Delhi Hardlook | ‘We just plug in wherever we can’: Inside Delhi’s unsafe e-rickshaw network

Three kilometers away from this warehouse, on June 9, two men were charred to death in a fire that broke out at a house in East Delhi’s Dilshad Garden while two e-rickshaws were being charged.

This wasn’t just a one-off incident.

Another fire had broken out in Northeast Delhi’s Ghonda area in the same month.

In May, two teenagers died while sleeping inside an e-rickshaw charging station in Shahdara after a blaze broke out. In the same month, yet another fire at a charging station in Shahdara’s Farsh Bazaar claimed the life of a woman while injuring five others, including two children.

These incidents point to the dangers of illegal charging stations — operating under the radar with no regard for safety protocols — that serve the city’s rapidly growing e-rickshaw fleet.

According to sources, around 1.6 lakh e-rickshaws ply in Delhi — only about 50,000 are registered. But there are just 2,452 public charging points and 232 battery swapping stations across the city, according to the real-time open database developed by the Delhi government. Most are not compatible with e-rickshaws.

To assess the situation on the ground, The Indian Express visited six public charging stations — three didn’t exist, one was not functional, and the two that did exist didn’t charge e-rickshaws.

The setup

In Pitampura, near the Dera Gaji Khan slum on Parwan Road, around 10 e-rickshaws line the roadside as their drivers nap nearby. The vehicles are being charged directly from a massive electricity transformer, with thick black wires clipped onto it and routed to makeshift switchboards placed on the rickshaws. The charging cables are then plugged into these boards.

Children play around this tenuous arrangement, lifting wires to go under them or stepping over them.

An e-rickshaw driver, on condition of anonymity, said no driver has a fixed system for charging their vehicles. “Sometimes we pay for it, other times we just find someplace to plug in the battery. Humein koi jagah toh di nahi hai. Toh yahi kar lete hai (No one has given us space to charge our vehicles, so this is what we do),” he says

Around 5 km away is Badli, a rural pocket that has transformed into an urban village, boasting of its own metro station as well as a railway station. E-rickshaws zip through the narrow streets, their drivers shouting “Metro, metro, metro” to pedestrians.

Santosh charging point in Shahdara (Express/Mohd Atif)

Deep inside the area is a nondescript street, seemingly inhabited by factories. Inside these huge warehouses, however, are parking and charging stations for e-rickshaws. Drivers pay Rs 100-120 to have their vehicles fully charged and parked here for six hours.
The manager of one such charging facility goes by the name ‘Supreme’. Standing over six feet tall, he towers above the e-rickshaws charging under his watch. For now, though, he’s reclining on a cot, while Guddu, an e-rickshaw driver, sits at the foot of the bed, chatting about his day.

Supreme claims he doesn’t receive any support or subsidy from the government and that he pays the usual Rs 10 per unit of electricity.

To be sure, the Delhi electricity regulator offers a special tariff for charging e-rickshaws — Rs 4.50 per unit — to encourage legal connections.

A senior officer of the Delhi Police acknowledges that most of these ‘charging centres’ lack proper safety measures.

“Whenever there is an incident, we take action and issue notices under Section 16 of the Delhi Police Act. If we receive complaints, then we seal those centres and seize the vehicles. But they are at almost every corner… and there is no civic infrastructure for sufficient charging and parking. We cannot start seizing every rickshaw that’s being illegally charged. Where are we supposed to keep them?” he asks.

A safer, though more expensive, way to charge an e-rickshaw is through battery service companies.

In Shahdara, at Santosh charging point — a franchise of battery service provider Battery Smart — 18-year-old Rajat Rana is sitting on a chair and watching YouTube. “Since it’s so hot, a lot of the drivers don’t drive at this point. That’s why it’s so quiet,” says Rana, who just finished school.

In the evenings, though, Rana is on his toes. He has to quickly take out the batteries from e-rickshaws that come in and replace them with a fully charged one, while the driver scans the QR code stuck on the wall or counts loose coins to pay him.

The payment for the initial charge is Rs 170, and, thereafter, Rs 130 per battery.

The owner of the centre, Santosh Singh (28), has been running it for the past year. “We have to take mandatory permissions from the Municipal Corporation of Delhi to run the franchise along with a trade licence. We also have a no-objection certificate from the fire department, fire extinguishers, and a battery box, where we can keep batteries locked if they malfunction,” Santosh says.

He adds that he earns about Rs 20,000 per month and received six hours of training from Battery Smart for running the franchise.

Experts say that the park and charge model can be a good one: It gives e-rickshaw drivers a space to park their vehicles at night, which a lot of them don’t have at their homes, and also charges a nominal rate.

“The problem arises when these operations don’t use the correct type of charger. You need a charger that can tolerate high surges of electricity and would not harm the vehicle when that happens. The same safety functions might not be there in a simple socket. This leads to accidents where e-rickshaws catch fire. To make it safe, someone needs to ensure that safe chargers are installed,” says Priyadarshi Singh, an independent consultant on electric mobility.

Problems & solutions

Earlier this month, officials from the city’s power distribution companies put out a startling figure: e-rickshaws cause power losses of up to Rs 120 crore each year. Only around 4,000 legal connections have been provided to individual drivers or e-rickshaw charging station operators, according to a source in the discom.

According to the source, approximately 60% of Delhi’s e-rickshaws are charged through power stolen by the “parking and charging” mafia, which is often operated by local strongmen.
Many times, these strongmen buy e-rickshaws in bulk and rent them out to drivers, thus leaving the latter no choice but to use the owner’s charging stations. These are also convenient for drivers, as many of them don’t have space to park their vehicles at their homes, says the source.

This large-scale illegal charging leads to voltage issues, while the use of sub-standard batteries can cause sparks and short-circuits. And the unsafe lead-acid batteries, called ‘gili (wet)’ by drivers, used in almost 4 out of 5 of these e-rickshaws, have been called a ‘ticking time bomb’, especially in the summer months in overladen vehicles.

Some of the areas where frequent power thefts by e-rickshaws have been witnessed are Mandawali, Minto Road, Karol Bagh, Jama Masjid, Sangam Vihar, Batla House, Sarai Kale Khan, Tagore Garden, Paschim Vihar, Civil Lines, Mukherjee Nagar, and Narela.

Of the remaining 40% e-rickshaws that opt for legal means, the drivers go for bulk park-and-charge stations, or they charge it at home, or at battery swap stations.

Experts have identified a slew of issues plaguing the e-rickshaw economy: public charging stations are few in number, and they also don’t support charging of e-rickshaws as these vehicles were, till not very long ago, not manufactured in the organised sector with formal guidelines — leading to a lack of standardisation.

Thus, the government couldn’t have developed common charging stations for them, claims a government official who wished to remain anonymous.

Singh, however, calls it an enforcement issue: “Electricity is being provided by the discom. If there is a connection whose sanctioned load is 1 kilowatt but is operating at a much higher load, then the discom should shut down that place. They can easily see where the consumption is much higher than the sanctioned load.”

Sharif Qamar, Fellow and Associate Director, Transport and Urban Governance Division, TERI, concurs. He says that while there are multiple policy guidelines covering e-rickshaw manufacturing, assembly, and usage, enforcement remains a major challenge. “There is a jugaad mindset in the e-rickshaw ecosystem — illegal and unsafe charging practices, especially in unregulated park and charge spaces, persist largely due to weak enforcement by local authorities. Additionally, there are regulatory gaps in defining and standardising legal charging infrastructure for e-rickshaws.”

Singh also says some problems lie in the manufacturing of e-rickshaws and the kind of components used to assemble them. “Every e-rickshaw should be registered. This will ensure the vehicle is coming from a standard Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). Then the OEM ensures that the vehicle goes through checks. That would ensure there are only standard e-rickshaws, not the ones manufactured in informal settings, and are not standardised. The charger is usually included with the purchase of an e-rickshaw.”

He also says an e-rickshaw has to pass through a fitness check every two years for the initial eight years and then annually. If these checks are regular, it may also ensure safer vehicles are on the road. “Since many are not registered, they don’t undergo these checks.”

Back at the warehouse in Haiderpur village, Deepu insists that his facility, operational for about two years, is a boon for e-rickshaw drivers. “We charge just Rs 120 for charging and Rs 60 for overnight parking,” he says.