The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) hosted a webinar titled “Tryst with Electric Vehicles in India – A User Perspective” on Thursday, September 19, 2024.

The webinar featured a conversation between Priyans Murarka, a well-known electric vehicle (EV) enthusiast and an aspiring change-maker and Priyanka Rai, Head of Infrastructure at Statiq. Shyamasis Das, Fellow, CSEP moderated the session.

The event was live streamed on Zoom and CSEP’s YouTube channel.

About the event:

The conversation will involve two eminent speakers representing two fraternities in the electric mobility ecosystem in the country—early EV adopters and EV charging service providers. This conversation brings to the fore the importance of capturing user experience in India’s EV transition story and creating a feedback loop in policymaking, centred around EV users (aam aadmi). The current deliberations in India around EVs are found to miss out on recognising that public involvement is central to a successful transition to clean mobility.

Speakers

• Priyans Murarka, a well-known electric vehicle (EV) enthusiast and an aspiring changemaker. He will share his parents’ and his own unique story of criss-crossing India on electric cars (covering ~ 60,000 km) and shed some valuable insights into the convenience of charging EVs in India. He has taken a step further by systematically documenting the experiences and publishing crucial on-ground data, particularly on the charging infrastructure landscape. He has founded ExpWithEVs.in, a website for dissemination of useful practical data on EVs and charging. He is a co-founder at ActiveBuildings, an indoor air quality sensing and solutions company.
• Priyanka Rai, Head of Infrastructure at Statiq. Priyanka spearheads the company’s charging infrastructure expansion and aims to build the largest network of EV chargers in the country. Recently Forbes featured Akshit Bansal and Raghav Arora, the founders of Statiq, in its list of 30 Under 30 in the Industry, Manufacturing & Energy segment, a first for the EV charging industry.

Moderator

• Shyamasis Das, Fellow, CSEP. He has been investing the past eight years of his 15-year career in understanding and decoding different aspects of electric mobility with particular focus on charging infrastructure and its interlinkages with other sectors. He has led several marquee initiatives that included authoring on behalf of Ministry of Power and NITI Aayog India’s first handbook on EV charging infrastructure, developing the draft Battery Swapping Policy as announced in the 2022 Union Budget speech, formulating a roadmap for Indian Railways to make charging infrastructure an integral part of its facilities, and carrying out the first ever study on vehicle-grid integration in Indian context. He contributed to the Clean Energy Ministerial’s policy report on EVs and was invited by International Energy Agency to support GEF Global E-Mobility Programme – Managing Grid Integration of Electric Vehicles.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.