Centre planning Rs 1,000cr subsidy to help build electric vehicles charging stations

As climate change makes itself more and more felt, fossil fuels are being looked at as something that needs to be changed. In an effort to move towards something more sustainable auto companies have no doubt started moving towards the electric path. And while the road will be long and hard, it is not undoable. Here are the electric cars that are already on sale in India.

The Centre is planning to provide Rs 1,000 crore subsidy to build charging stations for electric vehicles (EV), according to a Mint report.

The Department of Heavy Industry (DHI) expects total investment of about Rs 2,000 crore to set up 1,000 charging stations across the country. The ministry’s contribution will be Rs 1,000 crore while the remaining amount will be contributed by private players.

The ministry plans to spread out this investment over five years. In the first year, DHI will invest Rs 50 crore, Rs 200 crore in the second year and Rs 250 crore in the subsequent three years.

The planned charging stations will be built all over India, but especially on Delhi-Chandigarh, Delhi-Mumbai and Mumbai-Surat-Pune highways. A charging station will be built at a distance of every 25 km on these highways. Cities with population of more than 4 million will also be focused on.

India has not been able to deploy the EVs procured by state-run Energy Efficiency Services Ltd due to the lack of charging stations. The government plans to deploy 5,000 electric buses in the second phase of Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Scheme, which expires in 2023.

“Electric vehicles and charging stations go hand-in-hand and neither can really take off without the other. It is great to see the government supporting the growth of charging infra as well, since the state-level policies which assign subsidies do not really exist on the ground,” Maxson Lewis, managing director at Magenta Power, an EV charging infrastructure provider, told the daily.