Government’s E-mobility drive is good for the environment… and the exchequer!

A bag of carrots, and a stick. That’s the crux of the government’s e-mobility drive. The carrots came in the form of the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles Scheme (FAME-1), FAME-2 and the Production Linked Incentives (PLI) Scheme, aimed at stimulating the manufacture and adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and ramping up the setting up of supporting infrastructure and allied industries, including battery manufacturing. The stick has been displayed only occasionally, in the form of the threat of higher taxes on vehicles that use traditional Internal Combustion Engines (ICE).

Parallelly, the government has been encouraging State Governments to develop their own programmes to promote e-mobility. States have not held back, offering direct discounts on the purchase of electric vehicles and road tax exemptions. With the policy ecosystem geared towards e-mobility, companies from across the spectrum have jumped into the arena.

Whether it’s Ola, which decided to branch out from a cab aggregation business into electric 2-wheeler production, or incumbents like Hero and TVS and Bajaj and M&M and Tata Motors who decided to add e-mobility and green-energy engines to already thriving ICE portfolios, or Exide and Amara Raja Batteries which decided to branch out into e-battery technology — the craze has cottoned on, and everyone wants a piece of the action and a finger in multiple electrifying pies. There are over 90 startups in India’s e-mobility space alone, and more are being born every month

There’s no doubt that the push is paying off. EV sales have picked up rapidly, investment in new technology is soaring, and early apprehensions over safety (like the propensity of batteries and vehicles to spontaneously combust) have largely been extinguished. Two of these new electric mobility startups – Ola Electric & Ather Energy – have either turned or have switched on their indicators to turn on to Dalal Street.

A lot of this has been driven by the noble desire to safeguard the environmental for future generations. All data points indicate that a switch to cleaner and greener energy sources to power mobility will ultimately help the environment, at least by slowing down the effects of pollution. However, this is a long-term play; a really, really long-term play.

In the short term, we’re probably just exchanging one source of pollution for another – because so long as India is dependent on coal-based power plants to produce electricity, there’s probably only a marginal difference in the pollution from fossil fuel engines and the power needed to charge electric engines. So until electricity is produced by non-polluting means, we will continue burning fossil fuels in one form or the other