E-Paper
Clean mobility is now an economic imperative
This article is authored by Rohit Kumar Singh, former secretary, Government of India.
The recent conflict in West Asia has offered India a familiar, if unwelcome, reminder: Energy security and economic security are not separate conversations. Every time oil markets shudder or a shipping lane comes under threat, the tremors travel quickly — into fuel prices, into inflation prints, into the quiet erosion of household budgets. The lesson is not new. What has changed is the urgency with which India must act on it. The shift to clean mobility is no longer a distant green ambition; it is, quite plainly, an economic imperative.
The underlying vulnerability has been with us for decades. India imports over 85% of its crude oil, and in Financial Year (FY) 2024-25 the bill came to $137 billion. This is not a rounding error in the national accounts; it is a structural exposure that gets tested every time there is a flare-up in the Gulf or a disruption in global shipping lanes. And as one of the world's fastest-growing large economies, India's appetite for energy is not going to shrink to make this problem more manageable. The problem must be engineered away — through domestic capability, not through hope that the next disruption will be milder than the last.
The real question, then, is not how to secure the next shipment of crude. It is whether India can build the domestic depth — in clean energy, in battery manufacturing, in the advanced technologies that sit beneath both - that insulates the economy from the next disruption, wherever it originates.
Electric Vehicles (EV) fit into this story not only as a cleaner alternative to the petrol car, but also as a hedge - a bet on domestic manufacturing, a way of keeping more of that $137 billion working inside the Indian economy rather than leaving it each year. India's own targets reflect this logic with some precision: 30% EV penetration for private cars, 70% for commercial vehicles, 40% for buses, and 80% for two- and three-wheelers by 2030. These are ambitious numbers. They are also, I would argue, the strategically essential ones.
India's policy architecture already reflects this shift. The ₹18,100 crore PLI scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cell batteries and the ₹25,938 crore PLI scheme for automobiles and auto components are not subsidies in the old, defensive sense. They are industrial bets on where the world is heading — designed to build the kind of supply chain depth that takes decades to replicate, and to signal to global capital that India intends to be a serious clean mobility manufacturing hub, not merely a large market for one.
This is also where India's manufacturing ambitions intersect with a broader geopolitical recalibration. As global supply chains diversify away from over-concentration in any single geography, India's clean mobility push and its PLI architecture offer a credible alternative node — one that partners like the US are increasingly looking to as they friend-shore critical technology and mineral supply chains. The India-US trade relationship, still finding its footing on tariffs and market access, has clean energy and critical minerals as one of its more promising points of convergence. Getting the domestic ecosystem right is not simply about import substitution; it is about positioning India as an indispensable partner in the next phase of global supply chain realignment.
India's rapidly evolving EV and clean energy ecosystem is, in turn, opening up the critical minerals value chain — lithium, cobalt and nickel, the three minerals that sit at the heart of every battery. The IEA's 2025 Critical Minerals Outlook found that energy applications — EVs, battery storage, renewables — accounted for 85% of all growth in demand for battery metals in 2024 alone, with lithium demand rising nearly 30% in a single year and projected to grow fivefold by 2040. India's own demand for critical minerals is expected to more than double by 2030, and the investment, innovation and employment that follows from this will not be confined to any one segment of the workforce; the sector is already drawing in greater participation from women across critical minerals and clean energy value chains.
It has become fashionable to discuss the EV transition as a disruption to India's automobile sector. I would frame it differently: This is the sector's next growth chapter, not an interruption to the last one. NITI Aayog's projections point to 50 million direct and indirect jobs across the EV value chain by 2030. CEEW estimates that 30% EV penetration alone will generate 1.2 lakh new jobs in manufacturing and EV ecosystem services. And the positioning is already underway — legacy two-wheeler makers have strengthened their hold on the electric segment, domestic automakers are expanding electric passenger vehicle lineups, and commercial vehicle manufacturers are seeing electric fleet orders surge, particularly in logistics and urban freight.
EVs will carry the bulk of this load, but hybrid technologies, green hydrogen and biofuels each have a role at different points in the transition and across different segments of the fleet. This diversity should be read as a feature of the strategy, not a hedge against its failure — it makes the system as a whole more resilient to any single disruption, technological or geopolitical.
The success of India's clean mobility push should not, in the end, be measured by EV sales figures alone. The real test is whether it reduces the import bill, deepens domestic manufacturing, secures the supply chains that matter, and makes India materially less susceptible to the next West Asia-style shock. Clean mobility, in that sense, has stopped being a story about emissions. It is now a story about reducing vulnerability, building domestic capability, and securing India's economic future on India's own terms.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Rohit Kumar Singh, former secretary, Government of India.
