NEW DELHI: Delhi is emerging as the electric vehicle capital of India with such vehicles accounting for 9.3 per cent of all vehicles bought in the city so far this year, which is the highest in the country, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said here on Wednesday.
He inaugurated seven EV charging stations at bus depots across Delhi along with Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot. Delhi has more than 2,000 charging stations, according to official figures. The new charging stations have been developed at DTC’s Rajghat, IP Estate, Kalkaji, Nehru Place, Mehrauli, Dwarka Sector-2 & Dwarka Sector-8 bus depots.
They will be open for all EV owners with low-cost slow and fast charging setups. A tariff of Rs 3 per unit has been fixed for slow chargers and Rs 10 per unit for fast chargers. Kejriwal said the Delhi government had implemented the Electric Vehicle Policy in 2020.
“At that time, we were not expecting such a huge response which we have received. In the past two years, 60,846 electric vehicles have been purchased in Delhi. Last year, 25,809 were purchased and this year, only seven months have passed and yet 29,845 vehicles have been sold already. “This means that there has been an increase of 115 per cent and we’re anticipating that this will further increase by the end of the year,” he said.
Noting that the people of Delhi have started to accept electric vehicles as a mode of transportation, he said once the people accept anything, cultural change sets in as they are replacing their older vehicles with electric vehicles.
Sharing data about the sales of electric vehicles, he said out of all the vehicles purchased in the city in 2022, 9.3 per cent were electric vehicles.