The carbon footprint (CF) has emerged as an important yardstick to understand the total contribution of countries, sectors and individuals to climate change. In contrast to conventional emissions accounting which captures only territorial or local production activities, the CF includes the emissions imposed by consumption across global supply chains for goods and services. Recent interest has grown in the application of CF assessment for municipalities owing to their large contribution to global carbon emissions and the limited coverage of existing data to monitor their climate pledges. By linking household-level consumer surveys to a global supply chain database, spatially-explicit CF assessment is possible at a district and household scale. To date, such technique has exposed otherwise unforeseen differences in consumer carbon footprints in developed countries. Within this study we calculate and compare the household carbon footprints 623 districts in India, based on micro consumption data from 203,313 households and explain their variation by economic, cultural and demographic factors. We show the eradication of extreme poverty does not contradict with climate change mitigation in India. However, our analysis suggests CF reduction policies within India need to target high-expenditure households which are responsible for nearly seven times the carbon emissions than low-expenditure households (living on $1.9 consumption a day). These vast disparities between the carbon footprint of citizens in India highlights the need to differentiate individual responsibilities for climate change in national and global climate policy.

碳足迹（CF）已成为理解国家，部门和个人对气候变化的总体贡献的重要标准。与仅捕获地域或本地生产活动的常规排放核算相反，碳排放量包括全球商品和服务供应链中的消费所施加的排放。由于市政当局对全球碳排放的巨大贡献以及用于监测其气候承诺的现有数据的覆盖范围有限，最近对市政当局应用CF评估的兴趣日益浓厚。通过将家庭层面的消费者调查链接到全球供应链数据库，可以在区域和家庭规模进行空间明确的CF评估。至今，这种技术暴露了发达国家消费者碳足迹的其他无法预料的差异。在这项研究中，我们基于203,313个家庭的微观消费数据，计算并比较了印度623个地区的家庭碳足迹，并解释了其受经济，文化和人口因素的影响。我们表明，消除赤贫与印度缓解气候变化并不矛盾。但是，我们的分析表明，印度的CF削减政策需要针对那些碳排放量比低支出家庭（每天依靠1.9美元消费）高将近七倍的高支出家庭。