NEW DELHI — India’s electric mobility transition is steadily gathering momentum. Across the country, an increasing number of electric vehicle (EV) models are entering the market, public and private charging infrastructure is visibly expanding, and fleet operators are actively experimenting with battery-powered alternatives. Yet, as leading urban and transport experts argued during a high-profile panel discussion in New Delhi, true sustainability cannot be achieved simply by swapping an internal-combustion engine for a battery pack.
The fourth installment of the TERI–IHC Lecture and Discussion Series, held at the India Habitat Centre on September 21, tackled the broader, systemic questions surrounding the country’s transportation future. Titled “Beyond Tailpipe: Electric Mobility at the Intersection of Air Quality and Energy Security,” the session brought together prominent researchers, industry executives, and urban governance specialists to examine how transport electrification can be leveraged to tackle persistent urban challenges. These include chronic air pollution, heavy dependence on imported crude oil, worsening traffic congestion, inadequate public mass transit, and the perpetual hurdle of last-mile connectivity.
Sharif Qamar, Associate Director for Transport and Urban Governance at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), moderated the comprehensive panel. The expert lineup featured Anumita Roychowdhury, Executive Director for Research and Advocacy at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE); Amit Bhatt, Managing Director for India at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT); Anirudh Arun, CEO of Refex Mobility; and Naveen Gupta, Founder and CEO of Trev Mobility. Together, they mapped out the realities, roadblocks, and necessary policy evolution required to make India’s mobility transition genuinely sustainable.
Can Electric Vehicles Solve Delhi’s Air-Pollution Problem?
Qamar opened the discussion by framing the conversation within the context of Delhi’s decades-long, arduous battle against toxic air pollution. While acknowledging the notable improvements achieved over past decades—such as the landmark shift of public and commercial transport from diesel to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)—he emphasized the sheer scale of the challenges that still remain.
Directing his first question to Anumita Roychowdhury, Qamar asked whether the ongoing transition to electric vehicles could deliver a transformative environmental impact comparable to the historic CNG transition.
Roychowdhury responded with an emphatic perspective, framing electrification not as an isolated technological fix, but as the critical next stage in a much larger, continuous clean-air journey. She recalled the rigorous regulatory interventions that shaped Delhi’s past air-quality management, including progressive tightening of vehicle-emission standards, the widespread expansion of CNG infrastructure, and strict restrictions targeting older, highly polluting vehicles and heavy commercial trucks.
“These interventions have made a difference,” Roychowdhury argued during the session. “लेकिन even after all these improvements, we still have a very large gap to bridge to meet clean-air standards.”
For Roychowdhury, the takeaway from past decades is not that previous policy measures fell short, but rather that incremental technological improvements are no longer sufficient to secure healthy urban air. The next logical and mandatory step, she stressed, must be a decisive shift toward zero-tailpipe-emission mobility.
“We can no longer look only at incremental improvements in vehicle technology,” she added. “We now have to talk about eliminating tailpipe emissions and moving towards zero-emission vehicles.”
However, Roychowdhury cautioned that electrification cannot succeed in a vacuum. It must occur alongside a fundamental transformation of how urban transport systems are planned, managed, and utilized.
What Happens When Laboratory Emissions Meet the Real World?
Shifting the focus to vehicle certification and on-road performance, Qamar turned the discussion over to Amit Bhatt, inviting him to shed light on the persistent discrepancies between laboratory testing and real-world vehicle emissions.
Bhatt drew upon extensive empirical evidence to illustrate how significantly standardized laboratory certification can diverge from actual on-road tailpipe performance. He noted that while laboratory tests are essential for establishing regulatory baselines, they are conducted under tightly controlled, standardized conditions that rarely replicate chaotic, congested city driving.
“There will always be some difference between laboratory and real-world emissions because laboratory tests are conducted under standardised conditions,” Bhatt explained. “The question is: what should the acceptable difference be?”
Highlighting the scope of on-road research, Bhatt pointed to a recent remote-sensing study conducted by the ICCT in Delhi and Gurugram. The comprehensive project captured an impressive 111,712 valid tailpipe-emissions measurements across a diverse mix of vehicles, including passenger cars, commercial taxis, two- and three-wheelers, light commercial vehicles, and urban buses.
Bhatt’s central argument was that public-health exposure is dictated entirely by what vehicles emit out in the open where people live, work, and commute, rather than what they manage to produce under pristine laboratory conditions.
“If we want to understand the health impact, we have to look at what vehicles emit in the real world, not only what they emit when they are tested,” he emphasized.
This reality carries profound implications for Indian policymakers. It highlights the urgent need for robust, continuous real-world emissions monitoring alongside a long-term, irreversible transition toward zero-emission technologies.
“The only way to address tailpipe emissions completely is to move towards zero-emission vehicles, whether the technology is battery electric or another zero-emission technology that may emerge in the future,” Bhatt concluded.
The Taxi Problem: High Mileage, High Potential
The conversation subsequently shifted to the commercial fleet sector, addressing app-based ride-hailing services and urban taxis. Qamar posed questions to Anirudh Arun and Naveen Gupta regarding a vehicle segment that holds immense potential for emissions reduction simply because commercial cabs travel significantly more kilometers daily than typical privately owned passenger cars.
Anirudh Arun described how dramatically the operational landscape of fleet electrification has shifted since the early days of commercial EV adoption in India. When Refex Mobility first began deploying electric fleets, the ecosystem was plagued by severe limitations: vehicle driving ranges were short, suitable commercial EV models were sparse, and public charging infrastructure was virtually non-existent, forcing early operators to invest heavily in building private charging depots.
“The challenge in 2019–20 was completely different,” Arun recalled. “There were very few cars available, the range was limited and there was virtually no charging infrastructure.”
Today, the market boasts a wider array of vehicle models, improved battery ranges, and a gradually expanding public charging network. Yet, Arun pointed out, a new set of operational hurdles has taken center stage—specifically, the inherent unpredictability of urban taxi routes.
“You know where a metro is going to go. With a cab, there is a lot of randomness,” Arun observed. “You can start in one part of Delhi and end up in Rohini, Noida or Ghaziabad. The question then becomes: is there enough charging infrastructure where the vehicle ends its journey?”
Consequently, effective fleet electrification requires much more than simply purchasing and deploying electric cars. It demands a sophisticated charging network explicitly designed around the fluid, unpredictable daily patterns of commercial mobility.
Corporate Mobility Offers a Different Pathway
Highlighting alternative avenues within the commercial sector, Arun noted that corporate employee transportation offers a vastly more predictable and manageable model for electrification.
Large corporate houses typically operate fixed employee-transport schedules, maintain designated office campuses, and adhere to strict corporate sustainability targets. Because these transit requirements are meticulously planned in advance, fleet operators can easily schedule vehicles and arrange charging cycles during intervals between assignments.
“Because these transportation requirements are planned, you can plan the charging cycle around them,” Arun explained. Furthermore, corporate campuses offer ideal locations for establishing dedicated charging hubs, allowing commercial fleets to recharge securely while employees are inside working.
This corporate model demonstrates that the electrification process becomes significantly smoother when mobility demand, charging availability, and vehicle utilization rates are integrated into a single, coordinated framework.
The Consumer Still Wants Reliability
Providing a complementary industry perspective, Naveen Gupta, Founder and CEO of Trev Mobility, discussed the realities of operating an all-electric, chauffeur-driven premium mobility platform across the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR).
When Trev Mobility initially experimented with electric vehicles, the team assumed that consumer range anxiety was the primary obstacle to widespread adoption. Guided by this assumption, the company initially procured vehicles boasting robust battery ranges of 400 to 500 kilometers on a single charge, expecting the anxiety to dissipate.
To their surprise, the issue persisted. “We started with cars offering 400–500 kilometres of range, thinking that range anxiety was the problem. But the same issue came back,” Gupta noted.
In response, Trev shifted its strategic focus toward longer-distance travel and premium mobility segments, where itineraries could be managed with greater operational predictability. Even so, the challenge of physical charging logistics remained a daily hurdle, particularly when multiple vehicles returned to base simultaneously, creating sudden spikes in power demand.
“Charging is still the challenge. When all the cars come back at around the same time, managing the charging cycle becomes difficult,” Gupta explained. “You need proper route optimisation and you need to keep enough vehicles moving so that customer experience is not affected.”
What Should Government Do Next?
Bringing the discussion squarely back to the realm of public policy, Qamar asked the panel to outline the structural changes required to scale up electric taxis, commercial delivery fleets, and other high-utilization vehicles across India.
For Anumita Roychowdhury, navigating the next phase of the EV transition demands significantly greater regulatory ambition and stronger supply-side obligations from automotive manufacturers. While acknowledging that India has made commendable progress through various government incentive schemes and subsidies, she pointed out that current EV adoption rates still fall short of the levels necessary to meet the nation’s ambitious climate targets for 2030.
“So far, we have largely placed the responsibility on the consumer: give consumers an incentive and ask them to buy an electric vehicle. But where is the obligation on the suppliers?” Roychowdhury asked pointedly.
She strongly advocated for the establishment of clear, mandatory electrification targets for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), commercial fleet operators, and public transport agencies. State governments, she argued, must evolve from an "EV 1.0" approach—which relies primarily on consumer subsidies—toward an "EV 2.0" paradigm characterized by firm mandates, regulatory obligations, and measurable performance targets.
Crucially, Roychowdhury emphasized that the ultimate measure of success is not merely the raw volume of electric vehicles sold, but whether supporting infrastructure, electrical grid capacities, financing mechanisms, and public transit networks are fully prepared to absorb them.
The Hard-to-Electrify Frontier: Trucks
Expanding the discussion into heavy-duty transport, the panel turned its attention to commercial freight trucks, a sector historically regarded as one of the most difficult to electrify due to heavy payload requirements and long operating distances.
Amit Bhatt argued that the economic fundamentals for electric trucks are beginning to shift. Although commercial electric trucks continue to carry steep upfront purchase prices, their total cost of ownership (TCO) is gradually becoming competitive against conventional diesel trucks in specific operating niches.
Nevertheless, significant structural hurdles remain, including high battery costs, the necessity for high daily vehicle utilization, scaling manufacturing volumes, and, above all, the absence of heavy-duty charging infrastructure along major freight corridors.
“The biggest question is how we increase demand,” Bhatt said. Meeting that demand, however, is inseparable from infrastructure development. Long-distance electric freight requires strategically planned, high-capacity charging networks along key national highways.
“Where do we charge? How do we develop the highway infrastructure? Do we identify particular highways first, or do we identify nodes and connect those nodes? That is the next question we need to solve,” Bhatt noted, characterizing freight electrification as the next major frontier for India’s clean-transport transition.
The Economics of Electric Fleets
Addressing the commercial viability of green technologies, Anirudh Arun stressed that technological adoption must ultimately make sound financial sense to prevail in the marketplace. He pointed out that CNG achieved widespread dominance in India’s urban taxi market because decades of scale and dedicated infrastructure development successfully drove down its operating costs, establishing a formidable economic benchmark that electric vehicles must meet.
“The best technology should ultimately win through economic sense. There is only so much you can do to force a particular technology. People will adopt it when the economics work,” Arun asserted.
At the same time, he argued that conventional fossil-fuel technologies fail to account for their true environmental and public-health costs within standard transport economics. Commercial vehicles, in particular, log massive mileage; a commercial taxi traveling hundreds of thousands of kilometers over its working lifespan exerts a disproportionately large cumulative environmental footprint compared to a privately owned car used sporadically. This high utilization makes commercial fleet electrification an imperative target for maximizing emissions reduction.
Financing is the Other Half of the Equation
Highlighting a frequently overlooked barrier to entry, Naveen Gupta pointed to the complexities of the financial ecosystem surrounding commercial electric vehicles.
While electric vehicles boast substantially lower operational and maintenance costs over time, their higher upfront price tags demand significant initial capital outlays from fleet operators. Compounding this challenge, traditional commercial banks and financial institutions remain hesitant because they face high uncertainty regarding the residual resale value of electric vehicles and their integrated battery packs.
“The financial ecosystem is not yet completely comfortable with electric assets because one important factor is difficult to measure: the residual value of the vehicle and the battery,” Gupta explained.
Lenders require greater market transparency regarding battery health, long-term degradation rates, expected operational lifespans, and standardized residual valuation frameworks to accurately assess and mitigate financial risk. Without these supportive mechanisms in place, lower running costs alone may not be sufficient to overcome the initial capital hurdles faced by fleet entrepreneurs.
From EV Adoption to Mobility Transformation
In his concluding remarks, Sharif Qamar brought the discussion full circle, returning to the central theme of looking far beyond the tailpipe.
The insights shared by the panel underscored that while electric vehicles are vital instruments for cutting tailpipe emissions and curbing petroleum imports, true urban sustainability demands a much broader, multi-layered transformation. This includes expanding and modernizing public mass transit systems, building safe infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, improving last-mile feeder connectivity, scaling up robust charging networks, streamlining commercial fleet financing, enforcing rigorous real-world emissions monitoring, and maintaining consistent, forward-looking public policies.
Most importantly, the experts agreed, the transition requires a fundamental shift in how Indian cities conceptualize urban mobility.
Illustrating this point with a personal anecdote, Arun recalled opting for the Delhi Metro over a taxi when faced with a congested airport commute. The journey proved remarkably swift and cost a mere fraction of a cab fare.
“Public transportation and mass mobility have to be encouraged in our cities. People have to start feeling good about taking the bus or taking the metro,” Arun remarked.
Ultimately, the overarching objective of India’s transport evolution is not merely to swap every petrol or diesel vehicle on the road with an electric equivalent. Rather, it is to systematically reduce unnecessary vehicle kilometers traveled in the first place, while ensuring that the necessary journeys that remain are powered cleanly and efficiently.
