E-Mobility

Smart Cities are beginning to transition to cleaner mobility options in order to reduce carbon emissions, improve air quality, and reduce dependency on fossil fuels. Electric vehicles (EVs)—a cleaner and more efficient alternative to internal combustion engine vehicles—are gaining traction in urban centres as India works toward the vision of cleaner, more convenient, and cheaper mobility. For many applications, electric vehicles already have a lower total cost of ownership than internal combustion engines in India. Yet Increasing the use of electric mobility will require strong city government support in partnership with the many stakeholders involved in the ecosystem, including vehicle OEMs, battery manufacturers, charging infrastructure providers, power sector, and consumers.

Smart Cities Mission-Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs intends to launch a set of web-based resources to provide Smart Cities with information and guidance to promote electric vehicles deployment in their cities. These resources include a Framework document to provide a basic understanding of electric mobility ecosystem, a Workbook to guide city managers in understanding various steps required for identifying and implementing strategies/plans for promoting electric mobility, an Evaluation Metrics document to provide a framework for assessing and tracking progress, and a Best Practices Compendium to illustrate examples of cities from around the world that have successfully deployed EVs in their cities.

Together these documents aim to help Smart Cities understand, promote, and evaluate the adoption of electric mobility. In order to promote and deploy EVs, cities must first benchmark their current starting point, and then then identify measures and strategies through which the city will be able to promote electrification in the transportation sector. Key performance indicators like number of EVs and EV operators in the city, the number of charging stations in the city, investments made in promoting and deploying EVs, and air quality levels can help track the progress of the projects. The documents are designed to be continuously updated over time with new developments and input from stakeholders.

Electric Mobility Sector Framework documents are intended to be used by city managers, municipal commissioners, CEOs of smart cities SPVs for development & integrated planning. These framework documents will help develop capacities of these officers to better understand this sector in terms of policy perspective, designing, financing, technology and overall development.

Your feedback and suggestions over the draft documents would be invaluable for us. We request you to provide your feedback/ suggestions/ recommendations on this consultation paper, here, by 24 January 2019.