Electric Miracle

Personal Mobility Could Soon Come to Mean Something New Once Polarity Launches Its Electric Bikes. Off-roading is Another Option

- Jayashree Kini Mendes

THE STREETS OF EUROPE AND CHINA ARE thronged with two-wheel contraptions. They could be your conventional petrol mopeds or a regular bicycle. But it's only when they zoom through red lights at pedestrian crossings, their eerie silence and lack of exhaust reveals them as electric. Electric bicycles that have been hacked together with a battery strapped to the frame and wired to a backwheel hub containing a motor are a common sight.

Such sights often tug at the heartstrings. For one, India could have adopted this years ago considering our inadequate infrastructure, and foreseeing the increasing density of four-wheelers on roads today. It's only recently that the government has been talking about electric vehicles. While the focus has been mainly confined to four-wheelers, it is now turning to two-wheelers. But that again seems to have met with some opposition from mainstream two-wheeler makers.

But there is a way. Two Pune-based young automobile enthusiasts have shown the road. After spending almost a decade being gainfully employed, Sachin Jadhav, CMD, and Anand Mohan, executive director, Polarity Bikes, have spent the last two years working on a concept that was conceived nearly a decade ago when they were peers at Coventry. Jadhav's competence is automobile design, while Mohan went on to become an automotive journalist.

What the duo have created could be a harbinger for quick movement at large locations such as shop floor of manufacturing plants, malls, airports, etc.

A MOVING STORY

What Jadhav and Mohan have created might end transportation woes for millions of people traversing short distances to work and back.