Daybreak - Your E-Bus Will Be Fixed. Eventually. Probably.

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

When a public electric bus breaks down in India, three agencies get notified. None of them can actually fix it. The buses don't belong to the cities that run them. The contracts sit with central agencies. The warranties belong to manufacturers. When a four-year-old bus stalls because its battery management system glitched, the city logs a complaint, calculates a fine for the manufacturers, and takes the bus off the route. Commuters are left slim pickings. And India's about to deploy thousands more using the same model.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 Ramon Ganesh, 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. On a December morning in South Bangalore, an e-bus stalled. When the driver tried to restart it, it just refused to. You can imagine how things went down. It was a weekday morning and so,

So the uncooperative bus left tech workers and others all scrambling to find autos or bikes to get to work on. Inside the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, a woman named Jaya picked up the driver's frantic call. This is a third such call this month. She opened up a dashboard, logged in the incident, and pinged a diagnostic team to confirm what the fault was. Now, if you've ever wondered what happens when a public e-bus breaks down, this is the first

step in the process. Then it turns out at least three agencies get notified. But somehow, not one of them is quite sure how they should go about fixing it. Jayah's been with the BMTC for four years. She handles all these calls and error reports. She told my colleague, the Ken Report of Runei, that the older electric buses especially don't fail in predictable ways. Sometimes they run for too long between charge times. Sometimes the heat overwhelms the mechanisms. Sometimes it's the cold. No matter the reason, each breakdown eats into the runtime. In the four years since 2022, BMTC has run over 1,500 e-buses and locked nearly 14,000 breakdowns. But here's the catch. Despite all the hands-on work somebody like Jayah does, BMTC has little control over permanent fixes.

They are not the ones leasing these buses, so they can't even raise maintenance tickets directly with the companies that do lease them. Across India's major cities like Mumbai, Bangal, Pune and Delhi, central agencies like CESL, which is the Convergence Energy Services Limited and NVVN, which is the NPPC Vidyutviapar Nygum Limited, procure the fleets. State transport units or STUs, which are pretty cash-strap by the way, just operating. these buses. They only pay these aggregators for every kilometer that's run and not really for ensuring reliability. So basically, the system just logs the breakdowns, calculates fines and then just moves on. In the end, the contracts between companies just limit the penalties. These companies might have to pay a fine, but they won't lose much, even when buses stay broken. which means that the STUs lose routes and revenue, the original equipment manufacturers or OEMs,

absorb the penalties and public trust in electric buses erode. And all of this is happening just as India is about to deploy nearly 14,000 more e-buses and under the same model. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Vergis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nikaa and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Under India's electric bus program, cities don't buy e-buses directly. Procurement runs through central agencies under schemes like FAME, which is the faster adoption and manufacturing of electric vehicles scheme, or the Prime Minister's e-bus SEVA. These agencies aggregate demand, float tenders, and sign long-term contracts with manufacturers and operators.

Their goal is scale and cost control. It also shifts authority away from cities. Agencies like CESL and NVVN sign contracts with manufacturers and hold warranties. Payments also flow through them. Meanwhile, state transport units operate the buses and pay a per-kilometer fee to the original equipment manufacturers or OEMs. A former NVVN official told Runmay that this structure was no accident. He went on to say that because the electric bus push came from the center and so did the subsidy, when it came to control that also stayed central.

That's not how the states usually buy buses. Now, this model does work when buses run as expected. But when they don't, the authority fragments. What states can do is log faults and track downtime. What they cannot do is escalate failures directly to manufacture. or demand design fixes. Those decisions sit higher up in the chain. A few months ago, BMTC issued hefty penalties after repeated traffic violations from staff,

safety lapses and maintenance failures. Fines cross $25 crore rupees over two years for four firms running e-buses. That's Tata Motors, Electra Green Tech, Switch Mobility and JBM Auto. In Pune, this problem has turned into a balance. street shock. The transport authority there is planning to replace batteries on six-year-old buses. That's going to cost them 20 lakh rupees per bus, which is nearly a quarter of the original price. Now, you might be thinking, if there are fines, there must be accountability. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Turns out, the financial burden rarely falls in full on the OEMs themselves.

State units track downtime and flag violations, but the actual fines are processed by the contract owner, which in this case are the central agencies. What ends up happening is less a punishment and more an exercise in reconciliation. Numbers get logged, penalties are calculated and eventually amounts are adjusted against future payments often weeks later. A senior BMTC official told Rundmay that the 25-3rd, crore figure wasn't them imposing a direct fine. They had essentially issued a recommendation under the service clause. More importantly, these deductions are capped by design. See, under the

contracts used for electric buses, penalties only apply after fleet availability falls below 85 to 90 percent, with maximum daily and monthly caps. Once those caps are reached, deductions stop, even if the buses are staying idle. Effectively speaking, a bus that breaks down briefly and one that stalls for a whole day can face the same penalty. The result is that a bus can sit idle for days and still earn most of its monthly payment. For cities, that creates a familiar problem. Down time hurts them immediately. Passengers wait longer or switch to other models.

And as a BMTC official said, even when deductions happen, it doesn't really make up for lost routes or lost revenue. More on this in the next segment. India's first big batch of electric buses hit the road between 2019 and 2021. Those fleets are now 4 to 5 years old. That's exactly the time when batteries start to lose capacity, thermal margins shrink and early design compromises start to show up. Most of BMTC's 1,500 electric buses came between 2020 and 2020.

These first-generation vehicles were built when speed mattered more than testing. Many run older battery packs with air cooling. Delhi is a little head of the curb. It runs 3,400 electric buses, which is the country's largest fleet. Though even here, a sizable chunk came from that 2020 to 2020 batch. So by 2023, the Transport Corporation was flagging poor readiness, warning that buses were struggling in Delhi summers. An engineer from Electra Green Tech, which supplies a large share of Pune's e-buses,

said that early failures were often tied to battery behavior and not mechanical faults. He explained that when buses started throwing voltage imbalances or sudden cutoffs, they could adjust cooling and current limits. But if the issue is inside the battery management system, they'd have to wait for BYD, which is a Chinese electric vehicle maker to, push an update. The thing is, the limits of those early designs became clearer only in the heat. Even though the older packs were air-cooled, they couldn't withstand Indian summers. Once temperatures climbed, voltage would sag and protective cut-offs would kick in.

Pune find a B-Y-D, $25 crore rupees last September exactly because of this. In hindsight, none of this is that surprising. Part of the problem was how batteries were being sourced. In the early phases, cells came from different suppliers at different times. On paper, they were all the same, LFP or lithium-ion phosphate. But in practice, they behaved differently, especially once deployed at scale. Also, manufacturers often don't control the battery management systems. Those belong to suppliers like BYD as intellectual property. So, when something goes wrong, fixes require coordination across multiple.

parties. So what really caught cities off guard was the timing. Failure started to surface just as fleets crossed four to five years when degradation becomes harder to manage. Even though warranties covered this period, many problems did not qualify for full battery replacement. Meanwhile, buses that looked fine at delivery now run 12 to 14 hours daily through congestion, heat and frequent fast charging, which is a very different life from what they were tested for. Stay tuned. The reliability problems aren't exactly accidental. They're tied to how India's scaled electric buses under Fame 2. Launched in 2019, the scheme pushed rapid adoption through subsidies. Of the roughly 11,500 crore rupees allocated, electric buses received the largest per unit subsidies.

As of March 2025, over 6,800 e-buses were sanctioned with more than 5,100 delivered. A senior executive at Tata AutoComp told Runmay that the timelines were aggressive. There was enormous pressure to ramp up before subsidies' windows were closed. And when speed becomes a priority, of course, validation takes a hit. The policy also skewed what counted as success. See, under the gross cost contract model, payments were linked to kilometres that were run, not the reliability of the buses. Also, the fleets were being scaled faster than the feedback loops that were required to refine them.

The same senior executive at Tata AutoComp told us that in the early batches, some manufacturers were clearly rushing. In the rush, checks were being bypassed to deliver volumes, and of course everyone was racing to meet subsidy timelines. Now, there are some signs that the system is learning. Buses delivered after 2022 look quite different. They move to liquid-cooled battery packs and tighter tuning for Indian conditions. BYD has opened limited diagnostic access and Electra has begun thermal testing in local conditions.

But the procurement architecture still hasn't changed. agencies like CESL and NVBN still sit between manufacturers and cities. Buses are still bought in bulk and state units still operate fleets that they don't lease. Newer schemes acknowledge that electric buses need better financial cushioning, but they don't fundamentally alter who controls fixes when something breaks. Take that December morning from the beginning of the episode. The e-bus had stalled because the battery management system glitched and shutt up. the bus down. Jaia logged the complaint on the dashboard BMTC shares with NVVN.

She told us that BMTC would probably take it out of the manufacturer's monthly fees. The bus was removed from the route and one more vehicle was taken off of an already stretched schedule. Commuters would now either have to crowd onto the next bus or book an Uber. Jaya closed the ticket and moved to the next call because there would definitely be another one before her shift ended. 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 Varghies, and edited by

Rajiv Sien.