The draft of the chapter on climate change finalized by the plan panel, accessed by TOI, also dilutes India's long-standing position that a bulk of funds for adaptation as well as emission reduction measures should come from developed countries.

The Planning Commission has made a strong push for the government to generate the funds domestically and through the private financing route. It has made a pitch for opening the country to a cap-and-trade business in emissions - something that has been strictly off the charts for the country in its international stance.

Sources told TOI that the environment ministry has sent a letter to the Planning Commission asking it to bring the chapter in line with the existing government policy on climate change.

The plan panel's chapter also lends India to accepting a global peaking level of emissions - something the government has strongly opposed through the last two decades warning that it would not accept a global cap until the burden-sharing formula between the countries to reduce emissions was decided on the basis of equity and historical burden. The plan panel's chapter ignores this policy red line.

The PM's council on climate change is the apex body which decides on the domestic climate change policy while the environment ministry along with the ministry for external affairs draws up the international policy on climate change. Any changes in the climate change policy require the approval of the Union Cabinet.

The plan panel's climate change chapter has also reorganized and restructured the eight National Missions which were cleared by the PM's council on climate change without any prior approval even though the missions are now in the middle of implementation. "We need to shorten the list of Missions and separate out three policy thrust areas from the existing Missions that need to be monitored on a standalone basis," the chapter says.

India has consistently stated in the climate change negotiations that any steps beyond its voluntary measures to reduce emissions would have to be financially provided for by the developed countries. But the Planning Commission has advocated several enhanced domestic commitments on the basis of an interim report of an expert group it had set up under Kirit Parikh. The Parikh report has not been approved by the government as it has not given the final version which was to include the costs and benefits of the various commitments it proposed. The chapter says, "The most obvious source of financing for climate change action is the government budgetary support. Most of it would come as sectoral finance."

It adds, quoting the Kirit Parekh interim report, "It projects emission intensity reduction over the 2005 levels (measured in grams CO2 equivalents per rupee of GDP) by 23-25% by 2020 in the 'determined effort' scenario, which could increase to 33-35% by 2020 in the 'aggressive effort' scenario. The 'determined effort' scenario assumes effective implementation of mitigation policies that require continuous upgradation of technology as well as finance from both public and private sources."

Oddly, the Planning Commission has ignored the report of the steering committee specifically set up to draft the environment and climate change chapter of the 12th five-year plan. The steering committee included all relevant ministries as well as other experts and its report was meant to be the basis for the final chapter.

In side-stepping the steering committee report, the plan panel has re-oriented the direction of the climate change chapter away from a stronger policy on adaptation to largely a mitigation-based approach, taking the wind out of India's international stance that its priority at the moment was adaptation, finance and technology while it was ready to undertake only those mitigation actions that did not draw away additional resources from the domestic economic agenda.