Daybreak - India's e-bus ambitions are running on borrowed power

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

India wants 50,000 electric buses on the road by 2030. It's a clean mobility revolution that should clear the air in crowded cities.But there's a problem: the power grid wasn't built for this. Cities are plugging bus depots into the same 11kV lines that serve homes and corner shops. In some areas, the strain is already showing: voltage drops and flickering lights in residential areas.So, the country is racing to electrify its transport without electrifying the infrastructure beneath it. What happens when climate ambition outruns planning?Tune in. 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.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Every evening at 6pm, Snackshop owner Rehan switches off his fridge. His neighbor, a tailor, stops whatever he's doing, even if he's mid-stitch and turns off his super.

machine. Why? Because they both fear damage to the devices that fuel their livelihood. Because 6pm is when the voltage drops. I'm sure we're all familiar with power cuts and load shedding. But it's gotten quite rare in the big bustling cities like say Bangalore or Mumbai. They're actually at the beating heart of Bangalore right across a bus stand at Majestic. Now if you're not from Bangalore, Majestic is an important transport hub in the city. It's the spot where the metro lines converge, interstate and intrastate buses line up and where a host of rickshaw and taxi drivers wait ready to take you on that last mile. And the culprit behind the misbehaving power supply in this area? Electric buses. And a glowing Tata power EV charging station. When the buses

plug in to charge, the power dips in response. The lights in the tailor's shop flicker and he tells us that the sewing machine's needle also jerks in that moment, messing up his stitches. Rehan, the snack shop owner, says that he's already had to fix the fridge twice, and he can't risk doing that again. Both of them feel like these buses are taking away the current. What they are both describing here as a loss of current is actually the electric grid in the area reaching its limit. When a bus plugs in, it's drawing electricity from the same 11-kilovolt lines that are meant for homes and corner shops. It's not a system that was built for this kind of simultaneous load.

Basically, we're stuck in a situation here where poor planning has made what was supposed to be the green saviors of transportation, something of a headache. And it's not a headache that's going to be eased anytime soon. In fact, it might actually get worse before it probably starts to get a little better. Currently, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation,

or BMTC operates about 7,000 buses. Out of them, around 1,500 are electric. There are plans with budgetary allocations already in place to increase the number to 9,000. That's part of an even bigger national project and an ambitious target for a city. The India plan is to put 50,000 electric buses on the road by the next five years.

The government's main EV plan is the PME Drive scheme. It aims to electrify public and commercial transport and to support charging stations. And its biggest spend? You guessed it. E-buses. Almost 11,000 crore rupees over a two-year period by March 2026.

Of course, there's a lot of excitement about TVs. But a critical piece of the whole puzzle remains missing. Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore are all ordering thousands of e-buses. but the rollout is outpacing the grid. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Rita Gis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Snickda Sharma and I

will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 1st of December. The process for integrating more electric buses into the existing fleet seems to be a little backwards. My colleague at the Ken, reporter Muromai, spoke to a senior official at the Bangalore Electricians, supply company or BESCOM. He confirmed that the calls for power usually come after the buses are already sanctioned.

By then, the depots have been fixed and the tenders are out. He explains that, of course, that's not how power infrastructure works. They can't just deliver megawatts of power at short notice. Land, power lines and clearances take months to put in place. But transport can't wait. So, they have no choice but to stretch existing lines to their limits. The strain is already starting to show. When a hundred fast chargers are plugged into a line that's not designed for it, this is what happens.

The voltage drops, transformers heat up and the ripple effect hits nearby consumers first. But Rehan's unplugged fridge and BESCOM's valid complaints are small change in the big plan to go electric. A former BMTC official told Runmay that the pressure is huge. Every budget comes with new plans and allocations. No one wants to be the one who says, slow down. Mumbai and Delhi are racing ahead as well. Mumbai's public transport utility, BEST, is aiming for 8,000 electric buses by 2027. Delhi, on the other hand, already has more than 3,000 electric buses on the road.

A senior Delhi Transport Corporation official added that the target is up to 8,000 by February 26. That's just three months away. The logistics department, though, isn't seeing the same amount of planning. Rocky Mountain Institute, a US-based non-profit, released an analysis this year. It says India may need nearly 2 million public chargers, along with almost 3 lakh battery swapping stations by 2040 to hit its EV goals. While these are projections, the message is clear. Entire fleets can't run on improvisation.

More on this in the next segment. The real issue isn't just chargers or power lines. It's figuring out who's meant to build them. Take Bangalore, for instance. Out of BMTC's 50 depots, only eight have chargers. Because the addition of every new one sparks a three-way tussle. between the Directorate of Urban Land Transport or DULT, the Transport Department and the power utility. A senior DULT official shared that there isn't really a live demand model right now.

So while they know roughly how much power each depot needs, there's no integrated system that tracks what happens when all of them start charging at once. A live demand model, by the way, is basically a real-time dashboard. It tracks how much power each bus depot. is using, then it adjust charging plans based on where and how much power gets drawn. Cities like London and Shenzhen already use it, but no Indian city has built one yet. The DULT official added that the immediate plan was in fact just to fit charges into existing depots. Building new power infrastructure around them isn't on the cards right now.

He explains that it's just faster that way. They're working within whatever the grid can afford at the moment. So the plan right now is to add more buses first and then see where the stress shows up. But if the grid doesn't collapse first, the city roads will. The systems and new buses are running on are decades old. The results are well predictable. Clean buses, clogged roads. Think about it. Mumbai is famous for roads that practically dissolve every monsoon. Yet it's expanding its electric bus fleet faster than it can build new roads. Many, you know, of BESD's depots are in South Mumbai, even though most of the demand is in the northern suburbs. So buses end up driving long, dead kilometres just to reach a charger, wasting time and range

on the way. You see, electric buses can't run on routes built for diesel buses. Their paths need to consider battery range and charging time. Or else, charging needs escalate during peak hours. This complication is already causing transformer overloads near some busy, deep depots in Mumbai. Bangalore, which is infamous for traffic speeds that would make snails look fast, faces a similar mess. An IISC study found that over 60% of BMTC routes overlap with at least three others. Again, these decades-old routes weren't really built for efficiency. The 2022 India's Smart Grid Forum report notes that Bangalore's depot locations do not correlate with optimal e-bus routing or grid readiness.

This forces the buses into long, empty runs and inefficient charging cycles. At this stage, it seems like A-buses haven't really changed anything. In fact, they still crawl through the same traffic that diesel counterparts do. Stay tuned. Depos across cities have rushed to install fast chargers. This is because the former BMTC official tells us they look good on tenders and reports. Runmay also spoke to cash. is Castellino, a policy and regulatory affairs analyst. He simplified the physics for us.

Basically, the current setup powers through 11 kilo-volt lines, the same that's meant for homes and small shops. He repeated that this mismatch causes voltage issues and transformer overload. There's one innovative fix that Castellino says hasn't been explored yet. It's to initiate a vehicle-to-grid system. It's basically a battery management setup that feeds power back into the grid, which can ease peak load and extend battery life. But no surprises here, the grids haven't been fixed up for this system yet. You know how metro lines run on their own dedicated high voltage lines? Buses should also ideally have a similarly exclusive setup.

Instead, like we mentioned earlier, they're plugging mega wards of load into residential infrastructure. Kastrino says a major surge like that isn't healthy for the. the grid. It could cripple the entire public e-mobility network. He adds that for the grid update to happen, incentives need to be allocated there instead of just for bus subsidies. Especially now that the plan is to go fully electric on public transport, the grid needs to scale up to match the plan. Some cities are finally catching up. Just three years ago, a few of Delhi's e-bus depots were still using diesel generators to charge their zero-emission buses. A clean future with just a hint of exhaust.

That's now changing. In September, the city added six new switching substations across its depots. The DTC official said that together they can supply about 50 megawatts of power for roughly 1,200 buses, which means buses won't be pulling electricity away from homes anymore. Solar can also help, but only to a point. A depot in Surat has recently launched with solar panels on the roof. But solar is not enough to fuel an entire fleet yet. When the sun isn't shining as bright, the grid will still need to lean on coal and gas to stay stable.

So, the future isn't just about building more chargers. It's about building smarter ones and feeding them with cleaner, more reliable power. Considering the government's sweeping plans, buying the buses is the easy part. The harder part is pulling together all the moving parts. Communicating clearly with all the stakeholders involved to make sure the roads and the grid actually work for the buses before the buses are on them. 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 our subscriber-only offerings. 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 Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.