Growth in India’s public charging network has slowed to its weakest pace in two years. The more important focus is whether the companies that built the network, many with public money, can keep it working as growth moves beyond the big cities.
India’s EV charging sector is usually told as a story of numbers going up. Each new tally of public chargers is greeted as proof that the country is ready for widespread electric mobility, and each new target as a promise that more is on the way.
Our latest data complicates any narratives about the significance of sheer growth. India had 33,756 public charging connectors in September, 46 percent more than a year earlier. However, the July to September quarter added just 1,797, the weakest quarter since ExpWithEVs began tracking every quarter at the end 2024. And at India’s largest charge point operator (CPO), Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), more than half of the 5,036 connectors were non-working.
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There is no question that the network is growing, and that it is becoming more reliable. Yet a count of connectors says little about whether drivers can use them. A charger with connectors that do not work is not infrastructure, it’s merely a marker on a map.
A more useful probe is not how many connectors India has, but who is building them and whether they are kept working. The latest data raises particular questions about the state-run oil companies, which built much of the network with public money and whose record on keeping it working is patchy.
How ExpWithEVs count this
Our series tracks connectors, the individual guns that plug into a car, rather than chargers or stations. A single charger often carries more than one connector, and a station usually holds several chargers.
We check every connector thrice each month and count it as non-working only if it fails all three checks. As a result, the figures are likely to understate how often drivers arrive to find a charger connector out of service.
India’s one standard network
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This article was written by Joash Arivan. The data and research was collected by Priyans Murarka and Garvit Singh. All data and reporting is under CC-BY-SA-NC license.
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