As the Trump administration attacks electric vehicles, India powers ahead
Snub-nosed, agile and often lovingly decorated, noisy 3-wheeled autorickshaws have been a fixture on Indian roads for decades. About 8 million of these workhorse vehicles carry everything from commuters to e-commerce deliveries to small livestock.
But they’ve been undergoing a dramatic shift in recent years — getting quieter and cleaner. In 2024, more than 50% of the new 3-wheelers sold in the country were fully electric.
While the Trump administration removes charging stations and tries to revoke pollution safeguards and incentives that encourage the growth of electric vehicles, in India, the industry is surging ahead. Sales of electric two- and three-wheelers — which make up more than 80% of all vehicles on Indian roads — topped 2 million in 2024, compared to less than 100,000 in 2020. Electric vehicles now make up 8% of all Indian vehicle sales, nearly the same percentage as U.S. EV sales.
This rapid growth has been buoyed by a series of government programs to promote electric vehicles, batteries, charging and solar energy, and by a cohort of young entrepreneurs eager to see their country develop and prosper by embracing clean technology.
Solving charging problems
One of those companies is Kazam, an electric vehicle charging company launched in 2021 by two entrepreneurial software engineers.
“In my family, the dinner table conversation was always around new business ideas,” says co-founder Akshay Shekhar, who started and sold his first software company while still in college. Kazam was one of ten companies that recently met with investors, business leaders and policymakers at the Climate Tech Convening 2025 in Mumbai, co-sponsored by the global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.
In India, where gasoline prices run well above $5 per gallon and many cities face serious air quality issues, electric vehicles present a huge opportunity to save money while reducing climate and air pollution.
“Everyone from the tea-seller to the CEO has done the calculation that owning an EV is so much cheaper than a petrol vehicle,” says Shekhar, who launched a YouTube channel featuring interviews with EV owners before starting Kazam.
But in 2021, even with government support, eager consumers and domestic manufacturers ramping up production, access to charging was a major problem, especially for early adopting urban apartment dwellers. At least one fed-up owner famously stuffed his electric motorcycle in his building’s elevator and charged it in the kitchen of his 5th floor apartment.
“Please don’t try this yourself,” he wrote, posting a photo on LinkedIn that went viral.
So Kazam, initially envisioned as a software company, decided to build hardware first, developing a universal charger that can be installed in a standard socket to charge any electric vehicle. Then it created software that is also universal — it securely manages charging and payment for any vehicle at any charging station. In the U.S., while most manufacturers are now building standard charging ports or offering adaptors for model year 2025 vehicles, universal charging standards — which would allow any EV driver to plug in and pay at any public charging station — are still a work in progress.
Saving energy and money with EVs
Aided by innovative technologies like simplified charging management, battery swapping and more, companies in India that own or contract large numbers of vehicles have been quick to go electric.
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Major e-commerce companies like Amazon India and food delivery company Zomato have rolled out more than 10,000 electric vehicles each. Big Basket, India’s largest online grocer, worked with Kazam to electrify 200 fulfillment centers across 32 cities to provide charging for its couriers.
City buses in India are going electric too, thanks to federal government initiatives that aim to roll out more than 10,000 electric buses over the next few years.
In New Delhi, where the new buses have already started operating, Kazam’s charging management software was able to save two depots nearly $3,000 per month each on electricity, simply by detecting operational inefficiencies — like electricity losses when buses were parked far away from transformers. The software also allowed depots to generate revenue by allowing other vehicles to charge at open spots during downtimes — bringing in about $17,000 each month.
But what has Shekhar really excited is the next phase of Kazam’s software, which will allow users to choose the energy that charges their vehicles. Today, most of India’s electricity comes from coal, but solar energy is growing. Two of the world’s largest solar farms are in India. Kazam is testing a new peer-to-peer energy marketplace that would match electricity buyers, like a bus depot, with sellers, like a solar farm with daytime surplus – to conduct on-the-spot energy transactions that help match consumers with affordable clean energy.
Shekhar has high hopes that mass adoption of electric vehicles in India will come sooner rather than later. “Four years ago, when we were looking for investors, people used to ask me, ‘Is this really going to happen?’ Nobody asks that anymore.”
Hope for a warming planet
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