India announced 20 -25 per cent carbon emission cuts on the 2005 levels by 2020.This would be done through a series of measures including mandatory fuel efficiency standards for all vehicles, a compulsory green building code and switching over to clean coal technology. If nations arrived at a "comprehensive and equitable agreement," India would be willing to do more but only through voluntary measures. India would never agree to any legally binding emission cut or accept any agreement that stipulated a 'peaking' year to carbon emission. India would be willing to be a "little flexible" depending on the concessions it got for its mitigation action, by way of technology and finance from developed nations.

India's basic negotiating point is its low capita per income, but if India wants to lead the developing nations, we have to offer something during negotiations. India has always stood for a comprehensive equitable agreement. India would work overtime with like-minded countries like China, Brazil and South Africa, but in general, it has to engage with everyone else. Just because we are members of G-77, it does not mean we cannot talk to the U.S. and it also does not mean that we are selling the country. Between 1990 and 2005,emission intensity in the country has gone down by 17.6 per cent, even as the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) and the population went up. But this cannot be the only negotiating point. The GDP is low because the population is high. The country's biggest failure in the last 60 years has been that it could not control the birth rate.

The 12th Five-Year Plan of India would focus on a low-carbon strategy for economic growth. Based on the Planning Commission exercises during its Mid-Term Appraisal of the 11th Plan,  it is understood that the intensity could be reduced, though the greenhouse gas emission would continue to increase. India is not ready to subject its domestically funded mitigation action to international review. Copenhagen must fail. James Hansen, world's leading climate change expert, says summit talks are so flawed that a deal would be a disaster. The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations if next week's Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse.

In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climate scientist said, any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch. The developed countries who have drafted the report for Copenhagen summit want to continue more or less with business as usual, and the developing countries that want the money can get it through offsets (sold through the carbon markets).

Had America been supportive of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which views the heating of the earth's surface in a given theoretical framework that assigns differing roles to industrialised and developing countries, and prescribed for two sets of countries different action trajectories to mitigate the global emission of carbon dioxide, the world would have breathed easy as climatic dislocations and disjunctions caused by the ever rising volume of greenhouse gases pose a direct threat to human life.

Instead, America did the opposite and began to question the science that posited climate change. The net result is that the basics of the Kyoto Protocol are at risk of being overturned or seriously modified by leading western powers. In the event, the positions adopted by India and China - two rapidly industrialising developing countries - in Copenhagen, are likely to have a shaping influence on the course of the climate negotiations in future, although the two are not in an identical position.

Recently China had announced its proposal for 40 per cent reduction of emission intensity. If Kyoto is not jettisoned at Copenhagen, then industrialised countries can offer some assistance and India would be prepared to make deeper cuts in its emission intensity. The voluntary and unilateral actions of developing countries would have a positive hearing on arresting the rise of greenhouse gases, especially since China has now emerged as the world's leading polluter in absolute(as distinct from per capita) terms. Nevertheless, long-term impetus in deliberating climate change and mitigation strategies will be elusive if the U.S. does not pitch in with a meaningful contribution in Copenhagen.