India released its 2007 Green House Gas inventory few days back. I
think it has some big problems with the transport estimates. It claims that the
“road
transport sector emitted 123.55 million tons of CO2e, which is 87% of the total
emissions from the transport sector”.
The transport sector emissions include all GHG emissions from road transport,
railways, aviation and navigation. It suggests that “the total number of registered
vehicles in the country has increased from 5.4 million in 1981 to 99.6 million
in 2007. Two wheelers and cars constitute nearly 88% of the total vehicles at
the national level”.

The problem with the total numbers of vehicles in India is that
registered vehicles cannot be used for estimates as we don’t have active
scrappage/renewal system. Not many people have
an idea as to how to guess the number of vehicles on road.  Even the activity information (vehicle
travel/year in km) is not available on public domain and often people borrow
the numbers from some isolated studies and from other countries or other
researchers. 

In order to
highlight the data issues, following are some of the critical issues

·        
Vehicles

o   
No
breakdown by mode type and engine technology (e.g. Euro 1 or Euro 2 compliant,
etc.)

o   
limited
data on active vehicle fleet

o   
No data on
splitting small cars with big cars, MUV’s, LCV’s

o   
Isolated
surveys to determine age of the vehicles

·        
Fuels

o   
No fuel
split available - gasoline, diesel, alternative fuel

·        
Activity

o   
No data on
urban vs rural share of movement

o   
Occupancy
– how many people/load

o   
Annual
surveys and proper methodologies on vehicle-km travelled, passenger-km
travelled, and tonnes-km rarely exist

o   
Reasonable
data on fuel consumption per km travelled on various transport modes. This
issue is critical as quoted values from lab testing differs from actual on road
values

·        
Emission
factors:

o   
lack of
locally representative emission factors for existing vehicle fleet

Coming back on the India’s 2007 estimate of 123 million tons in
2007 for an activity information of 99 million vehicles is too low as seen from
the attached graphic. In fact the estimates of CO₂ /vehicles is
lesser (1.2) than what researchers have quantified for passenger transport
(ratio of 1.5 for passenger vehicles. Including commercial vehicles in estimation
would expand this figure to a range of 2 to 4). Strangely, the same authors, in
an earlier study had quantified 106 million tons in 2000 with 48 million
vehicles. Then why is that the doubling of vehicle numbers not showing impact?

One thing that hits hard in the below graphic is the huge variation
of CO₂ and vehicles. It seems that researchers do not agree with
each other … a classic case of elephant and the
blind men
! It's a high time that governments resolve these kinds of data issues by
improving the collection and survey procedures. One needs a strong institution
for collecting the information from various sources annually and derive
insights and it needs to be backed by sound budget.

Have a look at the attachment!!