Saar: The government will continue to offer them to shared-mobility platforms such as Ola and Uber cab aggregators.

On one side, the government is supposedly doing everything to electrify Indian mobility at the earliest. It is even targeting to shift 40 per cent of its own vehicle fleet to pure electrics. But then it goes ahead and does something like this. According to a publication, the government will soon axe the subsidies currently available on private electric car purchases. That points to the subsidy which is available under the FAME (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric and Hybrid vehicles) scheme.

Why? The policy-makers said that those subsidies and incentives should be reserved for electric cars which will run more on a daily basis, specifically on a shared-mobility platform. That brings in names such as Ola and Uber, which have a wide fleet of vehicles in several cities across the country. The officials which confirmed this news reportedly added:

“It neither makes a substantial difference in promoting sales nor serves the purpose of a clean environment.

Under the FAME scheme, which got an initial budget of less than Rs 1,000 crore, a cash subsidy of up to Rs 1.3 lakh is given on a pure electric car purchase. This benefit is likely to be removed from FAME II, which is currently being framed by the heavy industries ministry. The ministry has also proposed to raise the budget for the second FAME scheme to over Rs 9,000 crore.

SMEV Forms Five New Electric Mobility Verticals

India doesn’t make electric vehicles locally. More than 50 per cent of components used in e-cars from Mahindra and Tata Motors are imported into India. That is an area of concern and should be looked into to bring the final cost of e-cars down. Once the cost is low enough for the masses of the country to afford them, only then the government should draw inferences from sales figures. Last year, only 1,500 electric cars were sold as private vehicles in the entire country. That, compared to 32 lakh figure of cars with conventional powertrains underneath sold over the same period, is minuscule.

Government To Deploy Nodal Firms For EV Infrastructure

Several nations across the globe started their journey of transforming their mobility from the internal combustion engine to electrics way before India woke up to realise that it needs to do the same. Countries like Norway and China go to enormous lengths to encourage people to shift to EVs (electric vehicles). The initiatives that these countries and cities like Amsterdam in Netherlands and London in England include free parking, free charging, free or reduced toll taxes and free number plates among others.

Source: TOI

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Rachit Shad Trehan
A car nutter by heart. A hopeless engineer by education. Gunning for one goal - simplify cars.

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