Public Charging Infrastructure
Presenting our findings as of March 2026
Welcome to our latest edition of charging infrastructure updates in India. We’ve collected data from over 83 CPOs in India and are presenting you what we’ve learnt.
The article has interactive charts, so I would strongly recommend reading it on your desktop.
Before we dive into the data - let’s clear out a few concepts.
Connector - A connector connects to a car to charge it. It is also known as a ‘gun’ or a ‘charging point’. There are various ways to charge a car, but we only consider CCS2 (fast) and Type2 (slow) connectors. Other connectors like a 15A socket or industrial plugs are ubiquitous. It doesn’t give us an accurate picture when we start counting those.
Charger - A single charger can have one or more connectors. We’ve seen sites with a single charger having upto 12 connectors. For our analysis, this is considered as a single charger with 12 connectors.
Charging Station - A single charging station can have one or more than one charger.
Thus, charging stations have charger(s) and chargers have connector(s).
Captive chargers - A captive charger is restricted by use only for certain use cases - like for employees in an office parking lot, or charging hubs for cabs, or the slow charger installed at your home. These chargers are considered captive and not included in this analysis. Only public chargers are considered in our analysis.
So, next time, when you see anyone quoting any data on ‘chargers’ in India, ask them whether it is charging stations or chargers or connectors and whether they’ve included captive chargers.
We are conducting a Data driven session with TERI on EV charging infrastructure in India on 1st May in New Delhi.
We will be in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Poland next month. Let’s meet and discuss charging infrastructure!
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Yearly overview
We’ve extensively covered car sales in this article a few weeks ago. To recap, India has been selling 50,000 to 60,000 electric four wheelers for the past few quarters. With the existing crisis in West Asia, the push towards EV adoption is expected to be faster.
For the Oct-Dec and Jan-Mar quarter, the industry installed ~1000 CCS2 chargers per quarter. This is roughly 33% slower than the installation rate in Mar-Jun and Jun-Sep quarter. The industry installed more connectors (~2500 CCS2) in the Jan-Mar quarter than ~2000 CCS2 connectors in Oct-Dec quarter.
Looking at the entire country can give us some picture, but when we look at individual regions, we get a much clearer understanding. South Zone leads all the zones as shown in the chart below. This is due to high EV sales in South India as compared to the rest of the country.
Once a leader, the West Zone’s growth rate slowed down considerably this quarter. The South Zone too has seen slower growth, whereas North East saw reduction in total number of connectors. The North, Central and East zones have increased the rate of growth in this quarter.
Let’s look at some of the top states and CPOs in India.
Maharashtra leads the country with high CCS2 chargers. We are expecting this number to cross 2000 chargers by September this year. The second place fight is extremely close between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. We might see a toss up here in the next quarter as Tamil Nadu because Karnataka’s recent policy of adding Road Tax on EVs is regressive and will hamper the EV adoption in the state.
While we are here, let’s also look at some of the top CPOs in India by CCS2 chargers
BPCL is a clear leader among all CPOs with almost 3000 public CCS2 chargers.
Let’s look at the top government CPOs in more detail.
The chart begs to ask the question to IOCL - Why has IOCL, consistently, over the years, removed chargers from their app? We’ve been documenting their downfall in chargers in our previous reports. Did we just waste public money with PSUs? We wrote about how PSUs can turn the situation around and described a bull case for Oil Marketing Companies.
HPCL has shown almost consistent growth with adding ~250 chargers for the previous two quarters. BPCL, on the other hand, showed great growth in the last quarter by adding almost 600 chargers.
While the industry has been putting up chargers around the country, are they working? Are they on highways or in cities? Where do CPOs prefer to setup chargers? We will be answering some of these questions in our next article!
Would you like to know more about the industry market share and growth in the industry? Drop us a comment or reach out to us on social media!
We have various data analytics tools around charging infrastructure. If you’d like to know more, please feel free to reach out to us.
Disclaimer
All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.
The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.
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