Sanjay Arora
New Delhi….Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests, Shri Jairam Ramesh said India has taken major initiatives to reduce carbon footprints and one of the major among them is increasing forest cover in the country. Refuting a general perception that India is not interested in carbon emission mitigation , Shri Ramesh said with afforestation activities, the government is making huge investment in big carbon sync. It is to the size of 70 million hectare and another 30 million hectare will be added in next six years. At the launch of India Chapter of Climate Saver’s Computing Initiative (CSCI) here today, the Minister informed that we are deeply concerned about climate change and we will never allow our per capita emissions to exceed that of the developed countries. Even with 8-9% GDP growth every year for the next decade or two, our per capita emissions will be below developed country averages, he added.
Shri Ramesh said that the technology is going to be the key and geo-thermal roads and green building codes are in practice. The Minister said several energy efficient measures are being taken to bring down the green house gas emission level. He said first time we are introducing Eco Labeling to reduce carbon foot-prints and emission of GHGs. By January 2010,energy guzzlers like refrigerator, air conditioner, distribution transformer and fluorescent lamps will follow mandatory energy efficiency standards. Colour television, LPG stoves, electric motors will have mandatory eco-labeling from July next year.
CSCI is a global initiative which promotes adoption of smart technologies in everyday business and personal computing which can improve the efficiency of computer’s power delivery and reduce the energy consumed when the computer is in an inactive stage. It is calculated that more than half of the power in the desktop PC is wasted as heat. Even servers which are typically more efficient than desktops still waste 30 to 40 percent of power utilized. The wastage of power is because of default setting of sleep or hibernate mode when inactive for a sustained duration. In 90% of systems this functionality has been disabled. This result in higher energy consumption and an increase in electricity usage. In addition, IT users have lack of awareness about the power saving features which are already available in their computers.
