India is racing toward 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030 and net zero by 2070. But here is an uncomfortable truth that a government-commissioned expert panel has now put in writing: India does not know, with any precision, how much biofuel it actually consumes, how much electricity its electric vehicles draw from the grid, or exactly where large volumes of coal end up after it leaves the mine.

That is the quiet revelation at the heart of a new report released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) on July 6, 2026 — the output of an Expert Committee on Sustainable Energy Statistics, chaired by Dr Rangan Banerjee, Director of IIT-Delhi, and including senior representatives from the Ministry of Power, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, TERI, and the Alliance for Energy Efficient Economy.

The committee was set up precisely because India’s existing energy statistics framework — built around an annual publication called Energy Statistics India — was not keeping pace with the country’s rapidly transforming energy landscape. As the clean energy transition accelerates, the data gaps are no longer a technical footnote. They are a genuine policy problem.

Why Does the Data Gap Matter?

Consider biofuels. India has one of the world’s most ambitious biofuel programmes — a 20% ethanol blending target for petrol, a 5% biodiesel mandate, and compressed biogas goals. The government reports these targets proudly. But there is no consolidated national dataset tracking actual biofuel consumption across all sectors. The gap is so large that the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD) has had to estimate India’s biofuel numbers itself — arriving at a figure suggesting biofuels could account for 31 to 34% of India’s total annual energy consumption. The Indian government, one of the world’s most active proponents of biofuels, does not officially track this.

Or consider electric vehicles. India added over a million EVs to its roads last year. Every one of them consumes electricity — but that electricity is almost entirely invisible in national energy accounting, buried in aggregate residential or commercial consumption numbers rather than attributed to transport. As electric mobility grows, this blind spot will distort every energy model the country uses to plan grid capacity, emissions trajectories, and fuel substitution benefits.

Then there is the coal accounting issue. Roughly 20% of India’s coal consumption is imported, and domestic coal sold through e-auctions has often been categorised under a vague “miscellaneous” heading rather than tracked by end use. This makes it nearly impossible to measure how much coal is reaching power plants versus industry versus households — essential information for any credible carbon accounting.

What the Committee Recommends

The Expert Committee’s recommendations focus on four areas: adopting international energy statistics standards (specifically aligning with the International Standard Industrial Classification used globally); developing new methodologies to estimate EV electricity consumption; creating a national biofuel consumption tracking system; and building a more granular framework for captive power generation — the significant volume of electricity that large industries generate for themselves and that currently falls largely outside official statistics.

The committee also called for better inter-agency coordination, noting that India’s energy data is fragmented across multiple ministries with inconsistent definitions and conversion factors. A power ministry figure and a petroleum ministry figure for the same energy flow can look very different depending on which standards each used.

Why This Is a Net Zero Prerequisite

India’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2070 is not just a diplomatic pledge — it requires a monitoring and accountability framework robust enough to actually track progress. Internationally comparable energy statistics are the foundation of credible carbon accounting. Without knowing how much biofuel is actually being consumed, you cannot claim those emissions reductions. Without tracking EV electricity use, you cannot measure the emissions avoided compared to petrol or diesel. Without accurate coal-by-sector data, the entire emissions inventory has structural gaps.

The committee’s report is in many ways an acknowledgement that India’s energy statistics infrastructure needs a generational upgrade — not just to satisfy international reporting requirements, but because India itself will need this data to make smart decisions about where to invest, which sectors are decarbonising fastest, and where policy is failing to land.

The next step is implementation — and the committee was explicit that this requires sustained collaboration across all concerned ministries. It is the kind of unglamorous, essential groundwork that does not generate headlines but determines whether the bigger sustainable development commitments ever become verifiable reality.

Source: Press Information Bureau, Government of India. PRID 2281596, July 6, 2026.