Union environment and forests minister Prakash Javadekar indicated that India is in no hurry to announce a target year when its GHG emissions would rise to peak level, unlike China that pledged last month to peak its emissions by about the year 2030.

"We are not saying anything about (a peaking year). A peaking year is not an issue to be discussed in Lima," Javadekar said, speaking to reporters on the eve of his departure for a United Nations conference on climate change in Lima, Peru.

Delegates from over 190 countries are negotiating the content of a global pact intended to reduce the world's GHG emissions in the coming decades to avert average temperatures on the planet from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

All countries are expected to announce before mid-2015 their Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions -quantified sets of measures that each country will take to curb or reduce its own GHG emissions in the coming decades.

"The peaking year is not a benchmark," Javadekar said. "The benchmark is what will be our (India's) contribution. That we will definitely give and it will be much more than what people would be expecting," he said.

In a joint statement issued last month, China committed to peak its GHG emissions by about 2030 while the US said it would cut its own emissions by over 25 per cent by 2025.

Those pledges by the world's two biggest emitters have intensified expectations that India - the fourth largest emitter, after the European Union in third place - too would announce some significant emission-curbing measures and timetables ahead, during or soon after the Lima conference.

A senior environment ministry official who declined to be named said India was already pursuing an alternative growth pathway that will help curb the rise in GHG emissions. "We don't need to announce any peaking year - we're moving in the right direction."

Minister Javadekar said India cannot compromise on growth. "The poor in India have aspirations, we have to give them energy, no one can deny us this," he said, adding that the global atmosphere has a limited capacity to carry GHG emissions and the developed countries have historically been the largest emitters.

"They need to vacate the (atmospheric) space so that we can grow," Javadekar said.

Policy analysts who have been monitoring the global negotiations on climate change believe India needs to quickly articulate its contributions to avoid being viewed as a large emitter not doing enough.

"The minister is stating India's long-standing position," said D. Raghunandan, an analyst with the Delhi Science Forum, a non-government organisation in the capital that has independently examined India's options to curb emissions.

"It is time India should announce it is ready to take even more aggressive steps but make it conditional on the developed countries to take on more ambitious targets than they have announced so far," Raghunandan said.

Javadekar said the Narendra Modi government's decision to scale up India's solar power targets from 20,000MW to 100,000MW over the next five years will be pitched as a big contribution from India to curb its GHG emissions. "Through this five-fold expansion, India will avoid burning 50 million tonnes of coal each year," the minister said.

The Lima conference is expected to lay the foundations for a draft agreement on reductions in global emissions beyond the year 2020 that the UN is hoping will be finalised next year at the climate change conference in Paris.

Javadekar also said India would use Lima to remind the developed countries that $100 billion finance pledged for climate change related actions in the developing countries has not emerged yet. "$100 billion was promised, nine billion committed, but there is nothing in the treasury," he said.

Under agreements hammered out at earlier climate change conferences, the developed countries had agreed to help fund the transfer of technologies that would help developing countries pursue clean energy pathways.

In 2008, India had announced a national action plan on climate change that seeks to expand solar energy, enhance energy efficiency across industry and homes, grow forests, and pursue sustainable agriculture and crops resilient to environmental stresses.