India often talks about decarbonising transport, but rarely about the uncomfortable first step. Counting emissions honestly.

Freight is the invisible backbone of India’s economy. It moves our food, fuels our factories, and feeds our cities. Yet it is also one of the fastest-growing sources of emissions, air pollution, and energy demand. For years, policy conversations around clean freight have jumped straight to solutions. Electric trucks, green corridors, alternative fuels. What they have skipped is measurement. Without a common language for counting emissions, every solution risks becoming a slogan.

That is why the recently released whitepaper by Smart Freight Centre, TERI, and IIM-Bangalore matters far beyond its technical framing. It is not just about emissions accounting. It is about institutional maturity.

The central argument is deceptively simple. You cannot decarbonise what you cannot measure. In India’s freight sector, emissions data today is fragmented, inconsistent, and often incomparable across companies, modes, and regions. One logistics firm’s emissions number does not speak to another’s. State action plans struggle to align with national climate commitments. Global supply chains increasingly ask Indian exporters for data that simply does not exist in a standardised form.

The proposed nationally harmonised framework changes this starting point. By aligning with ISO 14083 and the GLEC Framework, while grounding calculations in India-specific emission factors and operational realities, the whitepaper attempts something rare. It bridges global credibility with local truth.

This matters because freight emissions are not just a climate issue. They are an air quality issue, an industrial competitiveness issue, and increasingly, a trade issue. Heavy-duty vehicles are major contributors to NOx, particulate matter, and black carbon, especially around logistics hubs and freight corridors. Cities like Delhi NCR are already living with the public health costs of this invisibility. Without emissions accounting, these hotspots remain politically abstract and administratively diffuse.

Measurement changes that dynamic. It makes emissions visible, attributable, and therefore governable.

There is also a quiet but significant policy signal embedded here. Emissions accounting is being framed not as a compliance burden, but as infrastructure. Just like ports, highways, or digital logistics platforms, a credible Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification system becomes a foundational layer on which clean freight programmes can be built. Fleet modernisation, zero-emission pilots, carbon markets, and disclosure requirements all depend on it.

From an industry perspective, this could be a turning point. Global buyers are tightening disclosure norms. Carbon border mechanisms are no longer hypothetical. Indian logistics players who cannot report emissions in a credible, comparable way risk being locked out of future value chains. A nationally anchored framework reduces that asymmetry and gives industry a common reference point.

What makes the whitepaper particularly relevant is its institutional lens. It does not assume that data alone will drive change. It recognises the need for multi-stakeholder governance, policy integration, and digital systems that can scale. In a sector as complex and informal as Indian freight, that realism is essential.

Of course, frameworks do not decarbonise by themselves. The real test will lie in adoption. Will ministries integrate emissions accounting into logistics planning. Will state governments use it to identify pollution hotspots. Will industry move beyond pilots to mainstream reporting. And will data lead to hard choices on fleet standards, fuels, and infrastructure investment.

But every transition needs a credible starting line. For India’s freight sector, that starting line has long been missing.

By shifting the conversation from ambition to accounting, this initiative does something quietly radical. It insists that climate action begins not with promises, but with numbers we are willing to stand by.

And in a country where freight emissions are projected to rise sharply over the next two decades, that insistence may be the most important climate intervention of all.

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