SIAM holds first dedicated EV charging infrastructure dialogue on Nov 20

A day set aside only for charging

The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers has scheduled its first event devoted entirely to electric vehicle charging infrastructure. SIAM's events page lists the "1st Growth and Readiness for EV Infrastructure Dialogue", branded SIAM EV Charging Day, for November 20 at ITC Maurya's Kamal Mahal in New Delhi.

SIAM runs a broader annual summit on electric mobility every February that covers everything from e-buses to battery swapping. This new dialogue, called GRID for short, is narrower by design. Its stated job is to get industry and government talking specifically about scaling charging infrastructure, the policy steps needed and how individual states should go about deploying chargers on the ground, according to the event listing on SIAM's own site.

That focus matters because charging has become the part of India's EV transition that lags furthest behind vehicle sales growth.

The money approved, the chargers still missing

Parliament's own numbers show why. Road transport minister Nitin Gadkari told the Rajya Sabha in July that the government had approved ₹688.84 crore for 6,562 public charging stations under the PM E DRIVE scheme, against a total of ₹2,000 crore earmarked for public charging under that scheme, Business Today reported. The same reply showed that no money had actually been spent yet.

In other words, close to a third of the public charging budget had been allocated on paper by mid 2026, but zero rupees had reached the ground. That is the gap SIAM's new dialogue is meant to address: getting discoms, state transport departments and charger makers to actually execute approved projects, not just win approvals.

SIAM's electric mobility group has flagged this slowdown before. At its February summit, group chairman Sushant Naik, who is also Tata Motors' chief corporate affairs officer, told delegates that India had moved from selling 50,000 EVs in 2016 to roughly 23 lakh in a single recent calendar year, and that charging infrastructure needed to keep pace with that growth, Autocar Professional reported at the time. SIAM's own count then put installed public chargers at over 29,000, up from about 5,000 in 2022. Whether that number has grown meaningfully by November is exactly the kind of question GRID's "state led deployment strategies" session is supposed to answer.

Why Bengaluru and Karnataka should watch

Karnataka readers have a direct stake in how this plays out. The state runs its own charger subsidy and approval process through KREDL, separate from the central PM E DRIVE scheme, and Bengaluru's charging operators face the same bottlenecks SIAM wants Delhi to fix nationally: slow discom connections, inconsistent tariff treatment for charging load and uneven land allotment for public chargers. If GRID produces concrete state level commitments rather than another round of panel discussion, it is the kind of event whose outcomes could eventually show up in how fast a new charger actually gets switched on in Karnataka, not just in Delhi.

SIAM has not published a full speaker list or agenda beyond the broad themes on its events page as of this week. Moto365 will follow up after November 20 to report what, if anything, was actually committed.

Sources

• SIAM events listing: 1st GRID, SIAM EV Charging Day
• ₹689 crore approved for EV charging network under PM E DRIVE, but no funds spent yet, Business Today
• India on course for 1 crore annual EV sales by 2030, SIAM's Sushant Naik, Autocar Professional