Introduction

Transport heralds the development of a region. The demand for infrastructure augmentation increases with the region’s pursuit of development goals. The basic infrastructures required for the region’s economic growth are roads, railways, water and air connectivity. With the increase in economic activities, the dependence of fossil fuel based energy sources and consequent green house gas (GHG) emissions have increased rapidly in recent times. The transport sector in India consumes about 16.9% (36.5 mtoe: million tonnes of oil equivalent) of total energy (217 mtoe in 2005–2006). Various energy sources used in this sector are coal, diesel, petroleum (gasoline) and electricity. Road, rail and air are responsible for emission of 80%, 13% and 6% respectively (TEDDY, 2006).

Vehicular emissions account for about 60% of the GHG’s from various activities in India (Patankar, 1991).

Globalization and liberalization policies of the government has spurted the economic activities. Consequent to this policy change are increase in urbanization and concentrated economic activities in certain load centers resulting in higher mobility. This fuelled the rapid increase in number of vehicles and traveling distance resulting in the higher consumption of energy with an average annual rate of 2.9%. During the last two decades, number of registered motor vehicles has increased dramatically from 5.4 million in 1980–1981 to 72.7 million in 2003–2004 (TEDDY, 2006). Energy consumption also varies with the modes of transport and public transport system has least average energy consumption per passenger kilometer (Singh, 2006). The urban population of India, which constitutes 28% of the total, is predominantly dependent on road transport. Around 80% of passenger and 60% of freight movement depend on road transport (MoF, 2000). Traffic composition of six mega cities of India (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata) shows that there is significant shift fromthe share of slowmoving vehicles to fastmoving vehicles and public transport to private transport (Jalihal et al., 2005). Among different type of motor vehicles, percentage of two wheelers has shown rapid growth (doubling in every 5 years) and it constitutes 70% of total motor vehicles of India (MoSRTH, 2004). Total number of road vehicles in India as per the latest available statistics (March 2004) were 72.7 million (MoSRTH, 2007a). Indian railways has important role for long journey movement of both people and freight. In last ten years, there is a sharp increase in number of passenger and goods movement and consequent fuel consumption. Current energy consumption in railways is around 5.1% of total transport energy with about 77.5% from diesel and balance is through electricity (TEDDY, 2007). During 2004–2005. Indian civil aviation accounted for more than 24% increase in the number of international and domestic flights, with consequent increase of aviation fuel from0.98 million tonnes (mt) (1976–1977) to 6.2mt in 2005–2006. Shipping sector has aided in the movement of about 18 mt of cargo (TEDDY, 2007).

The focus of this work is to develop the statewise inventory of GHG’s from Indian transport sector. Fig. 1 depicts India with cities that are important in terms of industrial and economic activities. Emissions from shipping, railways and aviation sectors were computed using the country level data. However, data is available at disaggregated levels for the road sector.