In 2014-15, electric vehicles (EVs) were little more than a statistical curiosity in India. Just 0.01% of all registered vehicles that year were electric. A decade later, the picture has shifted dramatically. In 2024-25, EVs accounted for 7.31% of new registrations, a surge that has caught policymakers, automakers and infrastructure companies scrambling to catch up. The electric revolution is no longer a distant promise, but unfolding in real time on India’s roads. But a fundamental question looms—where will all these vehicles charge?
The half truth
India’s charging landscape is expanding rapidly, at least on paper. According to Redseer’s ‘Powering India’s EV Future’ report, the country has grown from just 1,800 public chargers in FY22 to more than 30,000 by August 2025. Growth has doubled year after year—6,586 in FY23, more than 16,000 in FY24, and now 30,000.
Yet the numbers mask a more sobering reality. Of these 30,000 chargers, more than half, some 15,550, are non-operational. Only 14,450 are actually working, and their utilisation is below 10%. In a country where EV adoption is accelerating, this gap between ambition and execution is glaring.
India’s charging network is also metro-heavy—62% of chargers are in cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi, while non-metros, where EV adoption is quietly surging, account for just 38%. Jaipur, for example, now sees a quarter of all car sales coming from EVs, while for entry-level models like the Tata Tiago EV, nearly half of sales are outside the top 20 cities, in states such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
Consumers are noticing the mismatch. Kartik Sarma (name changed), a 45-year-old media professional in Noida, is planning to buy a new car next year but has ruled out going electric. “I live in a second-floor flat, and the RWA won’t allow me to install a charger in the basement,” he says. “The public chargers around me either don’t work or are impossible to use with so many different apps. Until it becomes as easy as filling petrol, I won’t take the risk.”
Sarma’s reluctance captures a broader anxiety—India may be selling EVs faster than it can provide places to charge them.
Amid this, companies like CharjKaro are trying to bridge the gap with a public-first approach. The Delhi-based startup already operates more than 1,000 charging points across four states and over 150 locations, all in publicly accessible spaces rather than restricted setups. It plans to add another 3,000 chargers in this financial year and is targeting 10,000 charging points in the next 2-3 years, with a strong focus on intra-city hubs, intercity travel and highway networks for electric buses and commercial fleets.
Showrooms to sockets
For carmakers, the charging bottleneck is existential. Selling EVs without solving charging, as one executive puts it, is like selling airplanes without airports.
Tata Motors, India’s largest EV player, has taken the most aggressive approach. Its ‘Open Collaboration Framework’, launched in 2023, has seeded more than 18,000 new public chargers in 15 months through partnerships with charge point operators (CPOs) and oil companies. It is also piloting ‘Mega Chargers’, 120kW stations with multiple guns and 95% uptime. Thirty are already operational in partnership with Statiq, ChargeZone and Zeon, with a target of 500 by 2027. “The intent of the city Mega Chargers would be to support a large number of charging use cases, and hence these chargers will be primarily installed in publicly accessible locations. We are also partnering with large corporates and offices to install convenient community chargers to serve their captive EV owners,” says Balaje Rajan, chief strategy officer, Tata Passenger Electric Mobility.
Other automakers are following. Mahindra has tied up with Charge+Zone to build fast-charging corridors on key highways. MG Motor India works with Fortum and Delta Electronics. Hyundai and Kia are exploring local tie-ups, drawing inspiration from their global partnership with Shell.
Luxury carmakers, too, are investing in plugs as much as product. Audi India has built what it calls a “robust and reassuring ownership ecosystem”. “We have installed 140+ chargers across 75 cities, along with India’s first ultra-fast 450kW charging hub in Mumbai,” says Balbir Singh Dhillon, head of Audi India. The company offers complimentary charging to its customers and provides access to over 6,500 charge points through its app. For Dhillon, “building charging infrastructure is not optional, it is core to making premium EV ownership viable in India”.
Scale, survival, innovation
If automakers are building confidence, charging companies are chasing survival. The economics are brutal—high upfront costs, slow payback, and patchy utilisation.
Statiq, one of India’s best-funded startups, is pursuing a twin-track strategy. “Our strategy blends the requirements of long-distance EV travel and urban convenience,” says Akshit Bansal, founder and CEO. “Highway corridors are crucial for pan-India mobility, while urban hubs serve the daily commuter,” he adds.
Reliability, Bansal insists, is non-negotiable. “Our chargers are built to endure India’s extreme weather. They are IP54-certified, monsoon-proof, and IoT-enabled for remote monitoring and over-the-air updates. Reliability isn’t just a feature, it’s a promise.”
The Tesla example looms large—chargers as part of a lifestyle, not just infrastructure. India, with its dhabas, malls, and dense cities, has a chance to create its own unique model, one rooted in its culture as much as in its technology.
Statiq has also piloted integrated charging hubs with malls, restaurants and dhabas. “We believe integrated charging hubs are the future. Our vision is to create destinations, not just stops,” he says.
Exicom, another veteran, is focusing on resilience and interoperability. “Fast charging is picking up across fleets, highways and workplaces,” says Anshuman Divyanshu, CEO of EVSE at Exicom. “The challenge is grid reliability, misuse of bays, and fragmented software protocols. We are building chargers compatible across operators and car brands to make integration easier.”
CharjKaro’s Raghu Khanna says the company is focusing squarely on reliability and uptime. “Charging is a service-based industry, and our team is well-equipped for it. We anticipate maintenance needs in advance and remotely monitor our chargers to ensure high uptime, even during monsoon season,” he explains. But challenges persist—gun theft in fast chargers has emerged as a costly problem. The company is investing in preventive measures to reduce such incidents. Looking ahead, the company is betting big on solar-based charging, AI-driven fast and slow chargers, and advanced battery health monitoring systems to differentiate itself in a competitive space.
Alongside, CharjKaro is collaborating with automakers in both passenger and commercial vehicle categories, offering charging services tailored for fleets. It is also working with battery swapping agencies to enable ‘Battery-as-a-Service’ models at its charging stations and has partnered with real estate developers to pre-install charging facilities in new projects.
But perhaps the most candid assessment comes from Ashhok Kapoor, co-founder of EzUrja, which has an on-demand mobile EV charging system with energy storage delivered to any spot anywhere. “The government’s focus shifted to vehicles while infrastructure lagged behind,” he recalls. “Ideally, both should have been developed in tandem. The real issue is not last-mile connectivity, it’s how the energy will be supplied. The weak status of the grid in India is the main pain point.”
EzUrja has faced a string of challenges— grid connection delays of up to 120 days for high-power chargers, tenders undermined by Chinese firms after changes in localisation mandates, and even theft of copper cables. “In India, even self-service petrol stations don’t work well, so EV infra faces added challenges,” Kapoor notes.
Yet the company has innovated. In 2022, EzUrja developed a mobile charging van, a 120kW unit capable of charging three to four vehicles up to 80% in 30 minutes. Kia was the first to adopt it. “This solution brings ease of access and reliability,” Kapoor says. “It removes dependence on fixed infrastructure while the grid and networks catch up.”
Reliability, visibility
Despite progress, consumer trust remains fragile. Redseer estimates that more than half of India’s chargers are non-functional, with utilisation below 10%. Tata.ev’s own research shows 38% of EV users cite unreliable chargers as their top concern.
The problems fall into four buckets:
Reliability: Poor maintenance means many chargers are down.
Interoperability: A fragmented ecosystem of apps, payment systems and connectors.
Consumer behaviour: Globally, 90% of charging happens at home or work. In India, where 70-75% of urban residents live in apartments, RWAs often block installations.
Commercial viability: Outside metros, low utilisation makes it hard for operators to recover investments.
This mismatch creates an uneven user experience. In cities, coverage is denser but fragmented; an EV driver may juggle 10-20 different apps. On highways, coverage has improved, by mid-2025, 91% of national highways had at least one fast charger every 50 kilometres, according to government data, but reliability is patchy.
The gap is stark compared with global leaders. China, where EV penetration is 54%, has 200 chargers per 1,000 EVs, with 45% being fast chargers and 100 per 100km of road. The US has 55 chargers per 1,000 EVs and 70 per 100km. Norway, the world’s EV poster child, has 29 chargers per 1,000 EVs but 70% of them are fast, with a density of 180 per 100km. India, by contrast, has just five chargers per 1,000 EVs, a density of five per 100km, and very low fast-charger penetration.
CharjKaro believes its accessible chargers across highways, cities and new real estate projects will help boost both visibility and utilisation, overcoming one of the industry’s chronic pain points—chargers that exist but aren’t usable or findable.
Policy push, official drag
The government is not blind to these gaps. In September, the Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI) rolled out operational guidelines for the deployment of EV public charging stations under the PM e-Drive scheme. Under the framework, government premises such as offices, residential complexes, hospitals, and educational institutions will receive a 100% subsidy on both upstream infrastructure (the equipment required to deliver electricity to charging stations) and EV charging equipment, provided the chargers are kept open for free public use. At transport hubs and other public sector-controlled locations, including railway stations, airports, bus depots, and toll plazas, the subsidy will cover 80% of the upstream infrastructure cost and 70% of the EVSE cost. For all other public locations, such as streets, malls, and market complexes, support is restricted to 80% of upstream infrastructure only.
These incentives build on existing efforts to expand India’s charging network. Subsidies under the FAME II programme have already supported the installation of around 7,400 charging stations through state-run oil companies, while the PM e-Drive scheme has earmarked Rs 2,000 crore for the deployment of nearly 72,300 public charging stations across the country. Beyond financial support, regulatory mandates are also shaping the landscape. The Model Building Bye-Laws of 2019 require that 20% of parking spaces in all new buildings be EV-ready, embedding charging infrastructure into future urban development. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has directed that charging facilities must be installed at every highway wayside amenity at intervals of 40-60 kilometres by 2028-29, creating the backbone for long-distance electric mobility.
Yet implementation lags. Land procurement in dense urban areas repeatedly fails. Grid upgrades take months. RWAs block chargers in gated societies. Many chargers already installed lie defunct for lack of maintenance.
Kapoor of EzUrja is blunt: “The larger problem remains: EV growth has outpaced charging infra growth. While multiple EV models are available, the ratio of chargers to vehicles is still skewed.”
Redseer estimates India needs 1.32 million public chargers by 2030, 45-50 per 1,000 EVs, aligned with global benchmarks. To stay on track, the country must double its charger count every 14-15 months. At current pace and reliability, that target looks daunting.
The cultural twist
Globally, Tesla has redefined charging as part of lifestyle, superchargers co-located with cafes, shops and rest stops. India may find its equivalent in dhabas, become natural partners for charging.
“All our existing Mega Charger locations are co-located with quality amenities such as restaurants, dhabas, or malls. At this stage, one of our priorities is to equip locations featuring high-footfall of both ICE and EV users with adequate charging points to build confidence among users across powertrains,” says Tata’s Rajan.
Some pilots are under way. Tata.ev’s Mega Chargers on the Delhi-Jaipur highway are co-located with popular food stops like Asli Pappu Dhaba and Hotel Highway King. Statiq is piloting similar hubs. CharjKaro’s upcoming highway hubs will also tap into this model.
Today, only the top quartile of chargers are profitable, typically urban fast chargers at malls or offices. Rural or remote chargers languish. Trust, ultimately, is the commodity in short supply. Consumers like Sarma will only buy EVs when charging becomes reliable, visible and easy. “It is important for CPOs to install chargers in the right locations and for the chargers to be visible to EV owners to achieve high utilisation,” adds Rajan.
The road ahead
India’s EV charging story is one of both remarkable progress and persistent gaps. In five years, the country has gone from virtually no public chargers to tens of thousands, with billions more committed. Adoption is surging, corporate fleets are electrifying, and both startups and automakers are innovating.
Yet reliability, visibility and home charging remain unresolved. Without these, adoption could stall. “The goal is to make EV charging seamless, smart, and everywhere you need it,” says Statiq’s Bansal. Exicom’s Divyanshu stresses interoperability. Audi’s Dhillon insists on reassurance. EzUrja’s Kapoor warns about the grid. For Raghu Khanna of CharjKaro, the mission is to cover the full cycle of EV adoption, from charging and solar integration to swapping and AI-powered monitoring. And consumers like Sarma remind us that without trust, technology alone will not drive adoption.