ABSTRACT
This article highlights the importance of energy-efficiency and cleaner technologies as instruments for climate change mitigation with a focus on India, and places these efforts against other South-Asian and South-East Asian countries. In light of the looming concerns of climate change, India has evolved an extensive policy framework to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by emphasising deployment of energy efficient technologies and promoting the share of renewables in the energy mix under the ambit of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC). In support of these, India has put in place various financial and economic instruments towards energy efficiency, such as the Perform, Achieve, Trade (PAT), a market-based instrument for energy saving and trade, and incentives for dissemination of renewable energy technologies through cuts in subsidy on fossil fuels, taxing carbon, feed-in-tariffs (FiT), renewable purchase obligations (RPOs) and generation-based incentives (GBIs) for renewable energy. To this end, a rapidly growing economy like India, with significant dependence on its natural resource base and predominantly climate-sensitive sectors, has displayed steady efforts to chart ecologically sustainable growth pathways in the face of local pollution and climate change that could potentially yield valuable lessons for other emerging market economies too.
