NEW DELHI: The Centre’s ambitious target of having one million high-speed electric two-wheelers on the road by March 2022, set under the FAME-2 scheme, is likely to fall short by a large margin. As of December 2020, only 4 per cent of the sales target has been achieved.
The actual cumulative sales of electric two-wheelers since January 2019 stands at 52,959 units. Under the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME 2) Scheme, launched in April 2019, only 31,813 electric two-wheelers had been able to qualify for incentives as of December 2020, according to data provided by Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles (SMEV) on Wednesday.
“The FAME 2 scheme had some good points and laudable objectives but came with so many strings attached, most of them introduced prematurely or unnecessarily, that lead to the achievement of only 4 per cent of the stated targets.
The scheme could not attract the customers to shift from polluting petrol bikes to electric two-wheelers, mainly because the preconditions and qualification criteria of FAME 2 made the bikes unaffordable to the mass market customer despite the subsidy,” said Sohinder Gill, Director General, SMEV.
The association noted that while the industry has been able to weather the Covid pandemic—sales of high speed electric two wheelers in the January to December 2020 period clocked in at 25,735 units—the ambitious target of generating sales of one million under FAME 2 is nowhere in sight.
Despite the setback, the segment is witnessing a very high level of interest from customers, Gill pointed out, adding that if FAME 2 is rejigged to remove the needless handicaps, adoption could grow exponentially. In a recent interview with TNIE, Naveen Munjal, MD, Hero Electric had said that the government has to do some course correction in policies governing high-speed versus low-speed models.