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Why India’s electric bus push is leading to fatal crashes
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
India’s big cities are learning that electric buses need trained drivers to handle them.
Public electric buses in Bengaluru caused 18 accidents, six of them fatal, over 15 months ending August 2025, while two crashes in Mumbai between December 2024 and January 2025 killed a dozen people. The accidents have also stretched beyond major metros, with a speeding electric bus killing four in Gujarat in April 2025 and another crushing a stationary auto in Odisha in January, killing two.
Insufficient driver training, not faulty technology, is the leading cause, according to municipal corporations and civil advocates. Vehicular issues have been ruled out in most incidents, with driver error accounting for about 60% of accidents involving both electric and conventional buses, according to Pawan Mulukutla, executive program director for Integrated Transport, Clean Air and Hydrogen at World Resources Institute India.
More than 10,000 electric buses already operate across 50 Indian cities, with 20,000 more in procurement, according to the World Resources Institute. The rapid expansion is outpacing efforts to train drivers on distinct challenges like sudden acceleration and hard braking, and experts say systemic reforms will be needed to resolve the deepening labour crisis.
“It is easy to blame the technology always, but it is difficult for me to believe that six or seven manufacturers do not know how a bus is to be designed,” Ravi Gadepalli, founder of Transit Intelligence, an advisory and analytics firm supporting the e-bus transition in Indian cities, told Rest of World.
These buses are tested and certified by the Indian government, Gadepalli said, adding that manufacturers like Olectra, PMI, and Solaris operate buses in countries like China and Poland without incident.
There’s a clear experience gap between drivers of diesel or CNG buses and those operating electric buses, said Amegh Gopinath, head of mobility and climate action at New Delhi-based Innpact Solutions. He documented this in an 18-month study for the German Agency for International Cooperation in 2020-’21, interviewing officials, drivers, and other ground staff of several state road transport corporations.
“With electric buses, there’s not a lot of exposure to the technology, exposure to the drivetrain,” Gopinath told Rest of World.
Private contractors conduct brief interviews and check for a heavy-duty vehicle license, and hire drivers with minimal electric bus-specific onboarding, Gopinath found. This contrasts sharply with the European and US markets, where drivers undergo rigorous initial training, attend refresher courses, and have their driving behavior monitored via simulators and real-world tracking.
“There’s a lot of push for defensive driving [abroad] as well – that you don’t accelerate at junctions, intersections, and at crossings,” Gopinath said. “But these things are not given a lot of importance in India at this point.”
State transport authorities contract private operators to run electric buses but do little to enforce training and safety standards. Oversight is largely manual and inconsistent, according to Gadepalli, who helped the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation set up a digital contract management system in 2025.
“At the end of the day, the authority cannot write a contract and forget about it,” he said. “They need to still have staff monitoring the operations in a lot of detail.”
Aggressive bidding to win contracts created a race to the bottom on pay. BMTC-hired drivers earn Rs 30,000 monthly on average, while private operators pay around Rs 22,000, Gadepalli said. Low salaries and poor working conditions have led to high attrition, with drivers opting for ride-hailing services like Uber and Ola instead, Shivanand Swamy, executive director at Centre of Excellence in Urban Transport, told Rest of World.
“In recent years, there have been instances where accidents were reported due to extended duty hours and driver fatigue,” Mulukutla said. “It is crucial to have clear regulations around duty hours and to ensure periodic training.”
Still, Swamy, who is facilitating technology adoption, operations, financing, and capacity building for the transition to electric public mobility, remains optimistic that these growing pains will subside. India’s road transport and highways ministry updated guidelines for EV driver training in January 2025 to be more rigorous and stringent
“This is a transition phase right now. Options are limited in terms of drivers’ availability,” Swamy said. “It will settle down very soon, I’m sure.”
In the aftermath of the fatal incidents, the Mumbai and Bengaluru governments have said they will mandate licence reviews as well as training and refresher courses even for privately hired drivers.
Some experts argue that a philosophical shift is also needed, viewing public transport as a public service rather than a revenue-generating model. The pressure on institutions to generate revenue adds stress to ground staff, Gopinath said.
“The focus has been about how much are you generating in terms of revenue, how many kilometres have we operated, what are our fuel savings,” Gopinath said. “If that shift happens, I think a lot of stress is taken off from these ground staff, especially the drivers.”
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Source: Scroll
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