7 NOVEMBER 2015

Ø  Underworld don Chhota Rajan was brought to the national capital in a chartered plane from Indonesia in the early hours of Friday. The CBI is expected to obtain his formal custody for interrogation by a multi-agency team. Rebutting reports that the gangster was undergoing dialysis for some kidney ailment, CBI sources said a team of doctors declared him stable after a medical examination at the agency headquarters.

Ø  Anticipating the high-visibility global diplomacy during the Paris climate talks, India has decided to project “Barefoot women solar engineers”, an initiative of Sanjit “Bunker” Roy, as a global success story crafted in India. Official sources told The Hindu on Friday that Mr. Roy’s initiative qualified to be projected in Paris as it was “innovative south-south cooperation at its best”. As part of the Indian team at the climate dialogue, Mr. Roy would narrate on December 1 the story of how hundreds of women from the least developed countries had formed a strong international network of clean energy propagators through south-south cooperation. This is the second time in a month’s time that Mr. Roy’s idea of “barefoot solar engineers” will be projected on a global platform. The decision to highlight “Barefoot women solar engineers” in Paris comes after the India-Africa Forum Summit, during which Mr. Roy’s work was showcased as an Indian community-level clean energy success story. The decision to showcase it was an outcome of the India Technical Economic Cooperation programme of the Union External Affairs Ministry, which was launched in 2008. Under the programme, selected grandmothers and mothers from different rural parts of the world are brought to the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, who are trained within six months to electrify their native communities under the care of a group of Indian rural electricians and engineers. The chief component of this initiative is to project solar and sustainable energy which benefits the lives of impoverished women in the least developed countries.

Ø  The message from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap report launched on Friday in Geneva is clear. Only a dynamic Paris climate agreement in December can help keep global warming under the 2°C threshold, as the current levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be cut by 2030 — 11 gigatonnes — is only about half of the total required. This is even if all conditional and unconditional Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) of countries submitted by October 1 are fully implemented, as emissions will still be 12 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) beyond the level that gives a likely chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C this century. Ahead of the U.N. climate meeting to commence in December, the UNEP report provides a sense of the scale of the task lying ahead of countries to curb global warming. It shows that the 119 INDCs submitted so far represent GHG emission reductions in 2030 of 4 to 6 GtCO2e compared to what the emissions would be under the current policy trajectory. The report notes that 2030 projections based on current policies are themselves 5 GtCO2e lower than the estimate of 65 GtCO2e by the Inter-governmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) fifth assessment report, which assumed no additional climate policies, put in place after 2010.