Almost every lever in the policy is aimed at the privately owned vehicle — the two-wheeler, the three-wheeler, the four-wheeler. Public transport is an afterthought: newly inducted Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) buses must be electric, and commercial fleet aggregators must electrify 30% of their buses by March 2030. 

The overwhelming weight of the ₹15,000 crore goes to helping a Delhi household buy a cleaner private vehicle — not to moving it out of the private vehicle altogether.

Buses That Never Came

Consider how long that neglect has run. 

Delhi's core population is now roughly 2.3 crore, and the wider National Capital Region (NCR) commuter belt some 3.5 crore — a scale on which buses, not private EVs, are the only serious answer. Back in July 1998, in the same landmark case that forced Delhi onto CNG, the Supreme Court ordered the government to run at least 10,000 buses by April 2001. 

Two decades on, in a 2018 affidavit to the High Court, the state itself admitted it needed a baseline of 11,000 — a figure later pushed toward 12,000. Yet the combined DTC and cluster fleet today stands at barely 7,300.

Set that against Shenzhen. 

The Chinese city covers roughly 2,000 sq km — marginally larger than Delhi's entire National Capital Territory (NCT) of 1,483 sq km — and holds some 18 million people, not far short of Delhi's 23 million. 

On that near-identical ground, it runs about 642 km of metro to Delhi's 390, and over 16,000 buses, every one of them electric, against Delhi's 4,500-odd. The gap is not land or density; it is a decades-long choice about what to build.

The Problem Isn't The Engine

Delhi’s new EV policy is to run until March 31, 2030. It says from January 2027, only electric autorickshaws may be registered; from April 2028, the same bar falls on new petrol and CNG two-wheelers. Electric cars up to ₹30 lakh get a full waiver on road tax and registration; two-wheeler buyers get subsidies of up to ₹30,000 in the first year, tapering thereafter; scrap an old polluter and buy an EV, and the state hands you up to ₹1 lakh. Thirty thousand charging and battery-swapping points are promised.

This is the quiet flaw in India's urban mobility thinking: we have decided the problem is the internal combustion engine, while the real problem facing the nation is the automobile-centric city itself. Swapping petrol for a battery, or blending ethanol into fuel, changes what comes out of the tailpipe. It does absolutely nothing about the congestion, road crash casualties, the land swallowed by parking, or too many vehicles chasing too little road. 

The clearest way to see the disorientation is to break down how Indians actually travel, sorting every daily trip into three buckets: non-motorised transport (walking and cycling), private vehicles, and public transport.

Mumbai leads, with public transport carrying roughly 70-75% of trips, anchored by the suburban railway and BEST buses. Kolkata follows at 65%-70%, on a dense weave of suburban rail, metro, the surviving trams, and buses. Then the cliff: Delhi manages 40%-45%, Bengaluru 35%-40%, Chennai 30- 35%, Hyderabad 25%-30%, Pune a dismal 15%-20%, and Ahmedabad just 11%-15%.

Good Mass Transit Not Sufficient

No accident that the two cities at the top inherited a colonial-era suburban railway. Bombay’s and Calcutta’s British administrators built mass suburban rail in the 19th and early 20th centuries to move a working population into a compact core. Generations later, that rail spine still carries the city — Mumbai’s suburban network alone moves some 7.5 million passengers a day. The public-transport habit in these cities is not a triumph of recent planning; it is a century-old inheritance they were wise enough not to squander. On buses, one city stands out: Bengaluru, whose BMTC — among India's more efficient fleets — moves around 40 lakh riders a day.

Which is exactly what makes Delhi’s number so instructive. Delhi has the country’s finest metro — over 60 lakh journeys on a good weekday — and a large DTC and cluster-bus fleet carrying around 41 lakh riders a day. And still, public transport’s share is stuck at 40%-45% because private vehicles account for around 60% of motorised trips. The metro was superb engineering layered onto a city that kept sprawling and buying cars faster than the trains could absorb them. 

Good mass transit, it turns out, is necessary but not sufficient. If the surrounding city remains built for the automobile, the automobile wins.

The Shenzhen Counter-Example

Look at how Shenzhen — a fishing settlement in 1980, now home to 18 million — spends that footprint. Public transport there accounts for 57.9% of all motorised travel at peak hours, with its buses being the first megacity fleet on earth to go fully electric. The metro carries over 70% of transit riders, and 39% of residents live within an 800-metre walk of a station.

Note what Shenzhen did and did not do. It did electrify — comprehensively, right down to the taxis. But it electrified inside a transit-first city. The buses were not merely swapped for electric ones; their job was redefined, from long-haul carriers into feeder services that funnel residents to metro stations. Density, station access and land use were planned together so that the natural, convenient choice for an ordinary commuter is the train, not the car. Shenzhen has electrified buses and taxis; India is busy electrifying private scooters.

Also, Shenzhen is not the sole example for Indian cities to follow. The total modal share percentage of public transit in Hong Kong (90%), Singapore (66%, soon to become 75%), and Tokyo (around 60%) tells a similar story woven around public transit and Transit Oriented Development (TOD).

That is the lesson. 

India's EV subsidies and ethanol-blending programme are not wrong so much as disjointed — a set of fuel-switching measures that leave urban mobility comprehensively gridlocked, but exactly as automobile-centric as they found it. 

The Case For Two Pilots

India does not need another all-cities, all-modes policy that promises everything and moves nothing. It needs proof. The disciplined move is to pick two contrasting cities, build the Shenzhen model in each over four years — to 2030, the very horizon of Delhi’s own EV policy — measure honestly what worked, and only then roll out nationally. 

The first is Pune. In TomTom's 2025 Traffic Index, Pune ranked as the world's fifth most congested city and third in India, behind Bengaluru and Kolkata, capping years of ranking among the global top ten. 

Pune is the retrofit laboratory in its purest form — a metropolitan region of roughly 7.5 million people that, as of March 2025, has over 50 lakh registered vehicles, meaning the urban core now has more vehicles than people. Nearly 35 lakh are two-wheelers — almost 75% of the fleet. 

It shows in the way Pune moves, private vehicles account for about 59% of trips (two-wheelers 35%, cars 13%), non-motorised transport for 28%, and public transport for a wretched 19%. Among India’s major metros, only Ahmedabad does worse. 

Yet Pune has the ingredients — a growing metro, the Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (PMPML) bus network, a compact old core — to be rebuilt around transit. A four-year pilot would fuse metro, bus and last-mile into one ticket and one plan, turn PMPML into a Shenzhen-style electric feeder network, enforce transit-oriented development along the corridors, and reclaim road space for buses, footpaths and cycle tracks. The target: lift public transport shares from 19% towards 50% within four years. 

If it can be done in vehicle-saturated Pune, it can be done anywhere.

The second is Dholera, a smart greenfield city. The region runs to some 920 sq km, designed for over 2 million residents and 8 lakh jobs by full build-out in 2042, on course to be among India’s fastest-growing cities, already anchored by a ₹91,000-crore Tata semiconductor fab, an expressway to Ahmedabad and an international airport due this year — the closest thing India has to a greenfield Shenzhen. 

Dholera can be built transit-first from day one: a metro spine within the city, mandatory density around stations, an all-electric bus feeder grid, and streets designed for walking before parking. The master plan should require that no resident live more than 800 metres from mass transit — Shenzhen's and Singapore's benchmark, adopted at birth, not at ruinous cost.

Policy That Changes The City

Most Indian cities are a blend of the two — an old, congested core wrapped in new greenfield growth at the edge. The fuel question then answers itself: electrify the buses, shared fleets, and feeders that a transit-first city runs on, and the ethanol-and-EV subsidies become an investment in a public system, not scattered handouts. 

That is the difference between a policy that changes the engine and one that changes the city.

(The writer is a former civil servant. Views expressed are personal.)