An NDTV report published on 16 September 2026 identifies three barriers to mass EV adoption in India. The most telling is not battery cost or vehicle range but the fear that when a driver leaves the charging clusters of Delhi, Mumbai, or Bengaluru, roadside help may not exist.
The anxiety is specific. A conventional car that breaks down on the Jaipur highway has access to mechanics, roadside assistance numbers, and fuel stations every few kilometres. An EV owner whose battery management system throws a fault code near Kishangarh at 2 a.m. faces a different situation. The NDTV report quotes no single stranded motorist, but describes a pattern highway users already recognize: public charging infrastructure thins dramatically once city limits end, and EV service networks have not kept pace with vehicle sales. The real problem is not the car's advertised range but the distance between one dependable charging point and the next.
India's push toward electric mobility rests on three pillars: the crude oil import bill, urban air quality, and climate commitments made in international forums. Official policy targets raising EV sales to a substantial market share by 2030, and state governments have offered incentives. Yet a target framed in policy documents means little to a family deciding whether an EV can replace its internal-combustion car for a monthly trip to a tier-3 town. That decision turns not on test-cycle range but on whether a working charger waits at the highway dhaba and whether a technician can distinguish a Type 2 connector from a CCS2 port.
The charging deficit is not new. A NITI Aayog report prepared with the Rocky Mountain Institute, 'Charging India's Electric Transport', identified highway and destination charging as the missing link for inter-city EV travel years ago, and that insight remains unaddressed at the national scale. Building chargers inside city limits solves the commuter's problem; mass-market buyers need corridors. Highway charging stations, where they exist, cluster near toll plazas or urban fringe areas, leaving long stretches of national highways with nothing more than a standard wall socket at a roadside eatery. This is not a gap a single automaker can close. It is a network problem requiring coordination across ministries, state transport departments, and private charge-point operators.
The absence of standardised roadside assistance for EVs compounds the infrastructure deficit. Anumita Roychowdhury of the Centre for Science and Environment has argued that public charging must expand beyond metros to make EV ownership viable for middle-income and non-urban buyers. Automakers such as Tata Motors and MG Motor have begun investing in roadside assistance networks, but these remain brand-specific and uneven. A Mahindra owner cannot assume the assistance van will carry the right adapter for her vehicle, even if the operator claims nationwide coverage. The third hurdle NDTV identifies is not a single missing object but a missing system: a national protocol for EV breakdowns that treats battery depletion and charger incompatibility as predictable events rather than emergencies. Without that protocol, every highway breakdown becomes an argument against the technology.
The practical consequence appears in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. A buyer in Nashik or Patna who reads about charger shortages will hesitate even if total cost of ownership looks favourable. When a neighbour asks whether the car can reach the district hospital at night or a relative's wedding ninety kilometres away, the answer must be unqualified. Until highway charging and service reach a density comparable to fuel pumps, the EV remains a second car for the urban affluent rather than a primary vehicle for the middle class. That is the segment whose adoption would shift India's energy security arithmetic.
India already has a coordinating framework to house such a system. The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan maps infrastructure projects across ministries and offers a platform for integrating charging-station rollout with highway development. What is missing is a mandate requiring every EV manufacturer, as a condition of selling vehicles in India, to maintain a minimum response time for roadside assistance on all national and state highways. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways could coordinate with state transport departments to standardise emergency response for EV-specific issues, from dead 12-volt batteries to software glitches that immobilise the vehicle. Public-private partnerships for highway charging hubs, with transparent tariffs and interoperability across networks, would do more for rural adoption than showroom test drives. The framework exists; the political will to attach service obligations to sales has not been exercised.
The stakes extend to manufacturing. India's production-linked incentives for advanced chemistry cell batteries and its 'Make in India' ambition in the auto sector depend on domestic demand reaching a scale that justifies capital expenditure. A market constrained to intra-city trips cannot absorb the volumes battery plants need to be profitable. The PLI scheme's promise works only if electric cars sell in numbers reflecting the country's entire geography, not just the top eight metros. The NDTV report identifies the service and charging gap as a hurdle that will determine EV growth on the Golden Quadrilateral, not in Lutyens' Delhi. Automakers that treat roadside assistance as a marketing afterthought will lose the next buyer. Those that treat it as part of the product will define the category.
The question before Indian policymakers is not whether the country will electrify its vehicle fleet but whether it will electrify the experience of driving outside the city. The next decade will decide whether an EV from Delhi can reach Jaipur without a support call, whether a family in Nagpur can use an electric car as its only vehicle, and whether India's battery investment becomes a bridge to energy security or a stranded asset on the highway. The three hurdles NDTV identifies are, in the end, one: the gap between the promise of e-mobility and the infrastructure of everyday travel. Closing it will require less rhetoric and more coordination, fewer showroom launches and more chargers at dhabas.
