Indian Oil ties up with Ola for first EV charging station in Nagpur

Indian Oil Corp, India's fuel refiner and marketer, on Sunday launched an electric car charging point at its fuel pump in Nagpur in partnership with Ola for charging the taxi aggregator's electric fleet.

"Nagpur, the first city to introduce the electric public transportation model in India, has added one more feather to its cap by adding the first electric charging station at Indian Oil's COCO (company-owned, company-operated) fuel station in the city," an IOC release said.

Indian Oil's entry into the EV ecosystem is part of chairman Sanjiv Singh's vision to prepare the company for disruptions in the traditional fuel business.

"The oil industry has to gear up to face disruptive technologies and Indian Oil has to make investments to prepare for the future even though oil will remain in the mainstream of the country's energy discourse for long," Singh had told employees in a webcast on 1 June after taking over as chairman.

"We applaud Ola for building the electric vehicle eco-system from a nascent stage in Nagpur and are happy to partner with them in their efforts," IOC executive ddirector (Maharashtra) Murali Srinivasan said in a statement.

In its annual report for 2016-17 presented earlier this year, IOC said it planned to set up battery charging stations and was exploring the manufacture and retailing of lithium-ion batteries.

Barely a week before Singh took over, Nagpur had become the first city in India to get an EV-based public transportation model, with a fleet of 200 taxis, buses, e-rickshaws and autos.

The union government's National Electric Mobility Mission Plan launched in 2013 aims at gradually ensuring a vehicle population of about 6-7 million electric and hybrid vehicles in India by 2020. The vision enunciated two years ago is for India to have only EVs on the road by 2030.

Indian Oil is the second state-run entity to take baby steps into the EV ecosystem. In June, India's largest power generator National Thermal Power Corp had set up two charging points in its Delhi and Noida offices and is working on expanding in Delhi and other cities.