India: Poor come first, G8 must do more on climate

SAPPORO, Japan (Reuters) - India said on Wednesday its first priority was spurring economic growth so that it could eradicate dire poverty and called on G8 countries to keep their promises to deliver significant green house gas reductions.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told leaders at a meeting of 16 major economies in northern Japan that India must work to help its poor and could not even consider quantitative restrictions on emissions.

"The imperative for our accelerated growth is even more urgent when we consider the disproportionate impact of climate change on us as a developing country," Singh said, according to a transcript of his speech to a Major Economies Meeting that included Group of Eight rich countries and major developing ones.

India had "little choice but to devote even more and huge resources to adaption in critical areas of food security, public health and management of scarce water resources", he said.

Around 600 million Indians do not have access to modern energy sources and a quarter of its population lives on less than a dollar a day.

India was also faced with an ever increasing energy bill putting its energy security at risk, Singh said.

Developed countries had not shown demonstrable progress on even the low levels of greenhouse gas reductions that had been agreed to, he said.

"This must change and you (the G8) must all show the leadership that you have always promised by taking and then delivering truly significant GHG (greenhouse gas) reductions," he said.

India is amongst the world's lowest per-capita emitters.

Singh also called for greater cooperation on clean technologies between developed and developing countries, faster transfer of those technologies to developing nations and a fairer regime for intellectual property rights.

"There is a strong case that critical technologies be treated as global public goods," he said.

(Reporting by Edwina Gibbs, Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)