and South Africa will cut their emissions by 30 percent-plus. However, the US made no reciprocal commitment. It has failed to improve on its measly offer of a 4-7 percent emissions reduction by 2020 (over 1990), when a 40 percent cut is needed.

So this wasn't an even bargain. The Plus Five committed a tactical error in not extracting a reciprocal pledge from Washington. But a tactical error must not be equated with strategic blunder. India can still, and should, press the US to make a more ambitious offer. At any rate, the announced reduction in carbon emissions intensity does not represent a retreat from the two declared policy “red lines”—India won't accept legally binding targets for reducing emissions, and it won't sign any agreement that requires that its emissions peak by a certain year.

Although taken in haste, the 20-25 percent carbon intensity reduction decision is a step in the right direction. India can and should cut the slack in its energy and material use. There's plenty of scope for doing so. The 20-25 percent target is meagre in relation to the 40-percent plus India can achieve even by a business-as-usual extension of its 1990-2005 record of 17.6 percent carbon intensity reduction. The scope for further reduction is enormous.

For instance, if power was fully metered and irrigation pump and motor ratings were matched, India would save 40 percent in electricity consumed in agriculture. Replacing incandescent lamps (annual sales, 700 million) with compact fluorescent lamps or light-emitting diodes would yield 75 percent saving with a payback period of just 4-6 months. Fans (annual sales, 25 million) are amenable to 40 percent energy saving and television sets to 25 percent.

All these are mass-consumption items. So the savings will benefit large numbers and reduce the burden on the electricity grid. Energy-efficient appliances can yield 70,000 million kilowatt-hours energy savings by 2013, equivalent to adding new capacity of 40,000 MW. This represents a little over a quarter of India's total installed capacity!

Similarly, with readily available commercial technology of supercritical power generation, we can raise the thermal efficiency of coal-based electricity from the existing 29 percent to 42-44 percent. This alone would cut coal burning by 50 percent. That's what reducing the carbon emissions intensity of GDP is all about. The scope for reducing carbon and energy-intensity is a huge 30 percent-plus in major industries like steel, cement, aluminium, glass, chlor-alkali, paper and so on.

India must exploit this and do more. Unfortunately, the National Action Plan on Climate Change and its eight Missions on solar power, energy efficiency, agriculture and water, etc. fail to draw up sensible and ambitious programmes. The National Plan was drawn up in great haste in order to ward off pressure from the G-8 Summit in Japan last year—without consultation with independent experts, people's movements and civil society organisations. The only Mission to have been officially launched so far, the National Solar Mission, was hastily revised just before Dr Manmohan Singh's visit to the US last month by bypassing the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change.

The Council was constituted in a great rush in June 2007 just before the G-8 Summit in Germany. It consists of 26 members, most of them ministers and serving and former bureaucrats, with just one NGO representative. All but one of its members are from Delhi or its suburbs—a crying shame for a country of 1.1 billion. The sole exception is Mumbai-based industrialist Ratan Tata.

This speaks to the closed, narrow and insular nature of climate policy-making in India, which bears no relationship to flesh-and-blood people, especially those who are already and likely to be most affected by climate change. Such policy-making ignores the real priorities: bridging the domestic equity gap in consumption between the rich and the poor and between disparate regions. Differentials in per capita emissions between the lowest- and highest-emitting states are 16:1, even higher than the per capita disparities between the European Union and India, which Indian policy-makers never tire of citing as indices of an iniquitous global climate order.

Such gaps can only be bridged if the poor are provided with modern energy services such as clean cooking fuel and electricity for lighting in a manner that does not lead to high emissions, and if the luxury consumption of the rich is discouraged through taxation and other measures—such as outright bans on fuel-guzzling SUVs.

Indian climate policy must simultaneously address domestic and global agendas. Domestically, India must move rapidly towards lowering the water, power and carbon intensity of production in agriculture, housing, transportation and industry. India must firmly embrace low-carbon development.

Two domestic agendas cry out for attention: the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers, and overexploitation of groundwater. The Indian government is ambivalent about or in blatant denial about Himalayan glacier melting, which is scientifically established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by Indian and international researchers. The glaciers are receding so rapidly that they will disappear in 30-35 years, creating havoc in the three great Indian river systems they feed, including the Ganga, Indus and Brahmaputra.

An important contributor here is Black Carbon, soot produced by the incomplete burning of firewood, twigs, cowdung and vegetable waste in the extremely inefficient cookstoves (2 percent efficiency) that the poor are forced to use. Enabling the poor to use efficient biomass stoves or LPG stoves will greatly reduce Black Carbon emissions.

Similarly, India is drawing a mind-boggling 54 trillion litres of groundwater a year. As much as 25 trillion litres is lost to the sea, raising its level by 0.6 millimetres. This is equivalent to the sea-level rise from the Alaskan glaciers' melting! This should jolt Indian policy-makers into urgent action. Some of these domestic agendas must be addressed for the sake of India's own poor—independently of the global negotiations.

Globally, India is called upon to play a multi-tiered, nuanced, and complex role in defending G-77+China solidarity, resisting Northern pressure, insisting on North-South and rich-poor differentiation, and in opposing disastrously ineffective market-based pseudo-solutions like carbon trading. Unless the North moves quickly to 40 percent cuts in its 1990-level emissions by 2020, a stark choice could stare India in the face this week: no deal, or a bad deal that locks the world into a high-emissions trajectory. India should have the courage to refuse a bad deal and demand a Copenhagen-II. (IPA Service)