The most quoted number in Indian EV charging has no source

Every conversation about charging reliability in India starts from the same statistic. Nearly half of India's public chargers are broken. It is in news reports, industry decks, investor memos and government commentary. We went looking for where it comes from. It took three links and about ten minutes.

The trail

Business Standard, 9 May 2026, attributes the figure to Exicom's India DC Fast Charging Reliability Report 2026.

Exicom's own page for that report attributes it to Down To Earth. Their wording is specific, and it is worth reading closely: "As of February 2024, nearly half of public chargers, approximately 12,100 out of 25,000, were reported as non-functional at a given point in time."

The Down To Earth piece states it as fact. With no citation. No sample, no method, and no definition of what non-functional means.

That is the end of the trail.

What the wording actually tells you

Read the Exicom sentence again. Three things in it matter more than the percentage.

It is February 2024. Two and a half years old at the time of writing.

It is a point in time. Not an average over a month, not a share of attempts. A snapshot.

The denominator is 25,000 chargers. Exicom's own page says the network went from about 5,000 to 29,000-plus stations between 2022 and 2025. Business Standard reported 52,718 public charging stations in July 2026. A written reply in the Lok Sabha in February 2026 said 29,000. TATA.ev said 24,000 in mid-2025.

Those numbers are not comparable to each other, because they count different things, and we are not going to pretend they are. But every one of them is larger than 25,000. The numerator in the famous statistic was counted once, against a denominator that no longer exists.

Two more numbers travel the same way

"Around 25% of stations experience frequent downtime due to technical faults, limited grid connectivity, or delayed maintenance intervention." Exicom attributes this to Business Standard. Business Standard, in the piece we started from, attributes its reliability framing to Exicom.

The share of EV owners who say they would go back to petrol appears in circulation as both "over 50 percent" and "51 percent", from two different attributions, neither with a sample size attached.

The number that does have a method

There is one Indian charger reliability figure we found that you can actually audit. IEEFA went and looked. Their September 2024 briefing reports fieldwork from June 2024 across South, Central, West and East Delhi: of 37 chargers examined, 84 percent were non-functional. The briefing carries the methodology and a per-location breakdown.

Thirty-seven chargers is a small sample and IEEFA does not pretend otherwise. But a small sample with a published method is worth more than a large number with none, because you can tell what it means and you can go and repeat it.

IEEFA returned to the subject in September 2026 with a briefing on the charging experience beyond charger deployment. Their lead energy specialist Charith Konda put the point plainly: charger uptime and reliability, not just the number of chargers, are what matter to the experience. One of the recommendations is to link public financial support to verified charger uptime.

Verified by whom, measured how, is the open question. Nobody has published an answer.

There is also no standard to measure against

We read the PM E-DRIVE charging infrastructure guidelines looking for an uptime requirement. There is one line on the subject. It asks nodal agencies to "ensure continued availability and uptime".

No percentage. No measurement window. No penalty. No definition.

So when an operator in India says its network is at 98 percent uptime, there is no published standard that the claim can be wrong against.

What we are not saying

We are not saying India's chargers work. Our own collection of publicly reported failures says otherwise, and we will keep publishing those one at a time, with the source next to each one.

We are saying that a number you cannot check is marketing, and that the most repeated claim in this industry is currently unfalsifiable in both directions. Nobody can prove it right either.

There is one honest count worth naming. ExperiencesWithEVs tracks non-working connectors by hand across 84 charge point operators and has done for eleven editions. It is the most rigorous thing in Indian charging and it is one person's spreadsheet. It measures what the operator reports.

What nobody measures is whether the driver who turned up got a charge. That is the number we are building. The first Mumbai index publishes on 5 November 2026, with its method, on the day it lands.

Sources

Every claim above is checkable. In order of appearance:

• Business Standard, 9 May 2026, on India's charging infrastructure
• Exicom, India DC Fast Charging Reliability Report 2026 page, 31 March 2026
• Down To Earth, 1 September 2025
• Lok Sabha written reply, Ministry of Heavy Industries, February 2026
• Business Standard, July 2026, on the installed base
• IEEFA briefing, September 2024, Delhi charger fieldwork of June 2024
• IEEFA briefing, September 2026, on improving the charging experience
• PM E-DRIVE charging infrastructure guidelines, Ministry of Heavy Industries