NEW DELHI, Feb. 7: India’s National Plan of Action on Climate Change will be released in June this year to address the challenges of global warming, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, today indicated. The government is also considering setting up a venture capital fund to promote green technologies, Dr Singh said inaugurating the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit here, organised by The Energy Resource Institute (TERI).

“The Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change is working on a National Plan of Action for climate change,” the Prime Minister said. “Even as we engage internationally in creating a global strategy to address climate change we would in parallel work on local, sub national and national action to meet the challenges of climate change.”

An area that needed immediate attention was public transport, Dr Singh observed. The government had asked the Planning Commission to come up with a comprehensive policy in this regard, he informed.

Expressing concern over “distortions” that had crept into the country’s energy pricing policies, Dr Singh said a national debate was needed on the issue. “Can we afford to persist with the distortions that have long crept into our energy pricing policies? Are we contributing to environmental degradation through some of our energy pricing policies?” he asked.

The Prime Minister questioned whether the country was encouraging overuse of resources through misdirected subsidies and what were long term costs of short term benefits through such policies. He also wondered whether the country was hurting its future energy security needs by shirking the responsibility to grapple with the political challenges on hand. “We need a much wider national debate on such issues”, he said.

He called upon TERI to present a global vision on energy security. “What are the technology choices available and what public policy choices do we have that will enable government to address the challenges we face in making clean and affordable energy available to our people”, he asked.