India's electric vehicle transition is prosecuted across at least four parallel architectures. FAME, and its successor PM E-DRIVE, under Heavy Industries. The PLI for Advanced Chemistry Cells, under the same ministry. Charging-infrastructure directives that travel through Petroleum, Power, and Housing concurrently. Over thirty state-level EV policies with their own subsidy structures. No constitutional mechanism convenes them. No executive instrument sequences them. What does this reveal about how the Indian state designs cross-cutting industrial transitions?
The fragmentation is not a coordination problem the architecture has yet to solve. It is the institutional design the architecture was built on. Each component of the EV transition was assigned to the ministry whose existing instrument vocabulary could accommodate it: FAME and PM E-DRIVE through Heavy Industries' subsidy architecture, the ACC PLI through the same ministry's manufacturing incentive architecture, charging-infrastructure directives through Petroleum's network operator framework, and grid capacity assessments through Power's regulatory architecture. Each instrument is institutionally coherent within its own ministry. What is absent is the convening layer that would bind them into a single industrial outcome.
When FAME II ended and PM E-DRIVE replaced it, the transition created a demand discontinuity because manufacturers had built production plans around a subsidy structure that changed without adequate notice. The disconnection was not between government and industry. It was between one arm of government and another.
The charging infrastructure story is the same disconnect at a different layer. Oil marketing companies were directed, under FAME II sanctions from the Ministry of Heavy Industries, to install charging infrastructure across their fuel retail network. But the OMCs themselves report to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. The electrical infrastructure upgrades required to support fast charging depend on state electricity distribution companies, which report to the Ministry of Power. The grid capacity assessments sit with the Central Electricity Authority. The land and permitting for depot-level bus charging involve municipal authorities under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. No single entity owns the end-to-end solution. The direction to OMCs was administrative, not statutory. There is no timeline-bound obligation with consequences for missing targets. India treated charging as a market opportunity to be nudged rather than a public infrastructure obligation to be executed.
State-level EV policies compound the disconnection. Over 30 states designed their own incentive frameworks with different eligibility criteria, different subsidy amounts, and different validity periods. None were coordinated with the central scheme. For indirect taxation a constitutional mechanism compels Centre-State alignment; for industrial transitions of comparable complexity, no equivalent mechanism exists.
Public bus electrification reveals the disconnection most starkly because the government is simultaneously the policymaker and the customer, and it still cannot coordinate with itself. Convergence Energy Services Limited aggregated demand and achieved significant price discovery for e-buses. But the buses need to be operated by state transport undertakings, which are loss-making entities whose depot infrastructure, grid connections, and maintenance capacity sit outside MHI's or CESL's administrative control.
Battery cells account for roughly a quarter of an electric vehicle's cost. Of the 50 GWh target under the ACC PLI, only 1.4 GWh has been commissioned. Until domestic cell manufacturing scales, EV domestic value addition is structurally capped; the vehicle may be assembled in India, but a quarter of its cost flows to the cell manufacturer abroad.
The ACC battery PLI tells the identical story from the supply side. The commercial decision to partner with a cell manufacturer, the technology transfer negotiation, and the Press Note 3 approval process run on three different clocks. A delay in any one invalidates the production schedule built on the other two. Neither can move decisively without the other committing first. NITI Aayog has played a convening role, but convening without executive authority is insufficient.
India's supply-side and demand-side instruments were designed to work together but were not sequenced or sustained as a reinforcing pair. The supply-side investment through PLI for Advanced Chemistry Cells is genuine but arrives without domestic lithium refining. The demand-side incentives have been inconsistent: FAME II subsidies were revised mid-scheme, states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Delhi offered incentives that were periodically reduced or withdrawn without notice, and the FAME II to PM E-DRIVE transition created a subsidy discontinuity that froze purchasing decisions. Subsidy unpredictability transfers policy risk from the architecture to the operator; the incentive becomes the planning hazard.
Tesla's prolonged India entry negotiations illustrate the structural mismatch from the market access side. Tesla sought import duty concessions to test demand with fully built units before committing to Indian manufacturing. The government's institutional position was the reverse: commit to manufacturing first, then receive tariff accommodation. Neither position was unreasonable within its own logic. Tesla evaluates market entry by testing demand; India evaluates market access by securing manufacturing commitment. The negotiation stalled for years because no institutional mechanism existed to bridge the two frameworks. Ola Electric's trajectory offers the domestic counterpoint; listing on the Indian market while simultaneously contending with Bureau of Indian Standards product quality standards and service delivery challenges that revealed the distance between manufacturing ambition and operational execution.
India has the market scale, the manufacturing ambition, and the policy vocabulary for an EV transition. What it lacks is the machinery to execute all of it as one programme rather than thirty disconnected ones. The company entering India's EV space must plan for thirty separate regulatory engagements, not one.