EV Charging Rules Every Indian Company Has to Follow in 2026 (And the Software That Proves It)

The question always arrives in the same shape. The chargers are ordered, the DISCOM load sanction has come through, somebody has already paid for a mobile app, and then a person in the room asks what the company is actually supposed to send the government, and when. Usually nobody knows. The hardware vendor's answer stops at "our app takes UPI".

A four gun 60 kW public site in India lands somewhere around ₹9 lakh to ₹16 lakh once the transformer, LT cabling, civil work, fencing and the chargers themselves are paid for. Two things decide whether that money works out: whether the site sells electricity reliably, and whether you can prove, on paper, that it does. The second one is almost entirely software, and it is the line item nobody budgets for.

So this is the compliance side, written for the person who has to sign off on it. What is mandatory, what is only advised, what has real money attached to it, and which clauses quietly turn into features somebody has to build. I have linked the government documents so you can read the clauses yourself instead of taking my word for it.

Save this page rather than reading it once. There are two things in here you will want again later: a twenty line checklist to paste into a vendor email before you sign anything, and a compliance calendar of what falls due each quarter. Both are written to be copied. If you are the person who will actually file the returns, bookmark it or send it to yourself on WhatsApp now, because you will be looking for it in January.

Fair warning on my bias: I run a development agency and we built and still operate an OCPP charging platform, so I sell exactly the thing this post says you need. I have tried to be honest about where buying beats building. I am also not a lawyer. For a subsidy claim or a licence application, read the gazette text with your own compliance person.

One practical note before the rules, because it changes how you should read them. This software already exists on our side and it is running in production today. We are not describing something we would like to build for you over the next eight months. PlugEV (branded CHARGE TECH) has been live since January 2025 across 40 plus chargers in two Indian cities, with OCPP, UPI, RFID, GST invoicing and the reporting in it. So as you go through each rule below, the honest answer to "who builds that" is that it is already built, and you can see it working on a live system. If you want a demo, ask for one and we will walk you through the actual operator dashboard, not slides.

The four documents that actually govern you

Most of the confusion in this space comes from people quoting the wrong vintage of rules. There are four things on the table in October 2026, and they do different jobs.

• Guidelines for Installation and Operation of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure, 2024, Ministry of Power, No. 12/2/2018-EV dated 17 September 2024. This is the consolidated rulebook. It replaced the January 2022 consolidated guidelines and the amendments that followed them, and it covers private, semi-public and public charging, plus the obligations of DISCOMs and nodal agencies.
• Operational Guidelines for Deployment of EV Public Charging Stations under PM E-DRIVE, Ministry of Heavy Industries, 26 September 2025. This one holds the purse. ₹2,000 crore of the ₹10,900 crore PM E-DRIVE outlay is for public charging, and the conditions attached to that subsidy are where compliance stops being theoretical.
• CEA (Measures relating to Safety and Electric Supply) Regulations, 2023. Chapter XI, clauses 123 to 128, is the EV charging station chapter. This is what an electrical inspector reads.
• Your state. The state EV policy, the state building code, the state nodal agency's own process, and in some cases a transport department scheme that applies to your fleet rather than your chargers. This is where the mandates with deadlines usually live.

One thing worth saying early because people get it backwards: setting up and operating a public charging station in India is a de-licensed activity. You do not need a power distribution licence to sell charging. What you do need is to register, report, display, and be auditable. No licence, plenty of paperwork.

1. Your station has to exist in a government database, with an ID

Under the 2024 guidelines, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, working with State Nodal Agencies, maintains a nationwide database of public charging stations. Charge point operators register their stations through the state nodal agency, and the stations get mapped on the government's EV Yatra portal, which is the public-facing side of that database.

What goes in is the boring stuff: where the station is, how many guns and at what rating, which connector standards, what you charge, who to call, and whether the charger is free right now. The first four of those are a one time form. The last one is a live feed, and that is the part that catches people out. A station that is listed as available while the charger has been dead for three weeks is worse for you than not being listed at all, because drivers arrive, find a brick, and write the review.

Software consequence: whatever runs your chargers has to be able to emit a current view of location, connectors, tariff and live availability, and keep emitting it after the launch day WhatsApp group goes quiet. If that data only exists inside a hardware vendor's dashboard that you cannot export from, you do not own your own compliance.

2. Quarterly numbers, per charger, on demand

Operators are expected to share periodic operational data through the nodal agency route: energy sold, downtime, and the service charges collected. Reporting in practice is quarterly. Sources differ on whether the file lands with the state nodal agency or gets consolidated centrally, and the format has moved more than once, so do not design around one spreadsheet template. Design around the underlying obligation, which has not changed: you must be able to produce, for any quarter, per charger, how many units you dispensed, how much you charged for them, and how long that charger was out of service.

Downtime is the number that embarrasses people. Energy sold comes off the meter and the invoices. Downtime has to be computed from something that was watching the charger continuously, which means heartbeats and status transitions logged and kept, not a monthly phone call to the site attendant. If your platform does not store charger status history, your downtime figure is a guess, and a guess is the thing you least want to put your name on in a government report.

• Energy dispensed per charger and per connector, per quarter, from meter start and stop values and not from a rated-power estimate.
• Service charge collected, separated from the electricity tariff you passed through.
• Downtime, derived from status and heartbeat history, with the reason where you know it (DISCOM supply, hardware fault, network, vandalism).
• Session counts and failed session counts. Nobody asks for failures yet. Keep them anyway, because they are how you argue with a hardware vendor under warranty.

3. The National Unified Hub, where compliance meets money

This is the clause I would put in front of any board that is about to spend on chargers with public money involved. The PM E-DRIVE public charging guidelines, dated 26 September 2025, say two things in plain language.

First, in the operational monitoring step: nodal agencies and their charge point operators "shall ensure sharing of operational data for installed EV PCS (such as charger location, slot availability, pricing, and digital payment options) with the 'National Unified Hub' being developed by MHI, in accordance with the defined protocols."

Second, and this is the one with a number attached, the undertaking for the release of the second and final tranche of subsidy has to certify that "installed EV chargers have been onboarded on the 'National Unified Hub' being developed by MHI". BHEL, as the project implementation agency, is building that hub along with a national mobile app doing charger discovery, real time status, slot booking and digital payments.

Read that as a procurement rule, because that is what it is. The subsidy under PM E-DRIVE runs up to 100 percent of upstream infrastructure and 100 percent of the charger cost on government premises, 80 percent upstream with 70 percent on the charger for government controlled locations like OMC retail outlets, railway stations, metro stations and municipal parking, and 80 percent upstream elsewhere. If your platform cannot publish discovery, live status, price and payment options to somebody else's hub through an API, then your own software is the thing holding up your final tranche. I have watched closed vendor stacks turn into a six figure problem for exactly this reason, long before anyone sends a notice.

Also note the standards table in the same document, because it is the clearest statement of what you are allowed to install: light EV DC (IS 17017-2-6) and light EV AC/DC combo (IS 17017-2-7) up to 12 kW for two and three wheelers, CCS-II (IS 17017-2-3) at 50 kW to 250 kW for cars, buses and trucks, and 250 kW to 500 kW for high power bus and truck charging with a minimum of 120 kW per gun. Pick a connector outside that table and the subsidy conversation ends there.

4. The price on the screen, and who gets a cut of it

The pricing rules are not complicated, but they are specific, and they are the ones that have to be reflected in your billing engine rather than in a policy document.

• What a driver pays is the electricity supply tariff, treated as a pass through on a per kWh basis, plus your service charge. Those are two different numbers with two different owners, and your invoice should show them as two different numbers.
• Charging station tariffs sat under a ceiling tied to the DISCOM's average cost of supply, with time of day differentials (cheaper in solar hours, dearer outside them). The ACoS linked ceiling was written with a 31 March 2026 horizon, so check the current position with your DISCOM rather than quoting an old blog post, including mine.
• Each station needs a separate metering arrangement. Your billing has to reconcile to that meter, not to the sum of what the chargers thought they delivered.
• Specifications and rates have to be displayed prominently at the station. If your tariff lives in an app and a QR code only, you are not compliant, and more practically you are losing walk up customers.
• Public land offered on a revenue sharing basis carries ₹1 per kWh to the land owning agency, payable quarterly. That is a per site, per quarter computation out of your own session data, and if you have twelve sites with four different landlords it is not something you want to do by hand on the 3rd of every quarter.

One honest gap worth knowing. India does not yet have a Eichrecht style legal metrology regime for chargers, where the meter inside the charger is type approved and stamped and the reading is legally evidential the way a petrol pump's is. People will tell you otherwise. As of now, your own logs are your evidence, which means you should keep meter start and stop values per session, immutably, with the charger's own identifier against them. If and when that regime arrives, the operators who kept clean session records will have a migration and the ones who kept invoice totals will have a project.

5. Payments, invoices and the GST trail

"Digital payment options" is one of the four data points the national hub explicitly wants, which tells you where this is heading: discovery and payment through somebody else's app, with your station as the thing being discovered. In India that means UPI first and everything else second. Cards matter at highway sites. RFID matters for fleets and for regulars who do not want to open an app at 2 AM.

Then there is tax. Charging sold to the public is treated as a supply of service and attracts GST, currently 18 percent, while the electricity itself is exempt when supplied by a DISCOM. The interaction between those two facts is genuinely contested, and the treatment has been argued both ways for different business models, so this is a question for your CA and not for a blog. What is not contested is the operational requirement: a GST compliant invoice, per session or per billing cycle, generated automatically, with your GSTIN, HSN or SAC, the split between pass through and service charge, and a number series that survives an audit. Doing that by hand at a few thousand sessions a month is not a plan.

The failure mode here is not tax, it is double billing. A charger reconnects after a network drop, retries its stop transaction, and a driver gets charged twice for one session. We handle that with idempotency keys so a retried message can never create a second charge. Ask any vendor how they handle it. The quality of the answer tells you how much production time their platform has actually seen. More on how the maths should work in EV charging tariffs in India and on the payment plumbing in OCPP and UPI payments.

6. Open protocols: "advised" today, unavoidable tomorrow

The 2024 guidelines advise operators to adopt open communication standards for data sharing, and they name them: Unified Energy Interface, OCPP, OCPI and OpenADR. Advised, not mandated. Plenty of vendors have hidden behind that word.

Look at what the rest of the machinery assumes, though. A national hub that wants your live status. A national app that wants to start a session on your charger. Unified Bharat e-Charge putting charging inside UPI style flows over the Beckn protocol. DISCOMs that will eventually want demand response at the moment the grid is tight. Every one of those is a conversation between your platform and something you do not control, and all four of them are already written down in the guidelines as the preferred way to have it.

• OCPP is how your chargers talk to your platform. Almost all hardware sold in India today speaks OCPP 1.6-J. 2.0.1 is where security and smart charging are headed. See the OCPP implementation guide and the 2.0.1 migration playbook.
• OCPI is how your platform talks to other networks and aggregators, which is what roaming means in practice.
• UEI and Unified Bharat e-Charge are the Beckn based India specific layer for discovery and payment. I wrote up what an operator actually has to get right in Unified Bharat e-Charge, explained for EV operators.
• OpenADR is for demand response with the utility. Nobody in India is going to ask you for this next quarter. Somebody will ask within the life of the asset you are buying now.

My read, as someone who has had to retrofit integrations into live networks: treat the word "advised" as a schedule, not as permission. The cost of being able to speak these protocols is a design decision today and a rebuild in two years.

7. The file the electrical inspector and the auditor ask for

Compliance here is partly hardware, partly a filing cabinet. Each EVSE model has to be type tested by an accredited lab, with the certificate valid for three years. Chargers and installation have to satisfy the CEA safety regulations, which in practice means earthing to standard, earth leakage protection, an emergency cut off that works, signage, fire safety, covered space, clearly marked and unencroached parking bays, and competent people on site for larger stations. Single line diagrams and inspector clearance come before energisation, not after.

The software part is unglamorous and it is the part that fails: meter readings, maintenance logs, incident records, calibration and test certificates, and session records, all retained and retrievable by site. When an inspector or an auditor asks what happened at charger 3 on the night of the 14th, the answer should take two minutes, not two days of WhatsApp archaeology.

If you are not a charging company, this still lands on you

Here is the part most Indian companies miss. You can end up operating charging infrastructure without ever deciding to be in the charging business.

• Your building. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs added a section on EV charging to the Model Building Bye-Laws, calling for charging infrastructure for at least 20 percent of parking capacity. Model is the operative word. It binds you when your state and local authority adopt it, which many have, with their own numbers.
• Haryana has moved to a sharper ratio for new projects: around one EV charging point for every three parking slots on commercial projects (malls, offices, hotels) and one in five on residential, applying from a fairly low parking threshold. Confirm the current notified text with the Town and Country Planning department before you design a basement around it.
• Maharashtra, Delhi and others carry EV ready parking requirements of their own, with figures that differ by source, by draft and by year. Read your own state policy, not a summary.
• Your fleet. The Delhi Motor Vehicle Aggregator and Delivery Service Provider Scheme, 2023, applies to aggregators and delivery service providers with 25 or more vehicles. It requires a licence, phases in electric vehicles across new fleet onboarding, ends at a full electric fleet by 1 April 2030, and carries per instance penalties that have been reported in the ₹5,000 to ₹1,00,000 range. If you run deliveries in Delhi, this is a mandate with a date on it, and it will put chargers in your own yard whether you wanted them or not.

So a mall, a factory, a hospital, an IT park, a hotel, a housing society or a delivery company ends up with eight chargers in a basement and a set of questions no hardware vendor answers. Who is allowed to charge here. How does the electricity cost get allocated to a tenant, a department or a driver. How do we stop the two directors' cars from occupying both DC guns all day. How does a visitor pay. What do we do when the society's auditor asks why the common area electricity bill went up by ₹40,000 a month.

None of that needs a national CSMS. It needs a small, boring internal system: authorise by RFID card or employee ID, meter and allocate cost per user or per cost centre, cap or schedule charging so your sanctioned load survives the evening, and produce a monthly statement your accounts team can actually post. If you ever open those chargers to the public, every obligation in the first half of this post switches on, and then you want the same system to also register, report and publish.

The checklist: what to demand in writing before you sign

Copy this into your vendor email. Ask for a yes or no against each line and ask for it in writing, from the person selling you the software, before the purchase order. A no is often fine. A vague answer never is.

textEV CHARGING SOFTWARE: COMPLIANCE CHECKLIST (India, 2026)
Vendor: ______________________   Date: __________

A. DATA OWNERSHIP
 1. Can we export all sessions, meter values and charger status
    history ourselves, any time, in CSV or via API?            Y / N
 2. If we leave you, do we keep the historical data?            Y / N
 3. Does the platform work with chargers from other brands?     Y / N

B. GOVERNMENT REPORTING
 4. Per-charger energy dispensed, per quarter, from meter
    start/stop values (not estimated from rated power)?         Y / N
 5. Downtime per charger, computed from status + heartbeat
    history, with reason codes?                                 Y / N
 6. Service charge reported separately from the pass-through
    electricity tariff?                                         Y / N
 7. Can the platform publish location, connectors, tariff and
    LIVE availability to an external portal or hub via API?      Y / N
 8. Has the vendor already onboarded chargers to the MHI
    National Unified Hub for any client? (ask for proof)        Y / N

C. TARIFF AND MONEY
 9. Per-kWh, per-minute, per-session and idle-fee pricing?      Y / N
10. Time-of-day tariffs (solar vs non-solar hours)?             Y / N
11. Land-owner revenue share computed per site per quarter
    (e.g. Rs 1/kWh), as a report we can pay against?            Y / N
12. GST-compliant invoice per session/cycle, auto-generated,
    with our GSTIN, SAC and invoice series?                     Y / N
13. Idempotency: what stops a reconnecting charger from
    billing a driver twice? (want a technical answer)           Y / N

D. PAYMENTS AND ACCESS
14. UPI, cards and RFID, with offline RFID authorisation when
    the network drops?                                          Y / N
15. Fleet / corporate sub-accounts with per-card limits?        Y / N

E. EVIDENCE AND AUDIT
16. Retained maintenance logs, incident records and test
    certificates per site, retrievable by date?                 Y / N
17. Immutable session records (no silent edits), with an
    audit trail on who changed what?                            Y / N
18. Uptime commitment in the contract, with a number?           Y / N

F. PROTOCOLS
19. OCPP version supported, and a written path to 2.0.1?        ____
20. OCPI for roaming? UEI / Unified Bharat e-Charge? OpenADR?   Y / N

The compliance calendar, in one place

Compliance fails on forgetting, not on disagreement. Nobody decides to skip a quarterly report. They just do not have the number on the day somebody asks. So here is the whole thing as a calendar. Paste it into whatever your team actually reads, put a name against each line, and the rest of this post becomes somebody's routine instead of a worry.

textEV CHARGING COMPLIANCE CALENDAR (India)
Owner: ______________   Sites covered: ______________

BEFORE ENERGISATION (once per site)
  [ ] DISCOM connection with SEPARATE metering for the station
  [ ] Single line diagram + electrical inspector clearance
  [ ] Chargers: IS 17017 connector per segment, model type-tested
      (certificate valid 3 years, note the expiry date here: ______)
  [ ] Earthing, earth leakage protection, emergency cut-off, signage,
      fire safety, covered space, marked and unencroached bays
  [ ] Register the station via the State Nodal Agency -> national
      database -> mapped on EV Yatra. Record the station ID: ______
  [ ] Tariff and charger specs physically displayed at the site
  [ ] If subsidised: chargers onboarded on MHI National Unified Hub
      (your final subsidy tranche undertaking certifies this)

CONTINUOUS (software, not a person)
  [ ] Live availability published to the portal / hub
  [ ] Session records with meter start and stop values, immutable
  [ ] Charger status + heartbeat history stored (this IS your
      downtime evidence, you cannot reconstruct it later)
  [ ] GST invoice per session or per cycle, controlled series

MONTHLY
  [ ] Reconcile station meter vs sum of session energy. Investigate
      any gap above ~2%, it is usually a charger meter or a lost stop
  [ ] Downtime review per charger, with reasons, and warranty claims
      raised on the hardware vendor while the evidence is fresh
  [ ] GST returns with your CA, charging as a supply of service

QUARTERLY
  [ ] Per charger: energy dispensed (kWh), service charge collected
      (separate from the pass-through tariff), downtime with reasons
  [ ] File the operational data through your State Nodal Agency route
  [ ] Land-owning agency revenue share (e.g. Rs 1/kWh) computed per
      site and paid, with the working kept
  [ ] Tariff review: ACoS-linked ceiling and time-of-day position
      with your DISCOM. Do not assume last year's number holds

ANNUAL / AS DUE
  [ ] Type-test certificates renewed before the 3 year expiry
  [ ] Electrical safety inspection, earthing test records filed
  [ ] Insurance, and a read of your state EV policy for changes
  [ ] Protocol roadmap: OCPP version, OCPI roaming, UEI, OpenADR

KEEP RETRIEVABLE BY SITE AND DATE
  Meter readings | maintenance logs | incident records | test and
  calibration certificates | session records | invoices | downtime

What this costs, honestly

Three paths, and the right one depends almost entirely on how many chargers you will run in three years.

• Buy Indian SaaS. Roughly ₹4,000 to ₹18,000 per charger per year with the India focused platforms, sometimes plus a transaction cut. Fastest route. Check the data ownership and export answers above before you commit, because that is where closed networks bite.
• Buy imported SaaS. ₹35,000 to ₹1,50,000 per charger per year, plus implementation. Strong products, built for other markets' tax and payment realities, and you will be paying a consultant to bolt India onto them.
• Build. A custom platform from an Indian team runs around ₹6 lakh to ₹18 lakh one time, plus hosting and maintenance. Break even against SaaS usually sits somewhere between 30 and 80 chargers. A small internal system for a company with a handful of chargers in its own basement, no public access, no national reporting, is a much smaller project, typically ₹2.5 lakh to ₹6 lakh.

There is a longer breakdown with the actual vendor names and numbers in EV charging software companies in India. If you are at four chargers, buy. If you are at sixty with a captive fleet, three cities and a subsidy claim in flight, buying someone else's roadmap is the expensive option.

Red flags when a vendor says "we are fully compliant"

• Nobody is "fully compliant" as a product feature. Compliance is a thing your company does every quarter, using software. If the word compliant appears in the brochure with nothing specific behind it, ask which clause of which document, dated.
• The platform only works with chargers the same vendor sells. Your second hardware purchase will be from someone else. It always is.
• No API, or an API that is "on the roadmap". The hub, the national app and your own accounting system all need one.
• Downtime shown as a live percentage but with no stored history you can query for a past quarter.
• GST invoicing that is really a PDF emailer with no invoice series control.
• No answer on duplicate billing after a charger reconnects.
• Your data lives in their tenancy with no export, and the contract is silent on what happens at exit.
• A quoted uptime number with no SLA, no credits and no definition of what counts as down.

What we built, and why I am confident about this list

We built PlugEV, branded CHARGE TECH, and we still run it. It has been in production since January 2025 across 40 plus chargers in two Indian cities, on OCPP 1.6-J over WebSocket with a NestJS gateway, Postgres, Redis for session state and idempotency, Razorpay for UPI, cards and Autopay, automatic GST invoices, RFID with offline authorisation, and session alerts over the WhatsApp Business API because that is where Indian drivers actually read messages. It has held 99.7 percent uptime, with the worst week at 99.1 percent during a payment gateway outage that was not ours.

Every item on the checklist above is something we either built because a rule or an auditor required it, or had to retrofit because we did not build it early enough. The per vendor quirks file in that repo exists because real chargers do not implement OCPP cleanly, whatever the datasheet says. The full write up is in the PlugEV case study.

If you are standing up a network, or you are a company that is about to inherit chargers in a basement because your state building code said so, that is the work we do: an OCPP platform you own, with the reporting, invoicing and hub integration built in, on NestJS and Next.js with Postgres underneath. We can also audit what a vendor has already sold you and tell you, in writing, which of the twenty lines above they fail.

Ask for a demo, because the software is already built

The reason I am comfortable publishing a twenty line checklist is that we run a system which answers all twenty. It is live, it has been billing real drivers since January 2025, and it is not a prototype waiting for your advance to begin. That matters to you in three ways: the timeline to get you live is measured in weeks of configuration and charger onboarding rather than a year of ground up development, the cost sits at the lower end of the build range because the hard parts exist, and you can judge it before you pay by looking at it working.

A demo takes about thirty minutes and we do it on the real operator console, not a slide deck. You get to watch a live charger map and session telemetry, a session start and stop with the meter values behind it, the pricing engine doing per kWh, per minute, per session and idle fees with time of day rates, a GST invoice generated at cycle close, an RFID card authorised with the network deliberately cut to show the offline path, the per charger downtime and energy report that your quarterly filing comes out of, and the fleet sub account hierarchy if you have business customers or departments to bill.

Bring your awkward questions to it. Your charger brand and firmware version, your DISCOM's tariff structure, whether your subsidy claim needs hub onboarding, what happens to your existing sessions if you migrate off your current vendor. If we cannot do something, you will hear that in the demo rather than after the purchase order. Three things we will want from you beforehand: how many chargers and in how many cities, the hardware brands involved, and whether any site is on government land or public funding, because that decides how much of the compliance side switches on.

The short version

• You do not need a licence to run a public charging station in India. You do need to register it, report it, display your rates and be auditable.
• The four documents that matter: MoP guidelines of 17 September 2024, PM E-DRIVE public charging guidelines of 26 September 2025, CEA safety regulations 2023 Chapter XI, and your own state's policy and building code.
• Register with the state nodal agency and get mapped on EV Yatra, then keep the live availability honest.
• Be able to produce per charger energy sold, service charges and real downtime for any quarter. Downtime needs stored status history, so this is a software decision made on day one.
• If public money is funding your site, your final subsidy tranche needs an undertaking that the chargers are onboarded on MHI's National Unified Hub, and the hub wants location, slot availability, pricing and digital payment options from you.
• Show the electricity pass through and your service charge separately, display rates at the site, meter each station separately, and pay the land owner their ₹1 per kWh quarterly where that applies.
• Open protocols (OCPP, OCPI, UEI, OpenADR) are advised, not mandated. Build as if they are mandated, because everything downstream of you assumes them.
• Not a charging company? Building bye-laws, state codes and fleet schemes still put chargers on your premises, and then you need cost allocation, access control and load management rather than a national platform.
• And the software that does all of the above is already built on our side and running in production, so ask for a demo on the live system before you commit to anything.

One ask, and it is not a sales one. State rules in this area move faster than central ones, and I cannot read nineteen building codes every quarter. If your state or your DISCOM is asking for something that is not in this post, send it to me and I will add it here with a credit to you. Same if a vendor answers one of the twenty checklist lines in a way you found revealing. Half of what I know about this came from operators telling me what they got asked for, and this post is the place I keep it.