FIELD NOTES ยท NEWSLETTER
What the Next Phase of EV Infrastructure in India Will Demand
Abhishek Sharma explains why the future of EV infrastructure in India will depend on reliability, operating economics, and consistent execution.
Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter.
Every couple of weeks, I want to share a few things I am seeing in EV infrastructure in India. Some from the industry, some from the work we are doing at IndoFast, and some from what years of running field operations have taught me.
There is a lot happening in the sector, but I am more interested in what those developments mean once they reach the ground.
Something worth celebrating this fortnight
First is some news from home ground.
IndoFast recently announced a partnership with Hala Mobility that will bring 15,000 electric vehicles onto its battery swapping network. The partnership is expected to scale further over the next couple of years, with plans to deploy more than 1 lakh vehicles by March 2028.
For an infrastructure company, adding vehicles to a network means much more than increasing the number of users. These are vehicles that will move through cities every day, often as part of delivery, logistics, or other commercial operations. Their drivers depend on them to complete more trips and spend as little time as possible off the road.
That changes the role infrastructure plays. A swapping or charging network is no longer something a driver uses occasionally. For a high-utilisation vehicle, it becomes part of the daily operating cycle. As more such vehicles enter the market, the quality and reliability of that infrastructure will matter just as much as how quickly the network itself is growing.
India's EV numbers are beginning to tell a different story
India sold around 2.5 million electric vehicles in FY2025-26, with EVs accounting for more than 8% of overall vehicle sales, according to industry estimates reported by EV Infrastructure News. The headline number is encouraging, but I think the mix of vehicles being sold tells us much more about where the transition is actually taking place.
More than 90% of EV sales came from two-wheelers and three-wheelers, while electric three-wheelers have already crossed 30% penetration. These are also some of the hardest-working vehicles on Indian roads. They are used for deliveries, passenger movement, last-mile transportation, and a range of other commercial activities where the economics depend heavily on how much time the vehicle can remain productive.
That is why I think the infrastructure conversation will gradually change as adoption grows. So far, much of the attention has naturally been on how many EVs are being sold and how quickly charging or swapping networks can expand.
As utilisation increases, the conversation will also have to include how reliably those networks perform once thousands of people depend on them every day.
Scale changes the way you have to run operations
This brings me to a lesson that has followed me from telecom infrastructure into EVs.
When an operation is small, a good manager can stay close to most of what is happening. You can visit important locations, speak regularly with teams, inspect problems yourself, and intervene whenever something appears to be going wrong.
That approach becomes much harder once hundreds or thousands of assets are spread across different cities. At that scale, the operating system becomes more important than the presence of any individual manager.
One discipline I have always found useful is understanding the previous day’s performance before the new day gets underway. You need to know which locations performed as expected, where something changed, whether a problem was isolated or recurring, and which issues deserve the team’s attention first.
Data helps, of course, but only when there is consistency behind it. A dashboard may show the same metrics across twenty cities, but those numbers mean very little if teams in those cities are following different processes or recording performance differently.
Standard operating procedures may not be the most exciting part of scaling a business, but they are what allow leaders to compare performance and make decisions with confidence.
The same checklist, the same definition of an issue, the same escalation process, and the same standard of execution need to travel with the network as it expands. Otherwise, scale tends to magnify small inconsistencies that were easy to overlook when the operation was smaller.
The next EV milestone may be harder to measure
We will continue to see large numbers attached to India’s EV transition. Vehicle sales will rise, networks will expand, and more infrastructure will be commissioned. Those are important indicators, but I think the next stage of the industry will increasingly be judged by numbers that receive much less attention.
For instance:
- How much of the infrastructure is actually being utilised?
- Is capacity available in the locations and at the times when vehicles need it?
- How consistently can a network perform during periods of heavy demand?
- How quickly can operational issues be identified and resolved before they affect the customer?
These questions will become more important as EVs move deeper into commercial use. While a network may look impressive on a map, its real value will come from what happens when a driver arrives and expects it to work.
That is where years of infrastructure experience become useful. Building the asset is only one part of the job. Keeping thousands of distributed assets performing consistently, day after day, is where a large part of the operational challenge begins.
One thing I am watching
I am particularly looking forward to seeing how EV adoption develops as different parts of the market become less dependent on purchase incentives and buyers make decisions increasingly on operating economics.
Commercial vehicle owners tend to evaluate technology quite practically. They look at what it costs to buy, how expensive it is to operate, how much productive time the vehicle provides, and whether the overall equation works better than the alternative. If electric vehicles continue to gain ground because those economics make sense on their own, that will be an important sign of maturity for the market.
It will also place greater expectations on the infrastructure supporting those vehicles. For a commercial driver, downtime is not simply an inconvenience. It affects the economics of the working day.
India has spent the last few years proving that EV adoption can grow quickly. The next few years may tell us how well the infrastructure underneath that growth can keep up.
If you work in EVs, infrastructure, or large field operations, I would be interested to hear what you are seeing from where you sit. Get in touch here.