India’s EV charger glut: usage, not rollout, now the crisis
The gist
India’s public EV charger network is booming in size—but with usage stuck at just 1–5%, the real crisis is empty plugs, not missing stations.
What to know
- By July 2026, India will have 52,718 public EV chargers, but most see barely any action, with utilisation rates languishing at 1–5%.
- Charger buildout is outpacing EV sales—2.5 million EVs sold in FY 2025-2026 vs. a tenfold surge in public charging points since 2022.
- Idle chargers are often a result of poor locations, mismatched hardware, and app or payment lockouts that keep 'available' plugs unusable.
From Rollout to Revenue Crisis
India’s EV charging sector is shifting focus from installation milestones to the urgent challenge of keeping chargers profitable and reliable, as low usage threatens both business models and policy support.
India’s charging buildout has moved into a different phase of the story: not whether enough stations are being announced, but whether the swelling network is being used enough to make business sense. That tension is captured starkly in the warning, “India’s EV Chargers Surge to 29,151 (Six‑Fold) Yet Utilisation Stalls at 1‑5%, Warns Rubix’s Tushar Bhaskar,” a headline that crystallises how rapid rollout and weak throughput are now colliding in plain sight.
The mismatch looks even sharper when set against the broader market’s growth curve, because charger deployment has outpaced vehicle adoption by a wide margin even as EV sales have risen strongly. IEEFA notes annual EV sales climbed from “about 50,000 vehicles in 2016 to around 2.5 million in the financial year (FY) 2025-2026,” while “the number of public charging stations increasing more than tenfold… from 5,151 in 2022 to 52,718 by July 2026,” leaving utilisation stuck low enough to expose a serious demand-and-revenue gap.
That is why the commercial problem can no longer be treated as a temporary side effect of early expansion: the sector’s own framing is shifting from installation counts to operating performance. IEEFA says “Charger uptime and reliability, not just the number of chargers, are essential to the EV charging experience,” and its call to link public support to “verified uptime and performance” shows that low utilisation is now central enough to reshape both operator priorities and policy incentives.
Bad Locations, Locked Plugs
A glut of chargers in inconvenient spots, mismatched hardware, and closed payment systems means many stations remain idle—even as the network expands, most are functionally out of reach for drivers.
The clearest reason plugs sit idle is not simply too few EVs but too many chargers built in places that make little sense in an actual trip. As one analysis put it, “Location is the Single Biggest Factor”: a charger just outside Mumbai on the Mumbai–Ahmedabad highway, installed by a well-known OEM with strong hardware and branding, still struggled because it never answered the basic behavioural question—why would a driver stop there, especially if it comes only 20 or 30 kilometres after departure or too near the destination?
Underuse is also being engineered by mismatch in both hardware and access: “Charger Size Should Match the Site, Not the Ambition,” because “A 60-kW charger and a 180-kW charger can both report 5 percent utilisation, but the energy dispensed is very different… roughly 72 kWh a day against 216 kWh,” while many cars cannot absorb the higher power anyway. And even when a charger is physically vacant, drivers may still be locked out by closed ecosystems requiring the right app, wallet or RFID card, turning available infrastructure into unusable infrastructure.