PM E-DRIVE is the central government’s main subsidy scheme for electric vehicles. The name is short for PM Electric Drive Revolution in Innovative Vehicle Enhancement. It began on October 1, 2024, with Rs 2,000 crore set aside for public chargers; rules for those chargers came out in September 2025.
In August, almost a year after those rules, the government told Parliament that not one charger had been installed.
A progress note from the government’s press office on October 1 this year, the scheme’s second anniversary, said Rs 851 crore had been approved for 8,147 chargers. These were to be set up by the three state-run fuel companies and ten state governments.
It did not say how many of them work.
The scheme has since been extended to March 31, 2028. The next 17 months will decide what it builds, and for whom.
The companies with the most at stake are the small ones the scheme leaves out. They need help with the cost more than anyone, and get almost none of it.
Many work like a franchise. A housing society, shop or highway restaurant pays for a charger on its premises; the company installs and runs it for a share of the takings. Such companies raise money a few crore rupees at a time, then wait months for drivers to find each new site.
This matters beyond the charging trade, because a shortage of public chargers is still a leading reason Indians hesitate to buy electric cars.
In the consulting firm Deloitte’s 2026 survey of Indian consumers, 43% named it as a concern.
Investors that are being pitched charging startups, and housing societies deciding whether to host a charger, need to know whom the subsidy helps and whom it hurts.
The answer starts with who owns the land.
Private Sites Get The Least
The government told Parliament in July that India had 52,718 public charging stations, according to a summary by the charging-software firm YoCharge. The previous central scheme, FAME-II, paid for only 9,583. Private money paid for most of the rest.
PM E-DRIVE pays according to who owns the site. Every station needs the charger itself and the cables and transformer that connect it to the grid.
Under the scheme’s guidelines, government offices that let the public charge for free get both paid for in full. Railway stations, bus depots, municipal car parks and state-run fuel stations get 80% of the grid connection and 70% of the charger.
Private sites, where franchise-style companies set up, get 80% of the grid connection and nothing towards the charger. The guidelines do not say why. Their working assumption appears to be that private sites can pay their own way.
The grid work makes up about 60% of a station’s cost, according to Mint, and operators put the charger at roughly 30%. At a private site, the operator or the site owner pays that 30% in full.
A few states fill part of the gap. Maharashtra’s electric vehicle policy, notified on May 27, 2025, pays up to 15% of the cost of a public fast charger, capped at Rs 5 lakh.
But a station needs four charging points to qualify; in practice, two fast chargers with two cables each.
Operators say only very busy hubs, such as stops on the Mumbai-Pune expressway, justify that.
Applying is opaque too. The government has not said how many proposals it has received or turned down. Its August reply to Parliament lists only approvals.
Operators say they are rarely told how much money is left or why they were rejected. As one charging operator put it to me, publishing both would cost the government nothing.
Most Startups Cannot Bid
Under the central scheme, no company can apply to the Centre directly, be it a startup, a carmaker or a charger maker. Only ministries, state governments and the firms they own, such as the state-run oil companies and power distributors, can file proposals.
Agencies appointed by each state choose the sites and file plans on a portal run by Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL), the state-owned engineering company that manages the scheme.
The agencies then either run the chargers themselves or hand them to a private operator through a tender, a competitive bidding process. Some states, such as Kerala, also accept applications for private sites, but only from operators already running at least ten stations.
The first tenders are showing who can bid. Telangana’s, issued on September 2 by the Telangana Renewable Energy Development Corporation (TGREDCO), offers 169 chargers at 116 locations on a ten-year contract. A bidder must have run at least 45 charging locations in the year to March 2026, or be a certified charger maker, and must have had sales of at least Rs 5 crore. Joint bids are barred, so a young company cannot borrow a bigger partner’s track record.
By mid-October, tenders were out for eight approved proposals covering 3,348 chargers, according to YoCharge, but no state had said who bid or won. Under these rules, the work will go to oil companies, charger makers, and larger operators.
Winners Pay Even When Nobody Charges
Even a company that clears the bar may regret winning. Bidders offer TGREDCO a fixed fee every month, and the highest offer wins.
The minimum fees work out to about Rs 9,500 per charger a month, rising 5% a year, plus Rs 1 for every unit of electricity sold. A unit, or kilowatt-hour (kWh), is enough to drive a small electric car about 6-8 km. Drivers can be charged no more than Rs 13 a unit, and the sites cannot earn anything from shops or advertising.
YoCharge’s breakdown works out that each charger must sell about 26 units a day, roughly one full charge for a car, just to cover the fee. Most sites are electricity substations and district offices in northern Telangana, where demand is untested.
Payback is slow.
Sites are grouped into five clusters, and a cluster’s subsidy is paid only when every charger in it works; one delayed site holds up the rest. Add a Rs 10 lakh deposit per cluster, and a company that has raised Rs 1-3 crore could see much of it locked up in one cluster.
A different design shares the risk.
In Rajasthan’s earlier package, the operator pays a fee for each unit sold rather than a fixed rent, so its costs fall when fewer drivers turn up. The central guidelines leave that choice to each state. Telangana gives no reason for its fixed fee, which guarantees the agency an income however few drivers come; Odisha’s tender shows the alternative can work, with the state regulator checking the operator’s sales figures.
The State Network Will Be Smaller And Later
Nor will the government’s own network crowd startups out much. The approvals so far work out to about Rs 10.4 lakh of subsidy per charger. At that rate, Rs 2,000 crore buys around 19,000 chargers, about a quarter of the 72,300 promised.
Most will be on government land, much of it away from where people charge. They will compete with private chargers only at busy bus stands, railway stations and highway fuel stations, where the subsidised price will set what drivers expect to pay.
A charging company’s value lies in where its chargers are and how often people use them.
How The Best Startups Manage Anyway
The strongest private operators are built around exactly that.
In the franchise model, the site owner pays for the grid connection and the charger; the company runs the station for a share of every unit sold. Investors call this asset-light, because the company owns few of the assets it runs.
The site owner’s earnings also rise and fall with sales, unlike Telangana’s fixed rent. A private site can also sell coffee, snacks or advertising to a driver who waits the better part of an hour, which Telangana’s subsidised sites cannot. Those extra sales often turn a charger that barely breaks even into a profitable one.
Software is the last advantage. Telangana’s tender document requires every operator to run its own system for monitoring chargers and taking payments, and to list each station on the National Unified Hub, a government directory drivers use to find chargers. A company with its own software can list its private chargers there too.
Weak operators are the mirror image. Those that buy every charger with investors’ money, on sites where few cars stop, are paying for idle equipment. Those whose plans rest on the subsidy will mostly fail to qualify, and the few that win a fixed-rent cluster risk running out of cash.
Companies that mainly sell charger units are stuck with thin hardware margins. Franchise networks that sign up sites but run them badly stop growing, because owners of idle chargers do not renew.
What Investors And The Government Should Do
For investors, the lesson is to judge a charging startup as if PM E-DRIVE did not exist, and to test three numbers. One is units sold per charger per day, against the 26 a Telangana site needs to cover its fee. Another is income per site beyond electricity. The third is how many site owners renew or add chargers after a year.
The government can help without spending more. It can publish how many proposals it receives, approves and rejects, and why, along with how many approved chargers work, and prefer fee-per-unit tenders to fixed rent. It could also pay part of the charger’s cost at small private sites.
The next answer to Parliament will show how quickly the government’s chargers are arriving. Until they do, franchise-style operators on private land have until 2028 to build their networks, and their investors have a clear reason to back them now.
