The Centre announced a £1.09 bn electric vehicle subsidy scheme, the PM E-Drive, marking the third phase of the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME) policy which has subsidized the purchase of over 1.6 million electric vehicles in India since 2015.
The new scheme will aim to boost adoption of electric buses, and brings the curtains down subsidies for electric and hybrid cars. The PM E-Drive scheme will give demand incentives to deploy 14,028 electric buses, demand for which will be aggregated across nine major cities by Convergence Energy Solutions Ltd (CESL), a stare-run company. With a £1 bn subsidy per kwh of battery capacity for each bus at a total outlay of £439.1 mn, public transport buses form the largest segment of the subsidy outlay.
The E-Drive scheme will also aim to develop an extensive charging infrastructure. Apart from electric buses, £267.9 mn will be set aside to subsidize 2.48 million electric two-wheelers and 316,000 electric three-wheelers.
Additionally, £50 mn each has been earmarked for electric trucks and hybrid ambulances, aiming to drive EV adoption in critical service sectors and the commercial vehicle segment for the first time.
“For ambulances, we are going to give incentives to hybrids because we need total reliability in the vehicles,” Ashwani Vaishnav, Union Minister for information and broadcasting said at a Cabinet briefing.
For trucks, the scheme will offer incentives only to those who have a scrapping certificate from vehicle scrapping centres approved by the road ministry.
While FAME-II extended incentives for electric cabs, the Electric Mobility Promotion Scheme (EMPS) that temporarily replaced it did not. The E-Drive scheme skips electric cars entirely, in an upset for Tata Motors Ltd, India's largest electric car maker that had vigorously pushed for subsidizing electric cabs in the new scheme.
