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In a bid to incentivise electric vehicles, the Delhi government is considering waiving road tax on all electric vehicles.
In the State Budget 2018-2019 speech, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said, “To further promote electric mobility in Delhi, we are preparing a comprehensive electric vehicle policy, which will particularly emphasise the replacement of BS-II and BS-III two-wheelers, taxi fleet and commercial goods carriers with fully electric vehicles.”
Varsha Joshi, Secretary, Power and Transport, told BusinessLine , “We have proposed waiving road tax for all electric vehicles. We are also working on an incentive scheme for replacing old two-wheelers with electric ones.”
‘Green Budget’
The government presented its first ‘Green Budget’ with 26 schemes of four departments — Environment, Power, Transport and Public Works.
Sisodia has proposed rolling out 1,000 fully-electric buses in the financial year 2018-2019. “This will be the highest fleet of electric buses in any city or State in India, and in fact, by any city in the world outside of China,” he said.
Electric buses
A Delhi government official said: “The proposal to procure the buses is scheduled to get an approval of the Council of Ministers by April 30. The draft tender documents are expected to be floated by June 30 and bids are to be opened by September 25. The financial closure of each project is expected by February 28 and the supply of buses will begin from March 31, 2019,” the official said. For rooftop solar, the government has proposed extending the generation-based incentive (GBI) scheme beyond 2018-2019. “In the Budget, the State has provisioned ₹10 crore for capital expenditure of some rooftop solar projects and another ₹5 crore as GBI,” an official said.
The government’s budgetary support for GBI is ₹2 per unit. This works out to around ₹2,600 per kW per year for three years and contributes to around 15 to 20 per cent of installation cost for domestic consumers. This is in addition to a 30 per cent capital subsidy from the Centre.
Subsidy for gensets
The Delhi Budget has proposed a subsidy of up to ₹30,000 to firms for switching over from diesel generator sets of 10 KVA or more to clean fuel-based electricity generator sets.
A one-time subsidy of ₹30,000 is also offered to all e-rickshaw owners registered from July 2015 to April 2016.
Chandra Bhushan, Deputy Director-General of the city-based NGO Centre for Science and Environment, said the Delhi government should be complimented for these environment-friendly proposals in the budget. A city as polluted as Delhi, needs such immediate measures and more, he said.
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