After power, the transport sector contributes to most of India's CO2 emissions. With strong policy & industry interventions, it is possible to reduce CO2 emissions of this sector significantly, and this can go a long way towards India's Net Zero by 2070 goal.
What could be some of the key interventions?
A study has concluded that the most emission reduction benefit comes from vehicle electrification along with grid decarbonization and fuel efficiency improvement in conventional vehicles. Together these can lower emissions by about 80% in 2050 - that sounds like an awesome number, 80%.
Now, none of the three recommendations should surprise us, and thankfully, there has been steady progress in all three. Of the three, grid decarbonization is happening at a fast clip thanks to solar, and fuel efficiency improvements for India's transport sector has seen some significant successes with the Bharat Standard implementations.
Electrification of vehicles, while creating significant buzz, has not really itself translated to the kind of numbers that we would like to see on the ground. This is especially so as heavy vehicle electrification is almost non existent in India.
The study has also recommended a few other strategies such as shifting 10-20% of travel demand from cars and 2-wheelers to buses and 10-20% of freight from heavy-duty trucks to rail. But how easy these are to scale to pan-India is questionable.
