New Delhi: India needs to accelerate its transition towards electric mobility, particularly in trucks and buses, and build domestic capacity in critical technologies and components to reduce vulnerabilities to global supply disruptions, Tarun Kapoor, Advisor to the Prime Minister said at the 66th Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) Annual Convention.
Kapoor said the next five years would be critical for the automobile industry, with incremental changes insufficient to meet India's energy security and technology goals. "If we want to set a timeline for ourselves then we should see very major transition in the next 5 years we want that the whole landscape should change and those incremental changes will not really help us," he said.
He said the transition towards electric mobility would have to accelerate amid rising concerns over energy security and dependence on imported crude. "The main change which is happening is that everyone is moving towards sustainability, towards energy efficiency, towards electric, towards fuels which are more environment friendly and we also have to do that," Kapoor said.
He identified heavy vehicles, particularly trucks, as a key area requiring faster electrification, saying diesel dependence remained a major bottleneck for India. The government, he said, would need to work with industry on financing models, battery swapping and highway charging infrastructure to bring down costs and make electric trucks more viable.
Kapoor also indicated that government measures could provide a stronger push to the transition, including through restrictions, taxation policies and schemes aimed at replacing older commercial vehicles. He said the government expected the industry to come forward with ideas that could help scale the transition much faster.
"Please expect some major things to come from our side and the industry has to be prepared for that," Kapoor said, while noting that the PM E-DRIVE scheme currently provides for 5,000 electric trucks, although only around 150 had been covered so far.
Beyond electric mobility, Kapoor called for greater domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and other critical components used in vehicles. He pointed to recent supply disruptions involving rare-earth magnets as an example of how dependence on concentrated global supply chains can create vulnerabilities.
"Then materials then all these inputs which go into manufacturing I don't say even China is not self sufficient in everything China also imports quite a bit so I don't say that India can become self sufficient in every part or every material which goes into manufacturing but at least those critical items where we think that there could be problem let us all think and then work together," he said.
Kapoor said India's broader ambition should be to emerge as a global automobile manufacturing, technology and export hub, with greater R&D, design, component manufacturing and innovation taking place domestically.
