‘All 24 EV charging points at Nagpur Metro ready for use’
Participants of all age groups, from children to senior citizens, perform synchronised yogasanas during a vibrant demonstration organised by Janardanswami Yogabhyasi Mandal to mark the Samadhi Day of Yogamurti Janardanswami on Thursday. (Pics by Anil Futane)
Staff Reporter :
After years of rodent damage, vandalism, dead SIM cards, and accidentally tripped switches, every single electric vehicle charger installed by Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL) at Nagpur’s Metro stations is working again. All 24 fast chargers are commissioned and operational, EESL sources confirmed to ‘The Hitavada’ on Wednesday. What remains unresolved is whether anyone will use them.
EESL owns and operates the charging infrastructure under a 10-year agreement signed with the Nagpur Metro Rail Corporation Limited in 2020, valid through 2030. EESL bears all procurement, operations, and maintenance costs. It is, on paper, a clean structure. In practice, keeping 24 chargers functional across open public spaces has proven considerably harder.
The failures arrived from multiple directions at once. Rodents gnawed through cables at stations built near open drains.
Display units were vandalised. Emergency stop buttons were tripped accidentally across the network and, each required a manual reset before the charger could return to service.
Running underneath all of this was a technical failure: the chargers were operating on 2G SIM cards for data communication at a time when 4G has long become standard for connected infrastructure. The mismatch caused recurring connectivity errors that made the live charger count on the EESL portal fluctuate unpredictably, rendering it effectively useless as public information. A module fix is currently being tested and is expected to stabilise portal data by June 1.
Sources acknowledged that rodent entry points had been sealed at the time of the original 2020 commissioning. They were not enough. “Continuous monitoring of open public spaces remains a practical challenge,” sources said, a concession that the gap between commissioning and sustained operability is not a problem EESL has fully solved.
Charging demand at EESL’s Metro stations has remained significantly below initial projections.
The reason, sources said, is that most private EV owners charge at home. The people actually generating out-of-home demand are commercial fleet drivers running more than 60 to 70 kilometres a day, primarily those operating app-based cab services. A public fast charger at a Metro station is not designed for someone plugging in overnight in their parking lot.
To bridge that gap, EESL is actively pursuing business-to-business tie-ups with fleet operators including Ola, Uber, and private EV taxi services. It is a model the organisation has already tested in Delhi. A market survey is simultaneously underway to assess local charging requirements and improve public access across its Nagpur stations, though EESL declined to name the agency conducting the assessment.
Maharashtra’s Electric Vehicle Policy designates Nagpur as one of six priority urban centres in the State’s drive to electrify 40% of its public transport fleet. Whether the charging network becomes a genuine utility or remains an underused infrastructure asset, may depend less on how many chargers are working and more on whether the fleet makes the best use of them.
