Despite push, govt depts show little appetite for electric cars
TILL DATE, ONLY 652 E-CARS HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED IN GOVT DEPTS. THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF VEHICLES HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED IN ANDHRA PRADESH (280) AND THEN DELHI (256)
NEWDELHI: State-run Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), which was tasked with procuring 10,000 electric cars for government departments by January 31 this year, has been granted a year’s extension, owing to lack of demand for their deployment to replace dieseland petrol-fuelled vehicles in existing fleets, according to the ministry of power.
EESL, a joint venture company of state-owned firms under the power ministry, has finished the procurement process of 10,000 e-cars under the national e-mobility programme that was launched by the Centre in March 2018, although it hasn’t taken delivery or paid for the cars.
That was to be done against demand from government departments to which these vehicles were to be provided on lease or on the basis of an outright purchase, to replace their existing fleet of petrol and diesel vehicles.
Till date, only 652 e-cars have been deployed in government departments; 295 AC and 161 DC captive chargers have also been deployed in their premises to charge these cars. The most number of vehicles have been deployed in Andhra Pradesh (280) and Delhi (256).
“Demand has been low in the past couple of months but anything new takes time to settle. Apart from these (652) cars around 1500 cars are under various stages of deployment right now and we have also signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) of 500 cars with a taxi aggregator — Blu Smart, which is an app based EV (electric vehicle) cab service,” said Saurabh Kumar. managing director at EESL.
Kumar expects demand to rise, and said the Indian Army and Indian Railways will soon start procuring cars from EESL.
Interestingly, while the original plan was to supply the electric vehicles to government departments, EESL decided to supply cars to Blu Smart because of high demand from the aggre