India goes electric

India’s coals and mines minister has insisted every car sold in the world’s second most populated country in 2030 will run on electricity.

The proposal is designed to clear up the country’s toxic air, which kills 2.3m Indians each year according to Greenpeace. And to reduce the amount of cash the country sends offshore to oil suppliers.

“We are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way," minister Piyush Goyal told the Confederation of Indian Industry.

"We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient... The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country.”

Oddly enough, India isn’t the only country with a 2030 target for a pure battery-electric new-car fleet, with Germany’s lower house of parliament this year passing a largely symbolic piece of legislation to ban internal-combustion engines by the same year.

Indian city skies are so polluted that Greenpeace’s ‘Airpocolypse’ study ranked deaths from transport-based emissions a close second behind cigarette smoke and insisted it cost India three per cent of its Gross Domestic Product.

The worst city, New Delhi, had airborne pollution levels 13 times higher than the maximum recommended by the World Health Organisation. India has also overtaken China as the country with the most pollution-related deaths in the world.

The push towards electric cars would be driven by demand and not subsidy Mr Goyal insisted, though he admitted the cities with the worst pollution problems would have their BEVs (battery electric vehicles) subidised in the early days of the push.

“The cost of electric vehicles will start to pay for itself for consumers," he told the International Business Times.

“We would love to see the electric vehicle industry run on its own," he added.