- Electric buses are breaking down often enough to disrupt routes, even as fleets continue to expand.
- City transport units lease buses from central aggregators who deal with the OEMs, creating a layered, complex cycle of ownership and maintenance.
- Many of the early buses in the fleets are about four-five years old, hitting a point when battery degradation begins.
- The push under FAME II prioritised speed over reliability in e-buses, leaving cities to deal with the hangover of the first-generation designs.
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Whenever a public electric bus breaks down in India, at least three agencies are notified about it. None of them is quite sure who should fix it.
Take the e-bus that staggered to a halt and refused to restart on a cold December morning in south Bengaluru. Techies scrambled to book autos and bikes to get to work. Inside the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), at a cluttered desk in the control room, Jaya answered the driver’s frantic call. She opened a dashboard, typed up the incident, and pinged a diagnostic team to confirm the fault.
“This is the third one this month,” she said. Since 2022, the city bus corporation, which runs over 1,500 e-buses, has logged nearly
Jaya has been with the BMTC for four years and handles calls and error reports. Electric buses, especially the older ones, do not fail in tidy, predictable ways, she said. Sometimes they run for too long before charging. Sometimes the heat overwhelms them. Sometimes it is the cold. And each breakdown eats into run time.
Despite Jaya’s hands-on involvement in the troubleshooting process, her employer has very little control over finding a permanent fix to the problem. The BMTC does not lease the buses, and hence cannot raise maintenance tickets directly with the companies that own them.
Across Pune, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi—any city that runs electric buses—the procurement and management of the fleets fall to central agencies like CESL (Convergence Energy Services Limited) or NVVN (NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam Limited). Their day-to-day operations fall on financially stretched state transport undertakings (STUs) that pay the aggregators on kilometres run rather than on how reliably a bus performs over years of daily operation.
Effectively, what STUs have is a system designed to log breakdowns, calculate deductions and fines, and move on—even when the buses stall. And because the contracts are written to protect projects from financial shock, the fine ends up protecting balance sheets more reliably than bus schedules.
The STUs lose routes and revenue, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) absorb penalties, and public trust in electric buses erodes.
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