After Goa and Delhi, Kerala government has joined the race to dip from Centre’s `4,500-crore FAME-2 ( Faster Adoption & Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles) subsidy pool. The state’s public transport entity KSRTC has floated tenders to lease 1,500 electric buses for 10 years. Earlier, Kerala had started e-bus service but failed to sustain the lease rate of `43.20 per km. “Once the central subsidy is in place, this rent rate can be tightbelted to a rate below `30 per km, making the e-bus commercially viable,” MP Dinesh, MD, KSRTC told FE.
The state transport PSU had not gone for the Centre’s subsidy during its first tryst with e-bus. FAME-1 was wound up by the time KSRTC got around applying for it. Ten e-buses, leased from Mahavoyage, are currently idling in KSRTC stables, after they bled the ailing state PSU by incurring the loss of `1 lakh per day. With battery running out often, the state’s e-bus experiment was hardly successful, said R Sasidharan, secretary of transport union.
