Bhel looks to tap India's payments powerhouse to charge up govt's EV drive
Bhel is likely to be nominated to lead the tendering process for 72,300 EV public charging stations under the ₹10,900-crore PM E-Drive scheme, Mint reported on 16 June. The Centre's marquee scheme to incentivize green mobility has allocated ₹2,000 crore to subsidize electric vehicle charging stations, but the PM E-Drive scheme has only about eight months left in its runtime.
Bhel's latest efforts reflect its diversification from being a manufacturer of thermal power equipment to aggregating demand for EV charging infrastructure across the country.
'Bhel is going to reach out to NPCI for developing the app. This is the first time Bhel is making an app for EV charging," said one of the officials.
'Bhel is primarily a thermal power equipment manufacturer, (and) developing an app, especially for financial transactions, is not its expertise. That is why it was proposed that Bhel collaborate with NPCI on this app," said another official.
Payments will be a crucial part of Bhel's app, especially as consumers have complained about incomplete payments, network and software issues, and inactivity of EV charging management systems, the second official said, referring to publicly available networks run by private companies.
'Many consumers also complained about their money being stuck in these charging systems," the official said.
'India has over 25,000 public EV charging stations managed by more than 40 charging point operators, often requiring users to navigate multiple apps to locate, access, and pay for charging," said Akshay Parihar, associate director (energy transition), at Deloitte.
'The proposed Unified Charging Platform, like UPI, will allow EV users to seamlessly locate, book, and pay across any CPO through a single, integrated app. This initiative is expected to improve accessibility, boost charger utilization, and enable EV charger interoperability across India's growing EV ecosystem," he added.
Bhel and NPCI did not reply to Mint's queries emailed last week.
India's buzzing EV market
While most electric vehicle users charge their vehicles at home, India had 26,367 public EV charging stations at the end of March, according to a Lok Sabha disclosure by the heavy industries ministry on 4 April.
New electric vehicle sales rose to about 1.9 million in FY25 from 1.6 million in the year before, according to data from Vahan, the central government's motor vehicle registry.
S&P Global said in its 'India's EV Market: Trends and Future Prospects' report published in March that it expects total electric passenger vehicle production in India to surge to about 1.33 million units by 2030, accounting for about 20% of the country's total passenger vehicle production.
NPCI, which oversees retail payments and settlement systems in India, has developed several products including UPI for realtime bank transfers, the RuPay credit card network, and FASTag for digital toll collections.
Bhel's proposed unified payment mechanism for public EV charging infrastructure would also help capture data for estimating the range of batteries in different vehicles, said the third official mentioned above.
'The payment cycle would help in gathering data regarding the requirement of charging for different kinds of vehicles and the range of their batteries. This data would give a sense of required charging efficiency, which would be key for future innovation in chargers and batteries," this official said.
All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity as Bhel's plan to approach NPCI is still at an early stage.
Multiple initiatives and starting troubles
The PM E-Drive scheme is the Union government's second programme to incentivise the rollout of a nationwide EV charging infrastructure—essential for encouraging more customers to buy electric vehicles.
In the earlier EV incentive scheme—Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric (and Hybrid) vehicles scheme (FAME)—the government allocated about ₹912 crore for installing EV charging stations across the country. It, however, disbursed only about ₹633 crore under the second edition of the FAME scheme, which ended in March last year.
Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd, and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd were tasked with setting up EV chargers across their fuel stations.
According to a parliamentary disclosure in February, these oil marketing companies installed about 4,500 public EV charging stations under the FAME 2 scheme, but only 251 of those were 'energized", or made operational.
'In addition to this, OMCs have set up 20,035 EVCS at their retail outlets from their own funds," the government informed Parliament.
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