| Wednesday, 16 November 2022 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
If you own an electric vehicle (EV), especially a four-wheeler, it’s quite likely that you have a few thousand rupees locked in the wallets of different charge point operators (CPOs).
Mobile apps and websites aggregating the locations of EV charging stations have proliferated, but when it comes to paying for an EV charge, it’s still largely a walled garden.
And that’s a big pain point for the user.
As it is, India has only one EV charger for every 135 EVs—one of the lowest ratios among the countries studied by professional services firm Alvarez and Marsal for its white paper on EV adoption.
So, last week, continuing its spate of policy interventions, the power ministry amended its guidelines for public EV charging stations. They can now offer a “prepaid feature for service charges, including time-of-day rates and solar hour discounts”.
Prepaid features are common among private CPOs—all but one already offer them.
