Nitin Gadkari recently announced that India would not need an electric vehicle policy for the time being. The automobile industry is seemingly ecstatic, but is this one step forward and two steps backIJ
India has to move towards a zero-emission vehicular future within the next two decades. This is not just because the rest of the world is moving down the same path, with north Indian cities suffering severe pollution in the winter, the Indian coastal and riverine communities almost certain to be victims of global warming and with rising sea levels and more extreme weather conditions, India has no choice. One does not want to be a fear-monger, but it would not be imprudent to say that our future as a nation state depends on this. That is what makes Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari’s contention that there is no need for an electric vehicle policy in the immediate future quite bizarre. This is the same man, who just a few months ago, at a convention of India’s automotive lobby body, threatened to ‘bulldoze’ manufacturers who do not start shifting towards electrification of vehicles and aimed that all new car sales by 2030 would be electric cars. This followed a report done by the Niti Aayog and the Rocky Mountain Institute that argued that India would not only save massive amounts of foreign exchange from reduced oil and gas imports but would also allow the country to bypass technologies.
It would be unfair to term this as a complete volte-face though, because after Gadkari’s comments, the Indian automotive industry did wake up. At the recently concluded Auto Expo, every major car manufacturer showcased either their electric concepts and some, like German brand BMW as well as Indian automotive major Mahindra, showcased their production electric vehicles. Mahindra also took the opportunity to show off their electric Formula-E racer, which is currently leading the championship. Car-makers have realised that electric is the way forward, and given the global supply chains, India cannot be isolated. In some countries, like Norway, ironically, one that made its fortune in the 20th century on the back of North Sea crude oil now have half of all new cars as electric vehicles. In the United States, demand for Elon Musk’s Tesla cars have led to the manufacturer having to deal with unprecedented demand and the resulting production problems.
But making the move to electric vehicles, in terms of production, resources and infrastructure is extremely challenging. So, this could be seen more as an injection of realism. The automotive industry seems to have convinced the Government that such a dramatic shift would be devastating to the Indian industry and would end up ‘bulldozing’ manufacturing jobs. Of course, the biggest single challenge for India is the availability of on-demand electricity across the country. Seventy years after independence, there are still communities without access to power, and while cities like Delhi and Mumbai have quasi-reliable power supplies, until a truly reliable power supply is guaranteed across the country no policy can succeed. And then there is the problem of generating that power. In Norway, electric cars reduce pollution because that country generates most of their power from hydroelectric plants, thanks to the many mountainous rivers. But in India, most of our electricity is generated from coal-fired thermal power plants. And much of the lignite that fires Indian power plants is high in sulphur and other pollutants, let alone the massive amounts of carbon thrown into the atmosphere.
The much ballyhoo-ed ‘nuclear deal’ hasn’t meant the establishment of tens of nuclear plants and after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, there has been an understandable decline in popularity of building out nuclear facilities. While some small European nations are generating a significant amount of power from wind energy and solar technology is improving too, despite the fact that India has significant advantages on both fronts, huge amounts of land and capital expenditure required for new facilities is a challenge. But India has admittedly managed to drive production costs per kilowatt-hour on solar and wind down considerably. Yet, if the Prime Minister’s UDAY scheme to provide electricity to economically-deprived households is to be successful, more thermal generators will need to be fired up and as new thermal plants have come online. A study by American space agency NASA scientists estimates that Indian sulphur emissions increased by 50 per cent between 2005 and 2016. What that means for electric cars in India is that pollution will just be shifted from city centres to the locations of power plants.
While that may not be a bad thing, given the dangerous levels of pollution in cities like New Delhi, that in itself is not a viable long-term solution. India does need to develop new, renewable sources of power generation and also hope that the much-anticipated power potential of thorium, available abundantly (although mined illegally by many politically-connected criminals) on the sands of southern India. So before India has an electric car policy, it needs to answer many problems surrounding electricity generation. While India can bypass technologies, it cannot skip that major single issue. That said, India does need to have a low-emission vehicle policy, one that surrounds alternative energy sources such as bio-gas and bio-diesel. In fact, before the Auto Expo, your columnist attended a roundtable where Gadkari addressed the potential of these sources and spoke about plans to use rice straw and wheat straw, burned in the fields by farmers every winter in northern India which precipitates the air quality crisis in northern India, as a source of energy. If not to drive commercial and private vehicles but to drive agricultural vehicles. Then there is the potential from the enormous mountains of trash generated in India. Such waste-to-energy projects are running across the world and could be a major way to use the old adage, kill two birds with one stone. The problem in India is that any project like this has to be run with a lot of scale, even a pilot project in India needs scale.
And India also needs to reconsider taxes on hybrid vehicles. Currently, hybrid cars face incredible levels of taxation. Hybrid technology in cars, particularly advanced hybrid technology as that available on the Honda Accord in India, can dramatically improve fuel economy and reduce India’s fuel import bills. Because hybrids are a mesh of existing and future technologies and do not require the establishment of charging infrastructure, although popularising plug-in hybrids that can be charged both from their own engines and the grid, will actually help in the gradual seeding of such infrastructure before a shift to electric vehicles.
To expect such a dramatic shift from petrol/diesel/natural gas power to electricity to happen over a single generation for a product as established as the motor vehicle is unwarranted. While humanity did move towards touchscreen mobile phones very quickly, mobiles themselves were fairly new concepts and had not been used for several generations before. The mindset change required to move to electric vehicles and then to autonomous vehicles will neither happen overnight or even over a decade. But happen it must.
(The writer is, Managing Editor, The Pioneer)