• Now why does that happen? Is it motivated? Is it in haste?

No, I wouldn't attribute. They didn't do the study themselves; they quoted a study. It's quite possible that the study thinks that if we cut by 20 per cent and they cut by 80 per cent, that's fair. It's certainly fairer than if they cut by 50 per cent and we cut by 50 per cent. But it's not really fair because 45 years later, when we will be a developed country almost, it is not acceptable that we have a global regime.

• So you think it would have been better if they would have consulted experts on this side as well?

Well, they didn't have to consult experts even. Our own Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, at the G8 meeting in Halligandam had made a proposal. Let me step back a little. When the first Kyoto protocol was negotiated, everybody knew that industrialised countries bear the major burden, so it was decided that they will cut and the developing countries will not cut at all. Actually what happened was, in the industrialised world, some countries didn't join. The United States didn't join, Australia didn't join. The countries that did, the United Kingdom and Europe, they never actually delivered on the cuts they promised. Of course, we didn't promise anything and nothing was imposed on us. So it's an arrangement that doesn't seem to have a very good background. Now, what has happened is that, first of all, we know that this hasn't worked well and secondly we know that the problem is more serious than we thought it was. I mean, all this work that Dr Pachauri and his 2500 colleagues have done suggests that in 20 years you could be running into real problems, so everybody has to do something. Now what Dr Manmohan Singh said was that we cannot say that because we weren't responsible in the past, we have no obligations. He said we must decide what is a reasonable obligation and in that context he made a suggestion this July, I think in the first week of July, that developing countries could agree never to exceed the per capita emissions of the industrialised countries and that's a kind of a challenge to them. What we are saying is, look, we'll never be worse than you per capita.

... contd.