In order to make the road of EV adoption easier in India, the oil marketing companies under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas have built around 3,448 EV charging stations at retail outlets.
In the FAME scheme which intends to push the adoption of EVs across the country and encourage the use of EVs in public transportation, the deployment of charging stations comes as an appreciable move toward market creation and demand aggregation of EVs.
Fame India Scheme envisages the support towards greater domestication of EVs by the means of subsidies and other policies for the 7,090 e-buses, 55,000 e-cars, 5 lakh e-three-wheelers, and 10 lakh e-two-wheelers.
The Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI) has also formulated a draft National Automotive Policy that addresses the concerns of the auto industry at large and the visionary Auto Mission Plan 2016-26.
The Phase II FAME India scheme comes after its precedent Fame India scheme Phase I successfully noted 520 sanctions for the charging stations or infrastructure in India.
Under the FAME India scheme, the ministry has sanctioned 2,877 EV charging stations in 68 cities across 25 States/UTs and 1,576 charging stations across 9 Expressways and 16 Highways.
This takes the total combined figure to 532 installed charging stations as of July 15th, 2022 with 479 and 53 charging stations under the Fame I and Fame II scheme respectively.
On July 1, the Ministry of Power issued the revised consolidated guidelines and standards on charging infrastructure for EVs which allowed any individual or organization to set up the public charging infra if they meet the technical, safety, and performance norms decided by the authorities – Ministry of Power, Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) and Central Electricity Authority (CEA), which are subject to time-to-time amendments.
Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI) in the Phase-II of the FAME India scheme sanctioned a Rs 1,000 crore budget for the installation of charging infrastructure for EVs.