India has a key role to play in mitigating global challenges related to climate change and transport sector will play a key role in achieving global development goals adopted in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At COP 26 in 2021, India announced new climate targets:
1) Increasing non-fossil energy capacity to 500 GW by 2030,
2) meeting 50% of India’s energy needs through renewable energy,
3) reducing the total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes from now till 2030,
4) reducing the emission intensity of our economy to less than 45% by 2030, and
5) India would become carbon neutral and achieve net zero emissions by the year 2070.
These targets will have impact on India’s current and future transport policies, for example to enhance electric mobility and sustainable urban mobility.
Presently, India has over 250 million vehicles, and this fleet is dominated by 2-wheelers, accounting for 78% of the total vehicles. With the increased push for Electric Vehicles (EV) through national and state-level policies, the EV sales in India was 238, 120 units, which was around 1.3% of the total internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) sales in India for 2021. Transport contributed to 13 per cent of emissions from the energy sector with predominant share of 90 per cent arising from road transport followed by civil aviation (6 per cent), railways (3 per cent) and domestic water-borne navigation (1 per cent). Another challenge is the increasing city population and it is estimated that over 800 million Indians will be living in cities by the year 2050. This will put enormous pressure on existing infrastructure of these rapidly developing urban conglomerations.
