Government Keen To Bolster E-mobility For Intra-city Transportation
The government of India is keen on promoting e-mobility by working towards adopting indigenous and affordable e-mobility solutions which are sustained by an economic model. This was stated at one of the sessions of the CII- Shell Greenovation: Future Mobility on Wednesday (7 June) at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
Abhay Damle, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Government of India, highlighted the importance of ‘Building India’s Transportation and Logistics Infrastructure’ for future mobility. He emphasised that Indian cars produce the least pollution when compared to trucks and buses, which make up 2.5% of vehicles and consume 65% of fuel consumption and produce about 70% NOx and DOx emissions. Therefore, the e-mobility industry should focus on converting high mileage vehicles into electrical.”
Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Principal Advisor, Minister of Power and New & Renewable Energy, Government of India and Professor, IIT Madras in his address at the Inaugural Session on ‘Moving towards Electric Mobility said, “Globally, electric vehicles is happening but with huge subsidies. However this is not a model than India can follow to scale up the production of electric vehicles by 2017. Therefore, the need of the hour is for innovative techniques to offset high battery prices, concessional GST and road-tax for three years and the development of usable and affordable technologies.”
Professor V. Ramgopal Rao, Director IIT Delhi said, “Innovation and creativity are the key drivers of development. We focus on exposing our students to the future challenges concerning the society and motivate them to be inventors of the technological future of the world.”
Dr. Suddhasatwa Basu, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi said that a clear policy roadmap should be laid out to enable the country to run more than 10 billion electric cars in the next coming years. He stated, “The road infrastructure needs to be in place as India has the poorest ratio of road per 1000 people i.e. 0.8 km while countries like North America, China, Japan and Korea have road densities of - 21 km per 1000 people, 12 kms per thousand people. For India to be successful in its transition in the mobility space, academia and industry have to collaborate with the right policy support from the Government.”
