"India Leader On Climate Action, Misleading Narratives By NGOs": Union Power Minister RK Singh To NDTV

Union Power Minister RK Singh today said India is a world leader in energy transition and climate action and the narrative being spread by "some NGOs in the developed world" is totally misleading.

Speaking at the NDTV Decoding G20 Conclave today, the minister said the NGOs will, for example, say that India is a huge country and therefore its total emissions are high. 

"That is ridiculous, you don't decide on the emissions depending on the size of the country. A small island will be consuming huge quantities of energy per capita, yet its total emissions will be less. You have to talk about it in per capita terms, like you talk about GDP. The narrative has to change," he said. 

The Minister For Power, New and Renewable Energy also claimed that India will far exceed its promise made in Glasgow to have 50% of its power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030 and actually achieve a figure of 65%. The promise was made at the COP26 in 2021. 

Mr Singh said one of the issues with renewable energy is that storage is expensive, and the developed world has not done enough about it. He said that, in a bid that came recently, the price for storage came to Rs 10 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) whereas the renewable energy cost is Rs 2.6 per kWh.

"So you get one unit of energy for Rs 2.6 and to store it for one hour you need to pay Rs 10, so the total cost comes to Rs 12.6. That is just not viable, so you have to add volume for storage. We are doing that, but if the developed world had started doing this when they started talking about the climate, today we would not have such a situation," the minister said. 

Listing India's achievements, Mr Singh said India has emerged as a country whose rate of transition to renewable energy is one of the fastest in the world and the rate of renewable energy capacity addition is the fastest in the world. All this was done, he said, while making sure that electricity is available for the country's growth.    

“We have, at the same time, emerged as the only country whose energy transition actions are commensurate with a sub-2-degree rise in global temperature. In 2017, interlocutors from western countries used to talk to me about how necessary it is to transition and how India should be doing more. It took me two years and now nobody talks to me about that, they are mostly on the defensive,” he said.

Mr Singh said India's per capita emissions are 2.19 tonnes per year and the world average is 6.4 tonnes per year. The per capita emissions of the developed world are 3 to 4 times the global average, he added.  

“If you have an economy that is growing at 7%, electricity from coal will also grow. But the point is that our renewable energy capacity is growing faster. The narrative has to change. We will meet the energy requirement for our growth, because we have a right to grow. The hypocrisy of developed countries is amazing,” the minister asserted.