25-member team for Paris meet

India will a send 25-member negotiation team with officials from six ministries and six subject experts to protect the national interest in the Paris climate summit that will kickstart on November 30.

The maximum number of negotiators would be from the Union Ministry of Environment and Forest, which would be sending 10 officials, including the minister Prakash Javadekar, who would head the Indian delegation at the high-level segment.

In addition, there would be four officials from the Ministry of External Affairs and one each from the ministries of power, finance, new and renewable energy, earth sciences and the prime minister’s office (PMO).

The rest are from the prime minister’s council on climate and consultants hired by the environment ministry.

Three professional experts from the prime minister’s council are Ajay Mathur, director general of Bureau of Energy Efficiency; J M Mauskar, a former environment ministry bureaucrat who negotiated for India in many previous summits and Jagdish Shukla, an Indian meteorologist and a distinguished professor at the George Mason University, US.
Four officials — Ravi Prasad, S Satapathy and Debasis Prusty and Adarsh Swaika (MEA) — are already in Paris.