Pawan Goenka, Mahindra & Mahindra MD, expects the EV segment in India to stabilise in the next five years. Speaking at SIAM’s annual convention, Goenka stated that the FAME scheme won’t be required after five years to make electric vehicles commercially viable as battery costs would have come down significantly by then. He said the battery price has already come down by 20-25 percent in the last two years and he expects it to come down by a similar percentage in the next two years.
The Indian government had launched the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME) scheme in 2015 to promote the use of eco-friendly vehicles by incentivising the sales and manufacturing of electric vehicles in the country; its second phase is expected to kick off today.
The second phase of FAME, with a budget of Rs 5,500 crore, will provide subsidies to all types of electric vehicles over the next five years.
Goenka expects EV production to increase substantially in the country by 2030, to around 30 percent of the market. However, he said that to achieve this goal the infrastructure has to be present, the vehicles have to be affordable and have a good range, and that there should be multiple options in the market; only then will sales happen.