Montreal Meeting on Ozone Depleting Substances


The XXVIII Meeting of the Executive Committee and related meetings were held in Montreal on 12th-16th July 1999. The Indian delegation was led by Shri Vinod Vaish, Special Secretary (E&F). It also included Shri Atul Bagai, Director (Ozone). In addition to leading the Indian delegation, Shri Vinod Vaish also performed the duties of Vice-Chair of the Executive Committee.

The following are the important outcome of the above meeting :

  1. 25 projects involving funding of about US $ 5.3 million were approved for India. These projects on completion would result in the phase out of almost 1082 tonnes (in terms of ozone depleting potential) of ozone depleting substances.

  2. The first project involving phasing out of use of carbon tetrachloride as process agent was approved (of M/s Excel Industries Ltd), which would result in the phase out of 400 tonnes of carbon tetrachloride out of a total use of around 7500 tonnes in the country.

  3. Projects involving funding for incremental costs for compressors were approved for the first time.

  4. The Servicing Sector of Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Industry has been presently given low priority in countries like India and China. These sectors will be taken up for study under bilateral assistances from Sweden and Germany for which preliminary discussions have been held. These projects would be submitted for approval in the next meeting of the Executive Commttee.

  5. In the meeting of the Production Sector Sub-Group, the developed countries led by USA have agreed to revise their earlier offer of US$ 58 million and submit a counter proposal to the recent proposal submitted by India which involves funding of US $ 101 million (on N.P.V. basis). On the insistence of India that this matter should be given priority attention, the US representative agreed to circulate the counter offer after discussing with the developed countries within a fortnight so that this could be discussed in an informal meeting of the Sub-Group on Production Sector in the last week of September at Washington where a meeting of the Ad-hoc Group to examine the question of replenishment of the Multilateral Fund for the period 2000-2002 is to take place as per the decision of the last meeting of the Open Ended Working Group which met at Geneva in June 1999.