Centre to back Pachauri

New Delhi, March 15: The Union environmental minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh, told the Rajya Sabha that the government had full confidence in the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief, Mr R.K. Pachauri, and would fight “any attempt to unseat him.”

“We are backing the IPCC chairman and will fight any attempt to unseat him,” Mr Ramesh added.

Elsewhere, the man at the centre of the storm, Mr Pachauri, found himself being pressurised once again to explain whether he was going resign.

Mr Pachauri clarified that the question of his putting in his papers, over what he described as “one mistake” that had crept into the Fourth IPCC report, did not arise.

Accepting that he and his team had gone wrong in declaring that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, Mr Pachauri insisted “just one mistake was not ground enough for me to resign.” He was speaking at a conference on “Environmental Audit-Fears about Water Pollution.”