Delhi Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot on Wednesday, announced government’s pilot project ‘Discover Electric Delhi‘, reported yourstory. The project will deploy upto 1,000 electric vehicles for delivery over the next one year.
As part of this pilot, over 30 urban delivery companies will be transitioning to electric vehicles. Further, the working group of this pilot will include a mix of various industries including online delivery companies, vehicle aggregators, logistics firms, charge station providers, and power distributors.
This announcement was made at the Urban Mobility Lab event organised yesterday by an American organisation Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and Delhi Transport Department.
“EVs are the future. It’s time to bring the future into the present. To make life better for the common man, we need to ensure that the cost of electric vehicles becomes less than petrol and diesel vehicles,” said Gahlot.
While, some notable participants include Amazon, Flipkart, Grofers, Bigbasket, Zomato, UberEats, DOT, Blue Dart Express, Hero Electric, Tata Motors, Tork Motors, and Mahindra Electric, Delta Group, Sun Mobility, and among others.
“We envision to make Delhi EV capital by adopting fully electric public transportation and private companies’ commercial operations by 2023 to achieve 25% EV target,” he added
Earlier in May, Delhi government was reported to be planning incentives for use of electric vehicles for delivery. The incentives were said to be included in the Delhi government’s electric vehicle policy, a draft of which was released in late 2018 to seek public and concerned departments’ comments. The draft policy had aimed to make 25% of all vehicles electric by 2023.
In its 2019-20 budget, the government had allocated ₹100 crore to its state electric vehicle fund along with an outlay of ₹1,807 crore to aid the implementation of transport department’s various schemes, programm and projects.
The state government also earmarked ₹50 crore from the fund of environment compensation charge for the state electric vehicle fund.
India’s central government had also set up a National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP) in 2013 to have at least 30% electric vehicles among all vehicles on the road by 2030.