OPINION | Scaling India’s EV ecosystem beyond infrastructure deployment

India must fortify our on-ground ecosystem

2025 was a defining year for India’s mobility ecosystem. Infrastructure deployment alone no longer guarantees impact — success comes from adapting operations to local realities, ensuring consistent reliability, and building systems that users and operators can trust. In a diverse and dynamic market, execution paired with real-world insights has become the key to unlocking sustainable growth and long-term scale.

Scale is a geography problem

One of the strongest lessons of 2025 was that India does not scale uniformly. Power quality varies block to block, user behaviour shifts sharply between metros and smaller towns, and local infrastructure readiness is inconsistent. Deploying more chargers is less impactful than deploying them intelligently. Understanding local conditions, prioritising reliability over footprint, and building teams that can respond to problems quickly are what turn infrastructure into usable services. Reliability is no longer optional — it is the defining metric of success.

Infrastructure is a people business

Physical assets are only as strong as the teams powering them. To scale India’s EV revolution, we must fortify our on-ground ecosystem by building deep capacity in installation, commissioning, maintenance and operations.

As systems mature, strong network effects emerge — faster hiring cycles, shorter training timelines, and more reliable execution across geographies. Importantly, these roles evolve from short-term green jobs into stable, long-term careers, reinforcing the sustainability of the ecosystem itself.

Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities: the new growth frontier

One of the most exciting EV trends of 2025 was the rise of Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities as high-potential markets. Once overlooked, these towns showed that adoption accelerates when solutions are built for local realities. Understanding user behaviour, infrastructure constraints and viable business models in these markets is now a key differentiator.

Users adopt ease, not infrastructure

A clear lesson from 2025 was that users do not want to engage with infrastructure — they simply expect it to work. Much like UPI, EV charging will scale not because people understand the system, but because it removes friction.

Today, that friction appears in the need to download multiple EV apps, uncertainty about charger reliability and nearby amenities, or the complexity of navigating home wiring and sanctioned load limits. Adoption accelerates when charging is predictable, well maintained and intuitive — working quietly in the background with fewer steps and clearer outcomes.

The road ahead

As the ecosystem moves into 2026, growth will be shaped less by experimentation and more by optimisation. Interoperability will require stronger policy backing. Reliability will demand deeper systems thinking. And leadership will increasingly be tested on operational discipline rather than speed.

For operators and fleets, charging will evolve into a grid-aware, demand-responsive service, with infrastructure sharing, time-of-day tariffs and scalable deployment models becoming critical to maximising utilisation.

2025 was the year the industry confronted the realities of scale. The next phase will belong to those who can execute consistently, adapt to local conditions, and build infrastructure that works quietly, reliably and at scale.

(Akshay Shekhar, Co-Founder & CEO, Kazam.)

Views are personal, and do not represent the stance of this publication.)