The conference, being organized by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences of Mumbai, is being seen as something of an indicator of which way the climate change argument flows in the country.

When the minister first publicly questioned how “equitable sharing” of carbon space between countries should be considered, the old hands at climate negotiations cried foul and pointed that to play with the term at this time was only going to create a trojan horse. The per capita norm, embodied in the Kyoto protocol, has been backed by successive governments and reiterated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself.

As reported by TOI in February, the minister had commissioned Arvind Subramanian, an economist working with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, to undertake a study to define equity in the context of climate change.

Critiques pointed out that with several million people living in India and other developing countries without even access to electricity, tinkering with the per capita equity principle was fraught with diminishing the chances of these millions to develop in the years to come.

The two most vocal critiques of the minister in the climate team were then shown the door – they were not part of the Indian team this time around to Bonn. The environment minister, instead, recommended two newbies at negotiations – Navroz Dubash from the Centre for Policy Research and T Jayaraman from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Significantly, Jayaraman is one of the lead organizers of the seminar on carbon equity. And while the PMO may have decided not to send Jayaraman and Dubash to the meet at Bonn, the minister’s support for the TISS professor has generated international interest in what gets showcased at Mumbai.

With the PMO having yet to take a decision on restructuring or repopulating the climate bureaucracy after veteran Shyam Saran exited, all climate players have been carefully watching for incremental shifts in policy as an indication of where the government might ultimately stand.

Jayaraman’s recent paper on equity that he co-authored with others and is yet to be released publicly may not go as radical as Subramanian’s , but it has generated enough heat with the climate negotiators and observers who have more or less been out of the loop on the home-grown equity debate.

Jayaraman in his paper suggests India does not lose out much if the date from when countries’ emissions are accounted for is shifted from 1850 (the point from where industrialised countries ’ emissions started rising) to 1970. In the paper, Jayaraman points out that the shift in the date might demand deeper mitigation action from China though. This could cause India and China to take differing climate stances internationally — a significant break from the trend today.

His paper, which is not based on assessing costs that India would have to bear for different emission trajectories but on a statistical objective of keeping global carbon emissions below danger levels has now, along with writings of Subramanian, come under the scanner of negotiators here and aboard. The two-day meeting too is bound to be of interest to observers to gauge not just the content but also the intentions of the group that has sometimes labelled itself as ‘progressive’ .

Carbon Equations

Sticking to the per capita emission approach, as stated in the Kyoto pact, the developing world demands that every individual has equal right to carbon space

Advocates say the developed nations have occupied roughly 70% of the carbon space though they are home to less than a fifth of the world’s population

Poor countries want the rich to vacate this space — reduce their emissions rapidly — or pay them to do so. This could impact how steep emission targets undertaken will be

Critics say the per capita line assumes there is an equal right to pollute or to the atmosphere as a global sink, leading to arbitrary burden-sharing