The Prime Minister's Office called a meeting on Monday of various ministries to give a final shape to India's climate change targets for the Paris agreement. A two-day meeting of Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) also began here on Monday to build strategy, after a recent one-week formal United Nations (UN) climate negotiations at Bonn suffered a dangerous logjam.

The LMDCs' meeting is being attended by 12 country partners, including China, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

India's target - intended national domestic contribution (INDC) - might be announced this month, before Modi's visit to the US, after Cabinet approval.

The failed talks at Bonn, where developed countries blocked formal negotiations on the agreement text, has led to greater uncertainty about the nature of the Paris agreement and how INDCs would be integrated into it.

An Indian negotiator who attended the meeting said: "We went with a positive agenda to negotiate on the agreement text. But we found our developed country partners wanted to while away time discussing 'concepts'. The co-chair's proposal had put many of the developing country issues out of the core agreement. This is not acceptable and we hope the remaining five days of negotiations before Paris will see better results."



He was referring to the structure of Paris package offered by the two co-chairs of the UN talks. It divides issues into three boxes. The first box of issues, it was proposed, would become the core agreement at Paris. The second box should form a part of less onerous formal decisions (but not part of the core agreement). The third box was labelled as issues on which there was lack of clarity.

Many developing country blocks found issues closer to their interests relegated to the second and third boxes. "If we go by the current formulation, mitigation and rules overseeing this mitigation action form an overwhelming part of the core agreement and the rest is relegated to lesser decisions or could be left out altogether. This will not be acceptable and if developed countries do not permit textual negotiations to advance we could see a Copenhagen repeat at Paris. That would be very unfortunate," said a negotiator from the LMDC group attending the Delhi meeting.

He said developing countries' agenda could fall off the table if the talks do not progress to permit bringing key issues back to the core of the agreement or the second box of items under discussion.

Four Indian negotiators Business Standard spoke to expressed similar concerns that the lack of clarity at the formal talks and the tactics of the developed countries brought out the uncertainty under which the country's INDCs are to be decided.

"Will the mitigation targets get locked into these hard legal binding character under the Paris agreement and the connected obligations of developed countries to provide finance, technology and capacity building be just notional? If that is the case, we should calibrate our efforts," one said. "After detailed analysis and discussions with experts and stakeholders, we are near finalising an ambitious package of actions but the critical question is in what context we should offer it to the international community, under the circumstances."



The US had demanded that at least a part of the INDC from developing countries, including India, be completely unconditional. The UN climate convention predicates actions of developing countries to the provision of finance, technology transfer and capacity building from rich countries.

While India decides on the nuances in wording the INDC, the LMDC meeting will decide how the formal UN talks can be brought back on track. "There are very few negotiating days left. The draft text (for the Paris agreement) must be balanced. The co-chairs were requested at the closure of the last meeting to include proposals from all countries and place these the way these countries give them importance (in the Paris package). The Delhi meeting is important for us to build strategies for the next round and then Paris in the light of what happened at Bonn," said the LMDC negotiator.