BATTLING RANGE ANXIETY

Inadequate charging infrastructure threatens to put the brakes on India's electric vehicles ambitions

- By AVISHEK G. DASTIDAR

BENGALURU-BASED ZORAVAR ALI (NAME CHANGED), AN EXECUTIVE WITH A TELECOM FIRM, HAD JUST BOUGHT HIMSELF A BYD ATTO 3, a compact SUV electric vehicle, and was really looking forward to a road trip with best pal Rahul Bajpayee (name changed) last July. Rahul, who had just come down from Delhi, had a work meet in Chennai, so that is where the two set off for. Things seemed smooth for the first 250-odd kilometres on the 340km-long journey along NH44 and NH48 via Kanchipuram. But then it was time to charge the battery. They found a charging point soon enough. But it was only of 20kW capacity and would have taken more than an hour to bring the battery to full life. The two turned to an online app to find out where they might find the next charger. One was located 20 km away, but when they reached it, they discovered it was newly installed and not yet connected to the grid. Another 25 km away, they found a third charger. Except that a non-EV here was parked wrongly, and its owner was nowhere to be found.

By this time, Zoravar and Rahul's range anxiety had hit its peak. They finally found a charger, at a Bharat Petroleum fuel station some 30 km short of Chennai, and plugged the car in, killing time at a small tea stall for the half an hour it would take for the car to charge. Unnerved by the experience, Rahul took a direct flight back to Delhi rather than do a return trip to Bengaluru.

Even as Elon Musk launched the Tesla Model Y in Mumbai in July and green-plated EVs become a common sight on Indian roads, the charging infrastructure in the country has failed to keep pace with the auto industry's accelerated shift to EVs or the government's ambition to push clean energy.