Can India turn modernization into the next mobility revolution?

For decades, India’s growth story has been written by a familiar script: take a technology invented elsewhere, strip it down, reengineer it at a cost, and roll it out to the masses. Examples of this approach are generic drugs, low-cost telecommunications, fuel-efficient cars. It is a script that India has executed brilliantly. The question India needs to ask now is whether it is ready to move from optimization to creation.

There are indications that it already does. Digital payments existed long before the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), yet UPI re-engineered the entire transaction architecture and created a good enough model that other countries want to emulate. Retail existed long before fast-paced commerce, but ten-minute delivery changed consumer expectations in a way that no global template had. In both cases, India has moved beyond the familiar scenario and created a new category of implementation for existing systems. These models are suitable for Indian density, informality and scale. Now they travel across borders. Mobility presents a similar opening.

Vehicle retrofitting

Vehicle retrofitting is the focus of the new opportunity. Retrofits that convert an existing petrol or diesel vehicle to electric by replacing the powertrain keep the chassis intact. It’s a useful technical fix, but the real innovation opportunity comes from everything that needs to be built around it – from legacy vehicle diagnostics, battery and power electronics systems designed for retrofit architectures, calibration software, test protocols, safety certifications, financing solutions, installation networks and qualified service personnel. Innovation is based on the transition from a single product to the creation of an entire operating system for a new industry, the definitive version of which has not yet been created.

India has the essential ingredients to attempt this: a deep automotive supply chain, engineering talent already proven in fuel-efficient design, a fast-growing electric vehicle sector, credible software capabilities and, crucially, a domestic market large and diverse enough to pressure-test the solution.

The edge of decentralization

India’s advantage is structural. Unlike new EV production, which rewards scale and centralization, retrofitting rewards distribution, such as local workshops, local technicians, and local entrepreneurs. India has already shown what decentralized infrastructure delivery looks like at scale.

The PM Surya Ghar Yojna (PMSGY) on rooftop solar has now reached over 63 million households and has been built through a network of over 34,000 engaged dealers, creating over 4.6 million jobs across the solar rooftop value chain. Here’s a blueprint for what an upgrade ecosystem could look like that doesn’t include a few large factories, but thousands of certified local centers. Each center can rebuild, repair and maintain vehicles while generating an average of at least 20 direct and indirect jobs.

India’s automotive geography is not limited to its metros. Millions of vehicles ply in Tier-II and Tier-III cities and rural India, held together by a vast, largely informal network of mechanics, garages and spare parts dealers. With the right standards and training, this existing workforce can be absorbed and the conversion of neighborhood mechanic shops into certified renovators. This proximity between service providers and vehicle owners also solves the trust problem that new technologies always face.

An opportunity for the Global South

The opportunity goes beyond India. Countries across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America share the same three conditions that make retrofitting relevant in India. They have large fleets of aging vehicles, price-sensitive consumers and much longer ownership cycles compared to more affluent markets. Collectively, the Global South spends more than $550 billion a year on oil imports, a dependency that sales of new EVs alone will significantly disrupt, as new vehicles only replace a fraction of the fleet each year.

Retrofitting offers these countries a faster and cheaper way to offset that fuel bill using vehicles already on their roads.

This is exactly the kind of opportunity that UPI India has already managed to capture. UPI-linked payments now work in eight countries, and India has signed digital infrastructure cooperation agreements with 23 others. This was not realized because India sold a payment app, but because it exported a replicable model and implementation manual that other countries could adapt.

Additional equipment could follow the same arc. If India builds certification standards, financial models, safety protocols and training channels for modernization close to home and at scale, it will effectively have an exportable system built.

Other countries with similar fleets and pressure to import fuel would rally behind him.

None of this happens by accident. It requires India to approach retrofitting not as a stopgap measure to be tolerated until new electric vehicles are widely available, but as a genuine innovation category to be deliberately designed. India has the right pieces, engineering talent, manufacturing base, networks of engineers and domestic testing base. Now it needs a plan to join these pieces together for a PMSGY-scale retrofit.

(Jaideep Saraswat is the Deputy Director of the Clean Power, Electric Mobility & Emerging Technologies Vertical at Vasudha Foundation. Ashish Dokania is the Managing Director of Green Tiger Mobility Private Limited. The authors declare no competing interest.)

Published – 21 Oct 2026 08:00 IST