Daybreak - For India's e-rickshaws, price decides what's safe and virality decides if anyone cares

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Last week, the government ordered Apple and Google to pull at least three battery management system or BMS apps that were being used to switch off e-rickshaws mid-road. If you've been on Instagram, you've seen the videos. A prankster opens the app, taps a switch, and a passing e-rickshaw just dies.It works because the cheap lithium batteries these vehicles run on often ship from China with their Bluetooth wide open, no password at all. The flaw was documented publicly years ago and nothing happened until it went viral. The batteries are still exposed. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks what really governs safety in India's informal economy.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

If you've been on Instagram this last week, you have seen these videos. A man stands by the road with his phone out, he opens a nap, taps a switch, and an e-rickshaw driving past him suddenly stops, sometimes with passengers inside. The driver is puzzled, he checks his battery and his wiring and finds nothing because the problem is standing a few meters away taking a video of him. One clip that kind of stayed with me and most of us, I think, is the one that showed a driver in tears over losing his daily earnings. The culprit was an app called Bat BMS.

It is a diagnostic software made by a Chinese company called Green Energy and it is meant for mechanics to check a lithium battery's health over Bluetooth. Within days, the government of India ordered at least three of these apps pulled down from the app stores. But the app was actually never the problem. You see, more and more of India's e-rickshaws are moving to cheap lithium battery packs, and it is the fastest growing part of the market. Most of these packs are built around a Bluetooth-enabled battery management system or BMS. The one at the center of this story are made by a Chinese firm called Jibyda,

which is a major supplier to the low-cost end of the market. On a lot of these packs, that Bluetooth connection is left wide open. There is no password and anyone. within about 15 meters can pair with the battery and cut the power to the motor. The app is basically just the key and it is a key that anyone with a bit of coding knowledge can copy. Now, a flaw this basic on lakhs of vehicles which are on the road should make you ask, how did it survive?

And the answer is that it was never a secret. Engineers documented this exact gap on GitHub back in 2019. A security expert who wrote about this issue in the Hindu, found the threat and in fact someone had even posted a fix. So was there simply no regulation? Turns out there was. The government notified standards for e-rishas in 2014 and those rules cover the brakes, the tyres, the dimensions, the horn. They describe a mechanical vehicle because that is what an e-risha was when these rules were written. And that explains why that warning from 2019 had nowhere to go because there was no office whose job it was to look for it.

Which is why what finally gave was actually a prank on social media. Within a week of these videos going viral, the government started an inquiry. Apple and Google were told to pull at least three such apps off their stores. But the apps were never the point. The way these batteries communicate is publicly documented and there are open source tools on GitHub right now that can connect to them. them. Anybody who can write a little bit code, like I said earlier, can rebuild what was banned. So the floor sat documented in public for seven years and nothing happened. But a reel got results in seven days. And understanding why is really a story about what governs India's informal economy.

Welcome to Debrick, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nekda Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 9th of July. Let's stay with the ban for a minute, because the closer you look at it, the stranger it gets. Let's start with what the government actually did. On Friday, the IT ministry ordered the app stores to take down at least three of these battery apps. The IT secretary S. Krishna confirmed it on the record at a cybersecurity summit the same day. He said, while the investigation is continuing, this is a precautionary measure.

And here is what that order ran into. Based on several accounts, the app came off Apple stores. But it stayed reachable anyway because these apps can be downloaded as files from other websites and installed on an Android phone without any store at all. News reports since the order suggests that it was still available to people who went looking. So the thing that was banned was, for many, still within easy reach. And even if every copy of Bad BMS vanished tomorrow, it would change very little. And that's because this app is one of many. There are lots of Bluetooth battery apps that speak the same language,

and the way those chips communicate has been picked apart by hobbyists for years. Taking down a few apps does not really close the door. Which brings us to the obvious question. ban secures almost nothing, why do it? I think the honest answer is that securing the batteries was never really the job. Look at what set the whole thing in motion. Viral videos. The government moved when the clips got big enough that the story turned from batteries to a government that looked absent and measured against that, the ban worked because once the app became the story, removing the app ended that story. See it that way and the rest of it falls into place. You

understand the speed because the government moves quickly when it feels watched. You also understand why the app was the target and the battery wasn't, because the app was the part that everybody could see. And you even understand who ends up worse of. The mechanic who used these apps to check his batteries has lost a working tool. And the pranksters making the videos lost nothing at all. And that is what enforcement looks like when attention is steering it. It is fast and it is loud.

And it is aimed at whatever is easiest to see. It looks like a response to danger, but actually it is more like a response to embarrassment. But that still only accounts for the one week that the whole country was watching. It tells us nothing about the years before it when the same flaw sat in plain view and nobody moved at all. To understand why, we have to follow the rickshaw back to the place where it was built. Stay tuned for more on this. So let's follow the rickshaw back to where it is. is made. I mean, try to picture the actual process. A factory in China packs a kit into a shipping

container and it has multiple components, a motor, a controller, the wiring and the battery with its Bluetooth chip. All of it is boxed and sold as a set. The set arrives in India and a small workshop wells together a steel frame, drops the kit into it and rolls out a finish vehicle. The body is Indian, but almost everything that makes it move is imported. And this is how most of these vehicles are built. In India, there are a few hundred of these small makers and assemblers and the sector is largely unorganized. Every one of them competes on price because the buyer is usually a driver looking for the cheapest mode of transport that can earn them a living. In fact, a lot of these drivers don't even own the rickshaw that they drive. They rent it. One driver in East

Telly told the secretariat, a policy news portal, that a good day brings him $7 to $800 before he pays for maintenance. At that level, the cheapest working option is the only option. And here is what I think that leads to. When money is this tight, the features that survive are the ones that a buyer can see. And a buyer cannot see security. Put two battery packs side by side. One has Bluetooth locked and the other is open to anyone's

within range. On the shelf, they look the same and they will power the same rickshaw for the same distance. The locked one though costs a little bit more to make. So on price alone, it loses. The open battery wins because the thing that makes it dangerous is the only thing that the buyer or the rickshaw driver has no way to notice. That to my mind is why a flaw like this was already documented and could sit in the open for years while millions of these batteries went out on the road. The engineers or coders who found this flaw were talking about it amongst themselves online and the people choosing the battery were solving a different problem, which was survival on a few hundred rupees a day. So the warning simply never reached anybody who had a reason to act on it.

The neat and tidy response to this would be to force a fix. Write security into the standards, check the chips before they clear customs and make the locked battery mandatory. Some version of this has to happen or will happen. But it carries a cost. And it's quite simple. A safer rickshaw is a costly rickshaw and a costlier rickshaw is out of reach for some of the people who most need the income.

This is the actual problem, which is why anybody who promises a clean fix is skipping the heart part. So think again about that stranded driver. For years, the thing deciding how safe as rickshaw could be was a market optimizing for the lowest price, and its verdict was to leave the battery open. This week, the thing deciding was viral videos optimizing for outrage,

and the verdict in this situation was to pull down a couple of apps. Between the two of them, the question of if the person in the driver's seat was actually safe, never came up. And that is what it means to run the most informal corner of an economy without a regulator who, answers to the people inside it. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium

podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Snitha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv CN.