electric vehicles

Indian government wants to develop a ‘green city’ in every state of the country, powered by renewable energy. The ‘green city’ will mainstream environment-friendly power through solar rooftop systems on all its houses, solar parks on the city’s outskirts, waste to energy plants and electric mobility enabled public transport systems. India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) on December 3rd unveiled a concept note stating that Prime Minister Narendra Modi desires one city in each state to be developed as a green city that will meet all its energy requirements from renewable sources of energy. The ministry notes that the idea…

[This article has been co-authored by Rajendranath Goswami, Head of Electro-Mobility, Robert Bosch Engineering & Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd.] India’s ambitious goals to electrify 30% of its entire vehicle fleets by 2030 promises an exciting albeit challenging journey ahead. The seriousness with which electrification of mobility is being pursued was made clear once more recently, with the government think tank NITI Aayog proposing that after 2030, only electric vehicles should be sold in India. While a coherent policy by the central government continues to elude, states like Karnataka, Telangana and Delhi have rolled out their own State Electric Vehicle (EV)…

Nitin Gadkari’s recent plans to “bulldoze” India into a switch-over to electric vehicles has met with a fair bit of scepticism across quarters, perhaps because of the peremptory nature of his announcement and the lack of a detailed roadmap for the transition. However, this does create yet another window of opportunity to assess and analyse what’s making the move towards cleaner vehicles so difficult, and what could be done to remove the obstacles. The thrust on electric vehicles, considered to be a potential solution to the problem of alarming levels of air pollution in our cities, had in fact come…