From cleaner air and real-world emissions to electric fleets, public transport and charging infrastructure, experts at the TERI–IHC Lecture and Discussion Series examine what it will take to make India’s mobility transition truly sustainable.
India’s electric mobility transition is gathering pace. More electric models are entering the market, charging infrastructure is expanding and fleet operators are experimenting with electric vehicles. Yet, as experts argued at the TERI–IHC Lecture and Discussion Series in New Delhi on 21 September, electrification cannot simply mean replacing an internal-combustion engine with a battery.
The larger question is how India can use electrification to tackle persistent urban challenges: air pollution, dependence on imported oil, congestion, inadequate public transport and last-mile connectivity.
The fourth TERI–IHC Lecture and Discussion Series session, held at the India Habitat Centre, was titled “Beyond Tailpipe: Electric Mobility at the Intersection of Air Quality and Energy Security.” The discussion examined how transport electrification could contribute to cleaner cities, reduced fossil-fuel dependence and a more sustainable mobility-energy ecosystem.
The session was moderated by Sharif Qamar, Associate Director, Transport and Urban Governance, TERI. The panel included Anumita Roychowdhury, Executive Director – Research & Advocacy, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE); Amit Bhatt, Managing Director-India, International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT); Anirudh Arun, CEO, Refex Mobility; and Naveen Gupta, Founder & CEO, Trev Mobility.
Can electric vehicles solve Delhi’s air-pollution problem?
Qamar opened by putting the discussion in the context of Delhi’s long battle with air pollution. He pointed to the improvements achieved over the past decades, but also to the scale of the remaining challenge.
His first question to Anumita Roychowdhury was whether electric vehicles could deliver a transformation comparable to Delhi’s earlier shift from diesel to CNG, particularly in public and commercial transport.
Roychowdhury’s answer was emphatic: electrification has to be understood as the next stage of a much larger clean-air transition.
She recalled Delhi’s progressive tightening of vehicle-emission standards, expansion of CNG, restrictions on older vehicles and trucks, and other pollution-control measures.
“These interventions have made a difference,” she argued. “But even after all these improvements, we still have a very large gap to bridge to meet clean-air standards.”
For Roychowdhury, the lesson is not that previous interventions failed, but that incremental improvements are no longer enough. The next step must be a transition towards zero-tailpipe-emission mobility.
“We can no longer look only at incremental improvements in vehicle technology. We now have to talk about eliminating tailpipe emissions and moving towards zero-emission vehicles.”
But electrification, she stressed, must go hand in hand with a transformation of the transport system itself.
What happens when laboratory emissions meet the real world?
Qamar then turned to Amit Bhatt and the distinction between laboratory testing and real-world vehicle emissions.
Bhatt referred to past evidence showing how significantly laboratory certification can differ from actual on-road performance.
“There will always be some difference between laboratory and real-world emissions because laboratory tests are conducted under standardised conditions. The question is: what should the acceptable difference be?”
ICCT’s Delhi and Gurugram remote-sensing study captured 111,712 valid tailpipe-emissions measurements, covering cars, taxis, two- and three-wheelers, light commercial vehicles and buses.
Bhatt’s larger point was that public-health exposure is determined by what vehicles emit where people live, work and travel, rather than simply what they emit under controlled test 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.”
The implication is significant: India needs stronger real-world emissions monitoring, alongside a long-term transition towards zero-emission vehicles.
“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.”
The taxi problem: high mileage, high potential
The conversation then moved to fleet electrification. Qamar asked Anirudh Arun and Naveen Gupta about taxis and app-based mobility, a crucial segment because commercial vehicles travel far more kilometres than most privately owned cars.
Arun described how dramatically the fleet-electrification ecosystem has changed since the early days of EV adoption.
When Refex began working with electric fleets, vehicle range was limited, few models were available and public charging infrastructure was scarce. Operators often had to build their own charging facilities.
“The challenge in 2019–20 was completely different,” Arun explained. “There were very few cars available, the range was limited and there was virtually no charging infrastructure.”
Today, more models are available, ranges have improved and public charging has expanded. Yet a different challenge remains: operational unpredictability.
“You know where a metro is going to go. With a cab, there is a lot of randomness. 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?”
Fleet electrification, therefore, requires more than selling electric vehicles. It requires charging networks designed around how commercial vehicles actually operate.
Corporate mobility offers a different pathway
Arun noted that Refex Mobility’s work with corporate clients provides a more predictable model.
Large companies often have fixed employee-transport schedules, designated campuses and sustainability targets. Vehicles can therefore be scheduled and charged between assignments.
“Because these transportation requirements are planned, you can plan the charging cycle around them.”
Corporate campuses can also provide charging infrastructure, creating an ecosystem in which vehicles can charge while employees are at work.
The lesson is that electrification becomes easier when mobility demand, charging and vehicle utilisation can be planned together.
The consumer still wants reliability
Naveen Gupta offered a complementary perspective from Trev Mobility, an all-electric, chauffeur-driven mobility platform in Delhi-NCR.
When the company began experimenting with EVs, range anxiety appeared to be the obvious consumer concern. Trev initially believed that offering vehicles with 400–500 kilometres of range would solve the problem.
It did not.
“We started with cars offering 400–500 kilometres of range, thinking that range anxiety was the problem. But the same issue came back.”
The company subsequently focused on longer-distance and premium mobility, where predictable operations could be better maintained.
Yet charging remained a challenge. When several vehicles return to base at the same time, operators face a surge in charging demand.
“Charging is still the challenge. When all the cars come back at around the same time, managing the charging cycle becomes difficult. 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?
Qamar then brought the discussion back to policy. If India wants electric taxis, fleet vehicles and other high-use commercial vehicles to scale, what needs to change?
For Roychowdhury, the next phase requires greater ambition and stronger supply-side responsibility.
India has made progress through incentives and schemes, but electrification remains below the levels required for its 2030 ambitions.
“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?”
She called for clearer electrification targets for manufacturers, fleets and public transport, arguing that states should move from an EV 1.0 approach towards EV 2.0 — from primarily incentive-based policies towards mandates and measurable targets.
The issue, she stressed, is not simply how many electric vehicles are sold, but whether infrastructure, financing, electricity networks and public transport systems are ready for them.
The hard-to-electrify frontier: trucks
The panel then turned to commercial trucks, once considered among the most difficult segments to electrify.
Bhatt argued that the economics are changing. While electric trucks have higher upfront costs, total cost of ownership is becoming increasingly competitive in some segments.
The bigger challenges are battery costs, vehicle utilisation, manufacturing volumes and charging infrastructure.
“The biggest question is how we increase demand.”
Demand, however, cannot be separated from infrastructure. Long-distance electric freight requires strategically planned charging networks.
“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.”
For Bhatt, truck electrification represents the next major frontier in India’s clean-transport transition.
The economics of electric fleets
Arun argued that technology adoption ultimately has to make commercial sense. CNG has become highly competitive in India’s taxi market because decades of scale and infrastructure development have driven down its costs.
That creates a formidable benchmark for EVs.
“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.”
At the same time, he argued that the environmental and health costs of conventional technologies need to be reflected in transport economics.
Commercial vehicles also have unusually high utilisation. A taxi travelling several lakh kilometres over its operational life creates a much larger cumulative environmental impact than a private vehicle that travels considerably less.
That makes fleet electrification particularly significant.
Financing is the other half of the equation
Gupta highlighted another barrier: financing.
Electric vehicles may have lower operating costs, but their higher upfront price creates a substantial capital requirement for fleet operators. Banks and financial institutions also face uncertainty over the residual value of electric vehicles and batteries.
“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.”
Greater clarity on battery health, degradation, expected life and residual values could make it easier for lenders and operators to assess risk.
Without such mechanisms, lower operating costs alone may not overcome the initial financing hurdle.
From EV adoption to mobility transformation
Qamar brought the discussion back to the central theme: going beyond the tailpipe.
The panel demonstrated that electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing tailpipe emissions and petroleum dependence. But a broader transformation requires better public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure, last-mile connectivity, charging networks, fleet financing, real-world emissions monitoring and policy stability.
Most importantly, it requires changing how cities think about mobility.
Arun illustrated this through a personal experience. Faced with a difficult airport journey, he chose the metro instead of a taxi. The journey was faster than expected and cost a fraction of a cab.
“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.”
The objective, therefore, is not simply to replace every petrol or diesel vehicle with an electric one.
It is to reduce unnecessary vehicle kilometres in the first place, while ensuring that the journeys that remain are increasingly powered by cleaner energy.
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