Thin Margins Leave India's Highway EV Chargers Unguarded

India's public EV charging network will grow from 52,000 points to about 70,000 by next year, Tata Power's Deepak Jain said at the Autocar Professional EV Conclave in Delhi on Tuesday. About 29,000 of the figure are said to be fast chargers.

On the same panel, Sai Giridhar, the president of the dealers' body FADA, said at least half of highway chargers do not work. Jain's numbers were higher. He put industry uptime at about 80%, a figure that includes chargers installed by government agencies and oil marketing companies. Tata Power's own network, he said, runs at 95%.

He gave two reasons for the outages. The first is cost. Operators earn a thin margin on the electricity they sell, so staffing every station is "not economical". Unmanned sites invite vandalism, "a big challenge" for the company.

The second is power. On highways fed by rural lines, supply is "a big question mark". A charger can be ready while the grid is not.

Tata Power's response is monitoring. A central control room tracks the network and sends local technicians when a charger fails. The company's app marks chargers green when power is available and grey when it is not, so drivers can pick another stop. Auto-charge and RFID start a session as soon as the plug goes in.

Large manned hubs with cafés are possible at a few sites, Jain said. Some industry peers have built them on the Hyderabad–Bengaluru route, and Tata Power is considering them. Most of the network will stay unmanned.

Slow payback is the deeper problem. Operators need "a minimum of 5 years to 7 years" to recover costs, Jain said, and some startups are struggling. The PM E-Drive scheme sets aside ₹2,000 crore of its ₹10,900 crore outlay for charging. Tata Power will keep investing where it sees utilisation, he said, because charging follows EV sales.