Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal will address a mayors’ climate conference in Denmark via videoconferencing on Friday, the state government said on Thursday, PTI reported. The Centre had on October 7 denied Kejriwal permission to visit Denmark for the event.
The event is titled “breathe deeply, city solutions for clean air”. Kejriwal will also address a joint press conference with mayors of six major world cities at 12 pm on Friday, the Delhi government said.
“Kejriwal is expected to share his experiences on how Delhi has been successful in reducing air pollution by 25% during the last five years,” the Delhi government said, according to Mint. “The chief minister is also likely to share the experience of how Delhi became the first city in the world to successfully implement the Odd-Even experiment for restricting the vehicular traffic on the roads of the city, which led to a reduction in air pollution in Delhi.”
The Ministry of External Affairs had said on October 9 that permission was denied to Kejriwal because it was a mayoral-level event. “A considered decision on political clearance by the Ministry of External Affairs is based on multiple inputs and takes into account the nature of the event, the level of participation by other countries, type of invitation extended, etc,” ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. “In the instant case, the participation of chief minister of NCT of Delhi as a speaker at a panel discussion was not commensurate with the level of participation from other countries.”
The C40 Climate Summit began in Denmark on October 9, and will end on October 12.
The Aam Aadmi Party had hit out at the Centre for denying Kejriwal permission. AAP leader Sanjay Singh said Kejriwal was not going to Denmark for a vacation but to hold a conference with mayors of 100 cities of Asia. “This is very unfortunate,” Singh had told ANI. “I don’t know why the Narendra Modi-led government is behaving with such hostility towards us. Because Kejriwal was not going to Denmark for a vacation. He was going to the summit to tell mayors of 100 cities how pollution was reduced by 25% in Delhi.”
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