POV: GET ON THE E-BUS

India’s auto makers probably never thought that the acrid smoke from crop residue burning across the fields in the northwestern parts of the country that engulfed the oh-so-pampered Delhi NCR area for a couple of weeks at the end of 2016, could impact their business and their future in the way it ultimately did. Even as they cried themselves hoarse that vehicular pollution accounted for just a quarter of total PM10 and PM2.5 pollutants in the Delhi NCR winter haze, came a variety of perceived roadblocks to their future growth.

Soon thereafter, electric vehicles (EVs) became the holy grail. India’s policymakers waxed eloquent on everything from electric mobility to battery technology to charging systems and building the ecosystem for smart e-mobility. Then, just as India’s car consumers had started dreaming of Teslas on their roads, the volume of the policymakers’ rhetoric was suddenly lowered and a much anticipated ‘National EV Policy’ was abruptly put on the backburner.

Conspiracy theorists have, of course, laid the blame for this sudden change at the door of India’s auto industry. And of course, the industry has been less than happy with what was seen as an attempt to ride roughshod on its divine right to propagate the technology of its choice.

Admittedly, there are some valid concerns with the e-mobility direction that was sought to be taken in India. Creating charging infrastructure to handle the proposed growth in electric vehicles would have been a challenge. Proposals put forward on swapping batteries have appeared too theoretical to say the least. Further, there wasn’t a single study in the public domain on the ability of the power grids to sustain the load volatility of even thousands of EVs—leave alone millions. An equally critical strategic concern related to the fact that global supplies of both lithium and cobalt (another critical ingredient) are increasingly controlled by one country—China.

Yet EVs are clearly the way forward. Concerns on a ballooning oil import bill thanks to a 15 per cent rise in oil import volumes and a 26 per cent increase in the average global crude price, and its impact on the country’s Current Account Deficit (CAD) are not misplaced.

In these circumstances, what India really requires is an affordable e-mobility initiative to take root, sustain itself and grow in line with the country’s needs. And quite fortuitously, the NITI Aayog seemed to agree when its vicechairman reportedly observed recently that the new focus would be to get two-wheelers, three-wheelers and public transport buses to shift to electric mobility, and “not worry too much about cars”. The logic is unimpeachable. Two wheelers accounted for 33 per cent of the vehicular pollution in Delhi NCR—three times as much as four-wheelers. Could a near ban on them be a good starting point? But given the political clout of the distribution networks of two-wheeler Goliaths in India, that may be a bit of an ask. See the explosive growth in e-rickshaws. That could be a great way forward. But in the absence of Conformity of Production (CoP) standards, poor nonstandard products from China will continue to flood the market, smothering any attempt to create the building blocks for an e-mobility ecosystem. An electric bus network that is based on trolley buses rather than technologies dependent on high cost lithium battery banks and expensive recharging facilities could be another appropriate solution.

But along with all this, what India really needs is perhaps a true indigenous research and development effort in the area of lowcost Na-Ion batteries, and technologies for generating hydrogen from biomass and agriwastes, which could then be used for fuel cells in trucks and buses.

Till all this happens, can we simply ask the automobile industry to achieve European standards of CO2 emissions and concomitant fuel consumption targets for vehicle fleets? We can think of electric cars after that!

B.V.R. Subbu is the former president of Hyundai Motors India and the author of SANTRO, The Car That Built a Company

What India really requires is an affordable e-mobility initiative to take root, sustain itself and grow in line with the country’s needs