India's electric vehicle (EV) sales rose 17% in FY 2024-25, increasing from 1.75 million to almost 1.97 million units. While this signals continued adoption, the need for scalable EV charging infrastructure has never been more urgent.
As of mid-2025, India has about 26,000 to 29,000 public charging stations. That works out to one charger for every 235 EVs which is well short of global benchmarks. In practice, fewer than 60% of these chargers are reliably operational at any given time. This gap between vehicle growth and charging readiness presents a unique opportunity to improve reliability, accessibility and user-experience around EV charging.
In Norway, China, and other mature EV markets, uptime levels of 97-98% are already the benchmark. In India, we must get there faster-because our EV transition is happening at breakneck speed. India's EV story will not be judged only by how many chargers we deploy, but by how many actually work
This is where research and development (R&D) becomes central, because the truth is reliability is engineered, not assumed. In India's context-where dust storms, 45-degree celsius summers, heavy monsoons, and uneven grid supply are part of daily life-chargers cannot simply be imported designs dropped into local conditions. They must be built ground-up with mechanical enclosures that withstand heat, rain, and dust, with remote monitoring that resolves faults before a technician even arrives, with smart diagnostics and predictive maintenance that anticipate failures caused by power fluctuations, and with machine learning that continuously improves performance by learning from thousands of chargers in the field. Only then can India move beyond a numbers game of installations and build a truly reliable EV ecosystem that consumers can trust.
R&D also unlocks analytics-driven intelligence. Every charger connected to a network generates huge amount of data: usage patterns, failure trends, and load variations. Global operators who invested in analytics have cut downtime by 30-35%, while optimizing charger deployment to boost utilization. For India, where average charger utilization is still under 7% (compared to 30-35% in China), intelligent use of data could transform both user confidence and business viability.
User experience, often treated as secondary, is equally critical. A survey by NITI Aayog (2023) showed that more than 40% of EV drivers cited "charging inconvenience" as a top barrier to adoption. What users need is clarity, not complexity-intuitive displays, one-tap digital payments, chargers visible on apps with real-time availability, and designs that fit seamlessly into residential and urban landscapes. In Europe, charging experience design has been shown to directly increase utilization rates, with urban adoption rising by 20-25% when chargers are integrated visibly and accessibly.
The path forward is clear: build fast, but build reliably. Without durability, intelligence, and user focus, we risk adding broken assets instead of usable infrastructure. India's EV journey demands a blend of global best practices-uptime, design, interoperability-and local adaptation for our grid instability, extreme weather, and dense urban housing. The future depends less on subsidies and more on innovation-engineering that cuts downtime, analytics that drive smarter networks, design that simplifies charging, and interoperability that ensures access anywhere.
Author: Anshuman Divyanshu, CEO - EVSE, Exicom
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
