Team News Riveting
New Delhi, December 11
Opposition Member of Parliament N K Premachandran received a letter from a union minister; the content in it came as a big surprise.
Exhibiting a healthy parliamentary gesture, Union Minister for Environment Bhupender Yadav wrote a letter to the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) MP from Kollam in Kerala to compliment for the latter’s speech during the ongoing discussions in the Lok Sabha on climate change challenges.
“Very good speech, excellent and academic. Your information is wide and remarks logical and the last six questions you raised are very relevant,” Yadav said in a written note he sent to Premachandran who stressed equity as the fulcrum of climate negotiations, hailed the Indian stand on climate justice in the recently concluded COP 21 conference in Glasgow and urged to strengthen the concept.
The opposition MP asked the government to frame a well-defined plan for energy transition to lower carbon footprint and congratulated India for managing to get the phrase “phase out” of coal replaced with “phase down” in the final negotiated COP 21 draft.
The 61-year-old Kollam MP is well known in opposition circles for his wide-ranging knowledge of parliamentary procedures and is among the most active opposition MPs of the 17th Lok Sabha.
Having mastery of major issues, Premachandran comes from a small village and his electoral political started from Navaikulam gram panchayat where he was elected as Member and held the position from 1987 to 1995. He was elected as a Member of District Panchayat in 1995. He was elected to Lok Sabha for the first time in 1996 and thereafter in 1998 and 2014 from Kollam Constituency.
He was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2000. He was elected to Kerala Legislative Assembly from Chavara and became Minister for Water Resources during 2006–2011.
In the 2019 general election, he won from the Kollam with a record margin of 1.5 lakh votes. He introduced a private member bill overturning Sabarimala verdict and it was the first private bill introduced in current 17th Lok Sabha.
