India's climate change roadmap to be ready in June

By Krittivas Mukherjee

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will unveil in June a national plan to deal with the threat of global warming, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Thursday, but it will not commit to any emission targets that risk slowing economic growth.

Singh's Council on Climate Change will look at setting up a venture capital fund to promote green technologies, increasing energy efficiency and combating the possible impact of climate change on millions of India's poor.

"India is prepared to commit that our per-capita carbon emissions will never exceed the average per-capita emissions of developed industrial economies," Singh told a summit on sustainable development in New Delhi.

Those emission levels could be brought down further as and when the worst emitters in the developed world cut back on their emissions, he said.

India, whose economy has grown by 8-9 percent annually in recent years, is one of the world's top polluters and contributes around 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions as its consumption of fossil fuels gathers pace.

But as a developing nation, India is not yet required to cut emissions -- said to be rising by between 2 and 3 percent a year -- under the Kyoto Protocol, despite mounting pressure from environmental groups and industrialized nations.

In December, world nations including India and top polluters China and the United States agreed to launch two years of talks on a broader global pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions to replace Kyoto once that pact expires at the end of 2012.

Kyoto binds 37 rich nations to curb emissions during the pact's first commitment period of 2008-2012. Developing nations are excluded.