Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday said United States President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate deal is a “shock” for India and the international community should get onboard so that the environmental balance is not destroyed.
“I am sure that the United States will definitely re-think on this,” he stated. Singh was inaugurating the two-day national conference on ‘Capacity Building of State Disaster Response Force (SDRF)-2017’.
The United States president’s recent statement about the Paris deal sent the message that the world community was not one and that a country was only concerned about its own environment, the Minister said.
It was to be seen in what circumstances the United States made such a statement, he added. For “people like us (India) and the international community, this has come as a shock.”
Announcing the United States withdrawal from the Paris deal on June 1, Trump had claimed that India had made its participation in the agreement “contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions dollars in foreign aid”.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had rejected Trump’s comment on Monday saying, “Our signature in the pact was not because of greed, it was not because of fear. We signed it due to our commitment to protecting the environment... India will continue to be part of it irrespective of whether the United States of America remains in it or not.”
Moving on from the climate deal, Rajnath Singh said only 20 states and three union territories had raised their SDRFs. “We have to shift our focus from disaster management to being disaster resilient,” he said adding the Union government has also increased allocation under SDRF from Rs 30,581 crore during 2010-15 to Rs 61,220 crore for 2015-2020.
Two new battalions of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) have been created. They are based in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh and in Arunachal Pradesh, he said.