Natural Gas in India (PDF)

Anil Kumar Jain is a member of the Indian Administrative Service, who is presently posted as Secretary in India's Coal Ministry. Over the past 35 years, he has worked in multiple sectors of the Government, with a particular focus on energy and the environment. He has the rare distinction for a bureaucrat to have specialised across the varied energy domain including fossil fuels, renewables, environment and energy policy. He was head of the upstream vertical in the Petroleum Ministry and oversaw the opening up of the exploration and production regime during the period 2003-08. Thereafter, he headed the Energy Division at the Indian Government policy think tank, the NITI Aayog, where he spent five years overseeing the preparation of the energy demand and emission calculating tool, IESS, 2047, and also wrote the draft National Energy Policy. He led Indian delegations to the energy- and climate-related working groups of G20 under various Presidencies between 2013 and 2017. He has also had a two-year stint at the Environment Ministry handling multiple subjects related to the environment and biodiversity. Since September 2019 he heads the Coal Ministry. While working towards reforming the coal sector with a view to dismantling the monopoly of the Government Undertaking, Coal India Ltd, he has founded the Sustainable Development Cell in the Ministry and coal companies to address energy transition concerns.

He was associated as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow with Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, through which he published his book Natural Gas in India: Liberalisation and Policy in 2011. He holds a BA (Hons) in Economics, an MBA, a Diploma in International Trade and a PhD on prospects and challenges faced by the Indian natural gas sector.