NITI Aayog pushes a market‑led road map for zero‑emission trucking in India

When Rajiv Gauba, the chief executive of NITI Aayog, stepped onto the stage at the 5th E‑Fast India Summit, he didn’t just talk about ideas – he rolled out two concrete tools that could change how India moves freight.

The two platforms – the Platform for Aggregating Clean Transport (PACT) and the Zero‑Emission Truck (ZET) Marketplace – are meant to act like a match‑maker, pulling together logistics firms, manufacturers, financiers and charging‑point operators. In plain English, they’re trying to fix the puzzle pieces that have kept electric trucks stuck on the sidelines.

Why does this matter? Heavy‑duty trucks make up a tiny slice – roughly three to four percent – of India’s vehicle fleet, yet they are responsible for more than a third of the sector’s carbon emissions. With about 70 % of the nation’s freight still traveling on roads, the stakes are high. In 2025, only around 800 electric heavy trucks rolled out, a figure that Gauba admitted was far from enough.

According to Gauba, the biggest roadblocks are a fragmented logistics landscape, sky‑high financing costs and the absence of coordinated charging corridors. “If we keep treating each operator as an island, the market will never reach the scale needed for real impact,” he warned.

Pact and ZET aim to solve exactly that. By aggregating demand, they hope to give financiers a clearer picture of the market, making it easier to design blended‑finance packages, leasing models and other innovative funding tools that bring the cost of capital for an electric truck closer to that of a diesel‑powered one.

But the plan isn’t limited to money. The platforms also call for the creation of dedicated electric freight corridors – routes where charging infrastructure is built in tandem with logistics hubs. The idea is to turn long hauls into a seamless, low‑emission experience, removing the “range anxiety” that haunts many fleet operators.

These initiatives sit squarely within a broader government push that includes production‑linked incentive (PLI) schemes for EVs, advanced‑chemistry battery programmes, and demand‑side measures like FAME, PM E‑DRIVE, PARIVARTAN and PM e‑Bus Sewa. Gauba stressed that electrifying freight is not just an environmental checkbox; it’s an economic and strategic necessity, tied to energy security and India’s ambition to hit net‑zero by 2070.

In his closing remarks, Gauba likened the evolution of e‑FAST over the past four years to India’s own journey from policy‑talk to real‑world implementation. “The lesson for capital‑intensive sectors is clear,” he said. “Governments get more mileage when they build the rules of the game and let markets play, rather than trying to dictate every move.”

While the platforms are still in their infancy, the message is unmistakable: a market‑led, coordinated approach could finally get electric trucks moving en masse across India’s highways.