The Business of Indian EV Infrastructure

ELI5 / TLDR

Zerodha’s Subtext sat down with Zora Khan, CEO of IPC India, a company that makes the chargers that come bundled with your electric scooter, plus the public charging stations and the software that runs them. The core insight: a charger is mostly the same box of power electronics regardless of which scooter it plugs into — what actually differs is the software handshake and the physical connector. The real bottlenecks for India’s EV transition aren’t the cars; they’re the unglamorous middle layer — a fragmented mess of connectors and protocols still getting standardized, an ageing local distribution grid that wasn’t built for everyone charging at 8pm, and a semiconductor supply chain that India still imports wholesale. IPC’s pitch is that building hardware tough enough to survive India’s chaotic grid is itself a moat — a charger that works here works anywhere.

The Full Story

A charger is a charger is a charger

The instinct is to assume that an Ather charger and a Bajaj charger are fundamentally different machines. They aren’t. Strip away the branding and every EV charger does the same boring thing: takes alternating current from the grid, converts it to direct current, and pushes it into a battery. The heart of it is a rectifier plus some conversion and protection circuits, and that core is common across every OEM.

“Whether it’s an Ather or an Ola or let’s say a Bajaj or any of these OEMs the basic hardware remains common because the function is the same.”

What changes sits on top. First, the software: each scooter’s battery management system — the onboard brain that decides how the pack gets charged — speaks its own dialect, so the charger has to be taught to talk to it. Second, the connector: the physical plug. Cars have settled this (more on that below), but two- and three-wheelers are still a zoo of incompatible plugs. Third, the power level, which just scales with battery size. IPC builds a platform spanning 350 watts to 3,300 watts where the hardware stays put and only the software layer and interface get swapped. That sameness is the whole business model — it’s why one supplier can serve ten OEMs at once without re-engineering from scratch.

The connector wars, and the protocol underneath

Anyone who lived through the type-A / type-B / micro-USB / type-C saga with phones already understands the problem. India’s EV connectors are at the messy adolescent stage where every player picked their own plug because the industry was too new to know better. Four-wheelers have grown up — there’s a mandated standard called CCS2 (Combined Charging System), and every new car now ships with it. Two- and three-wheelers haven’t, partly because India is the one leading the global two-wheeler EV charge, so there’s no other country’s homework to copy.

IPC’s response is to help write the standard rather than wait for it. It’s a founding member, alongside Ather Energy and Hero Vida, of a new consortium called LEAF — the Light Electric Vehicle Acceleration Forum — launched the previous month to standardize the hardware and software for small EVs. The strategic logic is bluntly stated:

“Whoever joins this first or standardizes this first these are the people who will shape how the standards are written for the future. And every OEM now knows which side of the table they want to be on.”

Underneath the physical plug sits a software stack worth naming, because it’s where a lot of the actual interoperability lives. OCPP — the Open Charge Point Protocol — is the common language that lets any charger talk to any cloud management system, regardless of who built either. Think of it as the thing that means charger brand X and software brand Y can work together without a custom integration. The current workhorse is version 1.6; a newer 2.1 adds support for two-way charging and feeding power back to the grid. And a sibling protocol, OCPI, handles network-to-network roaming — so charging on one operator’s station while signed up with another works the way your SIM roams onto a foreign carrier.

The grid is the real bottleneck, and it’s hiding in your building’s basement

This is the part Khan clearly cares about most, and it’s the most counterintuitive. India is officially a power-surplus country — it generates more than enough. Generation and high-voltage transmission, she argues, are genuinely a national engineering triumph. The problem is the last mile: distribution. The 11 kV and 415 V lines that carry power from the grid into your neighbourhood, and specifically the transformers parked in residential areas, were sized for the demands of a decade or two ago.

“During the day you’ll not have any issue… but then now everybody comes back in the evening and everybody puts their ACs, chargers, everything… so the peak happens all at once.”

A typical Bangalore residential transformer serving 20–30 flats is rated somewhere between 100 and 250 KVA. It coasts through the day, then everyone arrives home, switches on the AC, and plugs in the car — all simultaneously. The transformer slides into overload territory, runs hot, its insulation ages faster, and it fails early. The neighbours at the far end of the line watch their voltage sag and their own appliances suffer. EV charging doesn’t create this problem so much as it pours fuel on a fire that ageing transformers and rising AC loads had already lit.

There are two fixes, and they run in parallel. The hardware fix is the slow, expensive one: physically upgrade transformers, cables and meters. The software fix is cleverer — “dynamic load management,” where a cloud system sees every charger hanging off a given transformer, knows how much headroom is left, and parcels out power so the collective draw never tips into overload. Slow charging quietly at night instead of demanding a fast hit is the polite version of the same idea.

On the home side, this is why Khan keeps steering people away from grid upgrades they don’t need. A standard Indian single-phase connection is sanctioned for around 5 kW (sometimes 7.5). A home charger’s sweet spot is 3.3 kW, and single-phase can comfortably push 7.4 kW. Since a parked car sits idle for five or six hours overnight, slow charging on the existing single-phase line is plenty — no need to apply to the discom for a three-phase upgrade that costs ₹10,000–30,000 and an unpredictable wait. Save the fast 60–120 kW charging for public stations, where those constraints don’t apply.

Building for the worst grid in the room

The most interesting business claim is that India’s electrical chaos is IPC’s competitive moat. A charger designed for Germany or China assumes a stable grid. Drop it into India and it fails, because here the nominal 240 V single-phase supply routinely wanders from below 200 V to above 300 V, with surges, sags, harmonics, and phase imbalances on top. So IPC engineers for the worst case by default: a wide input range that tolerates anything from ~160 V to ~320 V, and surge protection rated for 6 kV where the rest of the world considers 4 kV more than enough.

Then add the non-electrical punishment — heat, dust, monsoon water ingress, and the vibration of a charger rattling around in a scooter’s boot over Indian roads. The argument that follows is the genuinely clever bit:

“A product that is developed for India can withstand… can work anywhere in the most reliable way… so whether it’s a Chinese charger or a German-made charger, I would say we will do it better and cheaper.”

Build for the hardest market at India-scale volumes, and you get something that is both bulletproof and cheap — which becomes an export advantage rather than just a domestic necessity.

What India can’t build yet

Asked the hardest thing to localize, Khan doesn’t hedge: semiconductors and microcontrollers. Every power converter relies on switching elements — MOSFETs and IGBTs — plus a microcontroller running the control algorithm, and India imports essentially all of them, mostly from supply chains rooted in China and Taiwan. The government’s production-linked incentive schemes are pulling fab investment in, but a mature local semiconductor ecosystem at competitive price points is three to five years out, not imminent.

Below the chips, localization gets easier as capital intensity drops: bare PCBs and magnetics (transformers, inductors) are next-hardest, then passive components like capacitors and resistors, where good Indian manufacturers already exist. Enclosures, die-castings, cables and plastics are already local. The net is that IPC’s “domestic value add” — the share of each unit actually made in India — already exceeds 55%, with the remaining gap pinned almost entirely on those imported chips.

Will the OEMs eat their supplier?

The obvious threat to a component supplier is backward integration — the OEM deciding to build chargers in-house. Khan concedes it’s a permanent risk in any industry and that vehicle makers have the capital to do it. Her counter is the standard specialist’s defence: IPC innovates faster because charging is its whole world rather than one item on a car company’s enormous to-do list, and it has economies of scale because it sells the same core hardware to ten manufacturers, not one. A captive in-house team would need to be much larger and couldn’t match those component-buying volumes.

She frames vertical integration as a phase, not a destiny — the thing young industries do (she nods to Ford building everything itself, and to BYD and Geely in China) when no supplier ecosystem exists yet. As the market matures and the job shifts from “integrate it once” to “keep upgrading and scaling it forever,” specialization and a tiered supplier ecosystem — exactly what internal-combustion autos already have — tends to reassert itself. She even points, without naming it, at a two-wheeler OEM that tried to do everything itself and is now pivoting into becoming an energy-storage company. And asked directly whether there’ll be an IPC scooter in ten years, à la BYD going from batteries to cars, she’s flat: never. The ambition is to be a power-electronics company across EVs, renewables and storage — and she won’t compete with her own customers.

What’s next

The forward look is modest and concrete. FY27 is a doubling of sales, which is mostly an operations problem — scaling the “five Ms” of manpower, method, machinery, materials and money to hit 2x output. On product, the one she’s most animated about is the bidirectional charger: a box that can run in reverse and let your parked vehicle’s battery power a small load — a few lights during a rural outage, say. And IPC is moving into full end-to-end public charging (hardware plus cloud software plus app) in partnership with Luminous-adjacent Schneider Electric company Lauritz Knudsen.

Key Takeaways

An EV charger is fundamentally a rectifier that converts grid AC to battery DC; the hardware is common across OEMs. Only the software handshake (talking to the vehicle’s battery management system), the physical connector, and the power level differ.
One platform spans 350 W to 3,300 W with shared hardware — which is precisely why a single supplier can serve ten OEMs without re-engineering each charger.
Four-wheelers have a mandated connector standard (CCS2). Two- and three-wheelers are still fragmented because India is leading that segment globally and has no precedent to copy.
IPC co-founded LEAF (Light Electric Vehicle Acceleration Forum) with Ather and Hero Vida to standardize small-EV charging — explicitly to be the one writing the standards rather than complying with someone else’s.
OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) lets any charger talk to any cloud system; OCPI handles roaming between charging networks. The newer OCPP 2.1 adds bidirectional / vehicle-to-grid support.
India is power-surplus at generation and transmission. The bottleneck is distribution — ageing neighbourhood transformers (100–250 KVA for 20–30 flats) that overload when everyone charges at the same evening peak.
The evening peak (ACs + chargers together) is what kills transformers via thermal stress, not average daily load. Fixes: physical upgrades plus software-based dynamic load management.
Home single-phase connections are sanctioned ~5 kW (up to 7.5). A 3.3 kW charger overnight is enough; a three-phase upgrade costs ₹10,000–30,000 and is usually unnecessary. Reserve fast 60–120 kW charging for public stations.
Indian grid reality: nominal 240 V single-phase swings from under 200 V to over 300 V. IPC builds for 160–320 V input range and 6 kV surge protection vs the global norm of 4 kV.
Building for India’s worst-case grid at scale is pitched as an export moat: a charger hardened for India works anywhere, and high domestic volume makes it cheap too.
Hardest component to localize: semiconductors (MOSFETs, IGBTs) and microcontrollers — all imported via China/Taiwan supply chains, ~3–5 years from competitive local production. Magnetics and PCBs are next; passives and mechanicals largely already local.
IPC’s domestic value add already exceeds 55%, with the gap almost entirely the imported chips.
Business modes: ODM (OEM gives a spec, IPC designs) vs contract manufacturing (OEM gives a full design IPC may not reuse). R&D / non-recurring engineering costs for OEM changes are usually absorbed by IPC, since OEM volumes are large; bespoke, OEM-specific tooling gets paid for by the OEM.
Vertical integration is framed as an early-industry phase; as markets mature, tiered supplier ecosystems (like internal-combustion autos) reassert. An unnamed two-wheeler OEM that tried to do everything is pivoting to energy storage.
FY27 outlook: 2x sales (an ops-scaling problem); flagship new product is a bidirectional charger for powering small loads during outages; expanding into end-to-end public charging with Schneider’s Lauritz Knudsen.

Claude’s Take

This is a clean, well-conducted founder interview that does the rare thing of making an infrastructure layer legible. The Zerodha interviewers came prepared — the questions about discom variation, transformer shortages, the draft electricity policy and OCPP roaming were specific enough that Khan couldn’t coast on platitudes. The single most useful idea here is the reframe that India’s generation is fine and the entire EV-charging problem lives in the last-mile distribution grid plus the evening demand peak. That’s the kind of mental model that reorganizes how you read every other EV headline.

Where to apply the BS filter: this is the CEO of a charger company, so the recurring theme — “India’s terrible grid is actually our moat” and “we’ll do it better and cheaper than China and Germany” — is a sales narrative as much as an analysis. It’s a plausible one; the engineering logic (wide voltage tolerance, 6 kV surge) is real and the export-from-a-hard-market argument has precedent. But “we can beat Chinese power electronics on cost” is an enormous claim to wave through when she’s just finished explaining that the most cost-determining components, the semiconductors, are entirely imported and three-to-five years from local maturity. Cheaper enclosures don’t offset imported silicon. Similarly, the answer to “won’t the OEMs build this themselves” is the textbook supplier answer; it’s reasonable, but every component supplier in history has said exactly this right up until the OEM decided otherwise.

Nothing here is misleading, and the discussion is genuinely educational on standards (LEAF, CCS2, OCPP/OCPI) and grid economics. It’s marketing-adjacent in the way all founder interviews are, with no independent numbers to verify the growth or cost claims. A solid, information-dense 7 — I’d have given it an 8 if a single skeptical follow-up had pressed the “cheaper than China” claim against the imported-chip reality, or if there’d been any hard financials.