State-owned oil marketing companies have promised to install at least 22,000 charging stations for electric vehicles in prominent cities and on national highways across the country within the next one year, the power ministry said on Saturday, as India looks to bolster charging infrastructure to promote eco-friendly transportation.
The number of public charging stations has grown by 2.5 times in a little over a year in nine major cities with a population of over 4 million each, albeit on a low base, according to the ministry. These include Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Surat, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
“The aggressive efforts undertaken by the government through various implementing agencies have resulted in rapid growth in the deployment of public EV charging infrastructure. There has been an additional installation of 678 public EV charging stations between October 2021 to January 2022 in these nine cities, which is about 2.5 times of the earlier numbers during the same period,” the ministry said in a statement.
