A charging station at a depot in Rajghat, Delhi.
Photographer: Ruhani Kaur for Bloomberg MarketsThe Developing World Is Buying $180,000 E-buses on the Cheap
India used financial alchemy to fund big-city transport at 30 cents a ride.
Talk about mission impossible. Your assignment: Electrify India’s fleet of public buses, which transport 128 million people a day. The economics are harrowing. An e-bus costs about 15 million Indian rupees ($177,000), 2.5 times the price of a diesel model. India’s riders tend to be poor. In Delhi, they pay a maximum of 25 rupees, or 30¢, for a ride. Women pay nothing.
The prospect made Mahua Acharya’s stomach ache. It seemed to require the resources of a multinational corporation. But Acharya ran Convergence Energy Services Ltd., or CESL, a small government-owned company committed to replacing fossil fuels. “I wanted access to scale,” she says. “It was really bugging me.”