 "Piyush Goyal")
The Ministry also said through Public Private Partnership (PPP) model it will create charging infrastructure across the country at petrol bunks to charge e-vehicles.
Speaking after inaugurating Bio-CNG Plant at Mahindra World City, near Chennai, Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (Independent Charge) – Power, Coal, New ad Renewable Energy said that “I have spoken to the Chief Minister of Maharastra and requested him to exempt e-vehicles from VAT, road tax and registration fee, he was positive. Will be talking to him again tomorrow on this.”
The Minister said as part of clean India programme his Ministry has taken several initiatives and one of them is to promote e-vehicles across the country. Today one of the major challenge is cost and infrastructure to charge the batteries.
“We are working with all stake holders to see how to reduce the cost, while through PPP mode we will look at creating infrastructure to set up charging points in petrol bunks,” said the Minister.
Pawan Goenka, executive director, Mahindra & Mahindra said he welcome the Ministry’s approach and said the company will look at joining and working with the Ministry in the project. He also said that the company already working with some independent providers to bring down the cost atleast by half.
Goyal added at present his Ministry is electrifying around 100-120 villages every day and this will be increased to 200.
The Prime Minister has given a target to electrify the 18,452 villages, which don’t have electricity now, in the country in 1000 days, but we are confident that the target will be achieved in 730 days.
He said currently 12 states have signed for UDAY (Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana) and he is confident all the states will sign soon. UDAY has been launched to improve financial and operational efficiencies of power distribution companies (DISCOMs). It envisages to reduce interest burden, cost of power and AT&C losses. Consequently, DISCOM would become sustainable to supply adequate and reliable power enabling 24x7 power supply. The scheme provides that States would take over 75% debt of Discoms, as on 30th September, 2015 in two years.
On adding new renewable energy projects, the Minister said, on solar the target was to 2000 MW in 2015-16 and the Ministry is confident that it will be increased by around 25-30 per cent and in 2016-17 around 12000 MW will be added in Solar alone.
