India’s energy needs are expected to double in the next 20 years and denying people this energy would be the equivalent of denying life to millions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his inaugural address at the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) on Wednesday.
“Energy requirements of the people of India are expected to nearly double in the next twenty years. Denying this energy would be denying life itself to millions. Successful climate actions also need adequate financing. For this, developed countries need to fulfil their commitments on finance and technology transfer,” he said during his address.
“We firmly believe in fulfilling all our commitments made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We have also raised our ambitions during CoP26 at Glasgow… I firmly believe, and I am sure you would agree, that environmental sustainability can only be achieved through climate justice. Sustainability requires co-ordinated action for the global commons,” PM Modi said.
“We have heard people call our planet fragile. But it is not the planet that is fragile. It is us. We are fragile. Our commitments to the planet, to nature, have also been fragile. A lot has been said over the last 50 years, since the 1972 Stockholm Conference. Very little has been done. But in India, we have walked the talk.”
Speaking at the Glasgow climate summit on November 1 last year, PM Modi announced that India’s non-fossil energy capacity will reach 500GW by 2030, meeting 50% of the country’s energy requirements by then. He said that India will reduce its total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes by 2030, reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 45% by 2030, over 2005 levels, and achieve net-zero emissions by 2070.
Modi also added in Glasgow that such ambitious action will be impossible without adequate climate finance from developed nations, calling on rich countries to make $1 trillion available as climate finance “as soon as possible.”
On Wednesday, he said equitable energy access to the poor has been a cornerstone of India’s environmental policy. Through Ujjwala Yojana, more than 90 million households have been provided access to clean cooking fuel, he said. And under the PM-KUSUM scheme, “we have taken renewable energy to the farmers,” he added. The PM also referred to India’s LED bulb distribution scheme, that has been running for over seven years , and has helped save more than 220 billion units of electricity, and reduced 180 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year.
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