Gearing Up For An Electric Future
Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, created a flutter earlier this year when he threatened the domestic automotive industry to start thinking about a future without the internal combustion engine. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers or SIAM, Gadkari was caustic. "We should move towards alternative fuel.. I am going to do this, whether you like it or not. And I am not going to ask you. I will bulldoze it," he said. "You may not like it, but I wish that your growth should be less. If this growth continues, I will have to add one more lane to national highways, which will cost a whopping Rs 80,000 crore. If you do not make electric cars yourself, we will force you to do it."
Gadkari is not alone. Piyush Goyal, the Minister for Railways and Coal, had in March mooted the idea of an all electric fleet by 2030. In May, government think tank National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog and Colorado based Rocky Mountain Institute released a report that recommended a push to electric vehicles or EVs, with fiscal incentives and discouraging petrol and diesel vehicles.
The sudden urgency within the government whose policies (at least the tax rates) actively discourage the development of a robust EV market has set
