Chandigarh Administration to invite bids to decide charging rates

Tribune News Service

Dushyant Singh Pundir

Chandigarh, March 24

The UT Administration will soon invite bids to decide the rates for charging of electric vehicles in the city.

At a meeting here today to fine-tune the Draft Electric Vehicle (EV) Policy, it was decided that tenders would be floated to operate the charging stations and the rates would be decided on the basis of the bids received for the purpose.

Debendra Dalai, Chief Executive Officer, Chandigarh Renewable Energy and Science & Technology Promotion Society (CREST), said the rates for charging of electric vehicles would be decided on the basis of the lowest bids.

He said the firm would operate the existing charging stations and also install the points approved by the government. The Central Government had sanctioned 70 charging stations for Chandigarh under Phase II of the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME) India scheme.

Dalai said 37 of the 70 fast charging stations had already been installed in different areas of the city. He said both two-wheelers and four-wheelers could be charged at the same charging station.

To a question raised in the Lok Sabha recently, the Ministry of Heavy Industries submitted that Chandigarh had a total of 2,057 electric vehicles, including 338 two-wheelers, 1,482 three-wheelers, 196 four-wheelers and 41 other vehicles.

The UT Administration had recently released the Draft EV Policy and invited suggestions or comments for inclusion or omission in the policy.

However, the highest number of suggestions were regarding the fixed number of vehicles to get incentives and subsidies every year. Stakeholders suggested that there should not be any fixed number to get incentives.

According to the Draft EV Policy notified recently, the UT Administration will give a special early bird incentive to the vehicles purchased and registered in the first year of the policy period. The policy will also help in creating public charging infrastructure within every sector and in the first two years of the policy period, 100 public charging stations will be installed in the UT.

The policy was framed to make Chandigarh a “model EV city” by achieving one of the highest penetrations of zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) among all Indian cities by the end of the policy period of five years.

The policy has a provision for incentivising the adoption of all vehicle categories such as e-bicycles, e-two-wheelers, e-carts, e-autos, e-goods carrier (L5N and N1) and e-four-wheelers (personal and commercial), which is over and above the FAME-II policy incentives provided by the Centre and will be applicable to only those electric vehicles that are purchased and registered in Chandigarh.

To accelerate the adoption of EVs in the UT so that these contribute to 80 per cent of new vehicle registrations by the end of the policy period, the Administration has set a target of 100 per cent registration of new e-two-wheelers, e-three-wheelers, e-four-wheelers (goods), e-cars (commercial) and e-buses by the end of five years and 50 per cent registration of e-cars for personal use.

Meanwhile, the incentive will range from Rs3,000 to Rs2 lakh for a limited number of vehicles of different categories. Dalai said they were working on finalising the Draft EV Policy and it would would be notified soon.

Officialspeak

Debendra Dalai, Chief Executive Officer, Chandigarh Renewable Energy and Science & Technology Promotion Society (CREST), said the rates for charging of electric vehicles would be decided on the basis of the lowest bids.

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