India, July 6 -- On July 1, Delhi's newly notified Electric Vehicle Policy 2026-2030 came into force, with staged mandates to electrify two-wheelers, three-wheelers and goods carriers over the next four years. Buried in its infrastructure chapter is a single, non-binding sentence asking power distribution companies to explore battery storage systems at electric bus depots.

That sentence deserves more attention than its length suggests. Four years after the government launched a Rs 18,100 crore scheme to build domestic battery cell factories, no beneficiary has received an incentive payment, and barely 3 per cent of the promised 50 gigawatt-hour (GWh) manufacturing capacity is running. The missing ingredient, increasingly, looks like dema...