Chandrashekhar Dasgupta and Prodipto Ghosh, members of the PM Council on climate change and two senior-most negotiators, who along with Shyam Saran, PM's erstwhile envoy on climate change, had opposed the environment minister's controversial positions on climate change, have been taken off the list of negotiators.
But in a balancing act, government has also not entertained proposals to include other non-official delegates that the minister was known to favour. These include Navroz Dubash from the Centre for Policy
Research, Delhi and T Jayaraman from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
The team for Bonn will be led by environment secretary Vijai Sharma and will only have government officials on board from various ministries, including ministry of external affairs, environment and forests, power and finance.
The current structure of the Indian climate negotiators team comprises of a permanent core negotiating group (CNG) which helps government draw red lines for negotiations and delegations. Negotiators are expected to defend the "bottomlines" at such formal climate jamborees.
The last cabinet decision on such red lines for climate negotiations was taken before the Copenhagen meet in December 2009 where the rift between the negotiators and the minister had become evident.
The government had been left bruised by two conflicting views, one suggesting that sticking to traditional lines was to India's advantage while Ramesh advocated a dilution of the stance. The lack of clarity in PMO during and after the talks had caused immense confusion in the climate team. Read the full report here.
Source: Nitin Sethi, TNN
