Assessing the accuracy and adequacy of India's national energy balances: implications for tracking sustainable development and climate goals
National energy balances are essential for estimating various socioeconomic and environmental development indicators, including carbon-dioxide emissions. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) annually publishes India's energy balance. However, the widely used source of India's energy balance is International Energy Agency (IEA). In this paper, compare the data from the two sources and find that MOSPI's energy balance estimates are different from IEA's. The estimates of per capita energy consumption and energy intensity from MOSPI are 26% higher than IEA for 2019-20. Another issue in MOSPI's data is the incomplete disaggregation of final energy consumption by end-use sectors. Energy consumption from oil products reported in the non-specified category in MOSPI tables is 40% of the total consumption. Due to this, the agriculture energy intensity is 33% lower, and the transport energy intensity is 43% lower than IEA. India's carbon dioxide emissions from MOSPI's energy balance estimate are 31% higher than IEA.
