India’s Electric Buses Are Growing Fast. The Depots Running Them? Not So Much

Part 1: The Cracks Beneath the Celebration

I remember the first time I walked into an electric bus depot in India. It was sometime in early 2024, and the air had a certain optimism to it. Brand new buses lined up in neat rows, gleaming under LED lights, their silent motors a sharp contrast to the rumbling diesel yards I’d grown up seeing. The depot manager, a man who had spent two decades with diesel fleets, waved his hand across the yard and said, “Sahab, yeh sab electric hai, aur abhi se yahi Chalega.” This is all electric, and this is gonna be the future.

He wasn’t wrong. But what neither of us fully understood at the time was how unprepared that future would be for the present.

The Numbers Tell a Proud Story

India took roughly five years to put its first 10,000 electric buses on the road. From pilot projects in Bangalore and Mumbai to the massive CESL aggregation tenders, the journey was slow, bureaucratic, and often frustrating. But we got there. And now, with the PM E-DRIVE scheme pushing subsidies of up to ₹35 lakh per 12-metre bus and more than 14,000 additional buses in the procurement pipeline, India is set to double that number in the next year alone.

The ambition is staggering. Delhi alone plans to have 8,000 electric buses running by the end of this year. States like Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra are racing to electrify their fleets. The Bharat Urban Megabus Mission envisions 100,000 electric buses across cities with a population of 1 million or more by 2030.

For a country where 56 State Transport Undertakings collectively carry approximately ₹38,000 crore in debt, this is more than a technology shift. It’s a leap of faith. And for the private operators who actually run these buses under the Gross Cost Contract model, where they own, operate, and maintain the buses while the STU pays them a fixed rate per kilometre, it’s a leap with very little safety net.

Facing the Heat

If you’ve followed the news in recent months, you know the story hasn’t been all celebration.

In March 2026, a DTC electric bus caught fire near Vayusenabad in Delhi. The bus was gutted. Fifteen passengers were on board. Mercifully, everyone was evacuated safely, thanks in large part to a driver who had clearly been trained in emergency protocols. He used a fire extinguisher, pulled the bus to the curb, and got everyone out. But the bus was a total loss. For the operator, that’s not just a vehicle gone. Under the GCC model, that’s revenue gone. No kilometres operated means no payment from the STU. The capital loss of a ₹1.2 to ₹1.5 crore asset, plus the revenue bleed while the bus sits destroyed, is devastating.

And fires aren’t the only crisis. The accident data is sobering. Bengaluru’s electric buses were involved in 18 accidents over 15 months, six of them fatal. Mumbai saw two crashes between December 2024 and January 2025. In Gujarat and Odisha, the incidents have stretched well beyond the metros. The common thread in nearly every investigation? It wasn’t the technology. Driver error accounts for roughly 60% of these accidents. The buses work. The systems supporting the humans who drive them? Not so much.

STUs have responded with promises of mandatory licence reviews, refresher training courses, and stricter oversight. But here’s what I’ve seen on the ground: the training problem is just the tip of an iceberg that goes all the way down to the depot floor.

The Real Story: Nobody Trained the Depot

Here’s what most people outside this industry don’t realise. Running an electric bus fleet is fundamentally different from running a diesel one. It’s not just about swapping the fuel source. The entire operational DNA of a depot needs to change, from how you schedule charging to how you read battery health data to how you allocate drivers to specific vehicles based on route profiles and state of charge.

And yet, across the dozens of depots I’ve visited in the last three years, the ground reality is this: most of the operational staff, depot managers, charging supervisors, and maintenance crews are diesel-era professionals who have been handed the keys to an entirely new technology with minimal training and almost no digital tools.

The transition happened faster than the capability building. OEMs delivered buses. Chargers got installed. And then everyone looked around and said, “Now what?”

So what does a typical EV bus depot actually look like? Where exactly do things fall apart — at the electrical panel, at the charger, in the telematics dashboard, or somewhere deeper?

That’s what we’ll unpack in Part 2.

To be continued…