Policy Update
Aakash Agrawal
1.Introduction
Vehicular emissions are one of the largest contributors to Delhi’s chronic air quality crisis, and transport electrification has been the National Capital Territory’s central policy response since 2020. The original EV Policy was an incentive-based programme — purchase subsidies, road tax exemption and registration fee waivers — designed to make electric vehicles cost-competitive rather than to compel their adoption. Policy 2.0 marks a deliberate shift in instrument choice: from voluntary incentive to binding mandate, with fixed registration cut-off dates for fossil-fuel vehicles in high-polluting, high-usage segments.
This shift matters for urban planning analysis because mandate-based transitions carry different implementation risks than incentive-based ones. An incentive scheme that under-delivers simply produces a slower transition; a mandate that is not backed by adequate charging infrastructure, grid capacity and financing risks supply shocks in essential transport segments — auto-rickshaws, goods carriers and eventually two-wheelers — that a large share of Delhi’s population depends on for daily mobility and livelihood.
Delhi’s first Electric Vehicle Policy (2020) achieved roughly 14 percent EV penetration in new registrations by 2025 but fell well short of its charging-infrastructure target, delivering only about 10 percent of the planned 45,000 public charge points.
Delhi EV Policy 2.0, drafted through 2025 and formally notified in July 2026, replaces incentive-led encouragement with hard regulatory mandates: phased bans on new registration of fossil-fuel two-wheelers, three-wheelers and goods carriers, and a fleet-wide target of 30 percent electrification by March 2030. This paper traces the policy’s evolution from draft to notification, sets out its core provisions, and assesses implementation performance and structural risks — chiefly subsidy disbursal delays, charging infrastructure siting constraints, extreme-heat battery safety, and inter-agency coordination gaps — that determined the outcome of Policy 1.0 and are likely to shape Policy 2.0.
2. From Policy 1.0 To Policy 2.0: What Changed And Why?
EV Policy 1.0 (August 2020) set a target of 25 percent EV penetration in new vehicle registrations by 2024 and a charging infrastructure target of 45,000 charge points. By the time the policy formally expired in August 2024, Delhi had reached approximately 14 percent EV penetration — a real but partial achievement — while charging infrastructure reached only around 10 percent of its target. The policy was extended multiple times (in 15-day and 3-month increments) through 2025 while a successor was drafted, reflecting a gap between the government’s stated urgency on air pollution and the administrative pace of policy finalisation.
The core diagnosis behind Policy 2.0 was that voluntary incentives were insufficient to shift high-mileage, cost-sensitive vehicle segments (autos, goods carriers, aggregator fleets) at the pace required, and that a narrower set of binding mandates targeted at the most polluting and highest-usage vehicle categories would deliver faster air quality gains than a broad-based subsidy applied uniformly across all vehicle types.
3. Key Provisions of Policy 2.0
3.1 Timeline
| Date | Milestone |
| August 2020 | EV Policy 1.0 notified for a 3-year period; target of 25% EV penetration in new registrations by 2024. |
| August 2024 | EV Policy 1.0 formally expires; extended repeatedly in the absence of a finalised successor. |
| March-April 2025 | Draft EV Policy 2.0 released for public / stakeholder consultation; existing policy given short extensions (15 days, then 3 months) to bridge the gap. |
| July 2026 | Delhi EV Policy 2.0 formally notified by Cabinet, effective 1 July 2026, valid till 31 March 2030. |
| January 2027 | Only electric three-wheelers and N1-category (light goods) trucks to be newly registered in Delhi. |
| April 2028 | Only electric two-wheelers to be newly registered in Delhi. |
| March 2030 | Target date for at least 30% electrification of Delhi’s total vehicle fleet. |
Source: compiled from Delhi Transport Department notifications, Drishti IAS, Down To Earth and Deccan Herald reporting, 2025-2026.
3.2 Registration Mandates
- From January 2027: only electric three-wheelers and N1-category (light commercial) trucks may be newly registered in Delhi; existing fossil-fuel vehicles in these categories may complete their full permitted lifecycle rather than being retired immediately.
- From April 2028: only electric two-wheelers may be newly registered.
- CNG auto-rickshaw permits are not being renewed from August 2025 onward, with existing permits converted to electric auto permits; autos older than 10 years face mandatory replacement or battery retrofit.
- Private car buyers who already own two vehicles are required to purchase electric for any additional vehicle.
3.3 Financial Incentives
- Two-wheelers: phased purchase subsidy of ₹30,000 in year one, ₹20,000 in year two, and ₹10,000 in year three, plus a per-kWh battery incentive.
- Three-wheelers (goods carriers, L5N category): subsidies up to ₹45,000-₹50,000, with a price cap of ₹4.5 lakh on eligible vehicles.
- Four-wheeler goods carriers (N1 category): subsidies up to ₹75,000, with a price cap of ₹12.5 lakh.
- Women buyers of electric two-wheelers are eligible for incentives up to ₹36,000.
- Hybrid vehicles are explicitly excluded from all subsidies — the policy is designed around pure battery-electric vehicles only.
3.4 Public and Fleet Transport
- School buses: minimum 10 percent electrification within two years of notification, rising to 30 percent by 2030.
- Municipal solid-waste collection vehicles (MCD, NDMC, Delhi Jal Board): phased transition to 100 percent electric fleet by December 2027.
- DTC and DIMTS public bus operators are to procure only electric buses for intra-city routes going forward, with the electric bus fleet targeted to reach roughly 3,000 vehicles.
3.5 Institutional and Financial Architecture
A new Delhi Clean Mobility Centre is proposed as the nodal implementation body, with the Transport Department acting as the lead department and Delhi Transco Ltd. responsible for charging infrastructure roll-out in coordination with the power department and electricity distribution companies (discoms). Implementation is backed by ₹7,000 crore in direct allocation against a stated ₹15,000 crore overall investment envelope, funded through an expanded State EV Fund drawing on the Air Ambience Fund, pollution charges, aggregator licence fees and levies on non-electric vehicle registrations.
4. Implementation Progress and Structural Challenges
As of mid-2026, the policy is in its early implementation phase, and its principal risks are the same categories of execution failure that undermined Policy 1.0 rather than new or unforeseen ones — which suggests they are systemic to Delhi’s multi-agency governance structure rather than specific to any one policy document.
4.1 Subsidy Disbursal Delays
Under Policy 1.0, a recurring and well-documented complaint was that promised purchase subsidies took months to reach buyers, creating cash-flow strain particularly for commercial buyers (auto and goods-carrier operators) who typically operate on thin margins. Policy 2.0 attempts to address this directly through pre-vetted ‘purchase stickers’ and automated claims processing, but this is a process fix layered onto the same underlying institutional workflow, and its effectiveness will only be verifiable once disbursal-time data becomes available.
4.2 Charging Infrastructure Siting
Policy 1.0’s single largest shortfall was infrastructure: roughly 10 percent of the 45,000-point target was achieved. Land scarcity in a dense city like Delhi is the binding constraint, not capital — the ₹7,000 crore allocation is unlikely to be the limiting factor if suitable sites cannot be identified and cleared across multiple land-owning agencies (DDA, MCD, PWD, discoms). Policy 2.0’s response is a ‘concessional location policy’ for infrastructure siting, but this only works if inter-agency land allocation is faster than it was during 2020-2024, which is an institutional coordination problem, not a policy-design problem.
4.3 Extreme Heat and Battery Safety
Delhi’s summer temperatures, which regularly exceed 45°C, pose a genuine technical risk to EV battery thermal management systems that is specific to this geography and was not fully addressed in the original 2020 policy. This has direct implications for both vehicle safety and battery degradation rates, and for autos and goods carriers that operate through the hottest hours of the day, this is a livelihood-relevant risk, not just a consumer-convenience issue.
4.4 Retrofitting Safety Debate
A 2026 proposal to subsidise retrofitting of older CNG/petrol autos to battery power (at roughly ₹50,000 per conversion, aimed at autos above 10 years old facing mandatory replacement) has drawn safety objections from vehicle manufacturers, who argue that retrofit conversions lack the engineering validation of factory-built EVs. This is an unresolved regulatory question that directly affects the roughly-10-year-old auto-rickshaw fleet Policy 2.0 is trying to phase out, and the outcome will materially affect the cost borne by low-income commercial drivers.
4.5 Timeline Realism for Auto-Ricksaws
Independent commentary has flagged that the one-year compliance window originally proposed for phasing out CNG autos gives limited room for consumer readiness and infrastructure build-out, particularly since reliable data on the number of autos older than 10 years was not publicly available at the time the mandate was framed — meaning the policy set a compliance deadline before fully quantifying the population it applies to.
5. Comparative Note: Mandate vs Incentive Design
Policy 2.0’s shift toward binding registration mandates is a defensible response to Policy 1.0’s shortfall, but it changes the nature of the risk the government is carrying. An incentive-based policy that misses its target produces a slower-than-planned transition, which is a manageable outcome.
A mandate-based policy that is not matched by adequate charging density, grid capacity and affordable financing at the point the mandate takes effect (January 2027 for three-wheelers and goods carriers) risks a genuine supply disruption in transport segments that low- and middle-income Delhi residents depend on directly for income. The government’s own framing acknowledges this asymmetry through its emphasis on subsidy and infrastructure readiness, but the underlying execution capacity for infrastructure roll-out has not yet been demonstrated to have improved from the 10 percent of target outcome under Policy 1.0.
Conclusion
Delhi EV Policy 2.0 represents a coherent and more assertive successor to a policy that delivered partial results. Its regulatory ambition — hard registration cut-offs rather than open-ended incentives — is a reasonable response to the specific failure mode of Policy 1.0, which was slow voluntary uptake in the highest-polluting, highest-usage vehicle segments.
However, the risks that undermined the first policy (subsidy disbursal delays and charging infrastructure siting, both fundamentally inter-agency coordination problems) have not been structurally resolved, only proceduralised. Whether Policy 2.0 succeeds will depend less on the ambition of its targets and mandates and more on whether the Delhi Clean Mobility Centre and Delhi Transco Ltd. can compress the land-allocation and disbursal-time delays that defined the 2020-2024 period, ahead of the January 2027 three-wheeler and goods-carrier mandate deadline.
References
Delhi Transport Department, Government of NCT of Delhi — Delhi Electric Vehicle Policy 2.0 notification, 2026.
Drishti IAS — ‘Delhi Electric Vehicle Policy 2.0’, current affairs briefs, 2025-2026.
Down To Earth — ‘Delhi EV Policy 2.0: Its Bold, But Not Yet Beautiful’, March 2025.
Deccan Herald — reporting on Delhi EV Policy extensions and draft policy provisions, 2025.
Bolt.Earth — ‘Delhi’s EV Policy 2026: Incentives, Infrastructure and Impact’, May 2026.
Ackodrive — ‘Delhi EV Policy 2.0: What Does It Mean For You?’, April 2025.
About the Contributor
Aakash Agrawal is a Research & Editorial Intern at IMPRI. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Manipal School of Architecture and Planning, Karnataka, and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning at Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow. His interests lie in urban policy, governance, and sustainable development, with a focus on implementation-oriented research that supports efficient, inclusive, and resilient cities.
Acknowledgement
The author extends his sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their invaluable guidance throughout the process.
Reviewers: Lubina Dua
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
