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Himachal Pradesh is building EV charging corridors and encouraging hotels to install chargers as it tries to reduce emissions from road-based tourism.
The state has notified six Green Corridors across about 2,000km of highways, linking major tourist routes including Shimla, Manali, Dharamshala, Chamba and Spiti.
Officials say only two of 41 planned charging sites are currently functional, while more than 66 hotels in the state have installed EV chargers.
The state’s own EV market remains small, making tourists, hotels and out-of-state commercial vehicles central to its electric mobility strategy.
Himachal Pradesh has spent the past two years building up its electric bus fleet as part of its response to worsening traffic and vehicular pollution across the state’s towns. But for a state whose economy depends heavily on tourism, its electric vehicle strategy will have to look beyond its own public transport fleet and towards the millions of tourists who arrive by road each year.
Over the past two years, the state has built this strategy around two main measures: persuading hotels to install their own electric vehicle chargers and developing a ‘green corridor’ of charging points along highways used by tourists.
According to the state’s Economic Survey 2025-26 report, tourist arrivals have rebounded sharply since the pandemic, reaching 14.5 million in 2025, including religious and international tourists. Most visitors arrive in their own vehicles, buses or commercial taxis, the majority of which still run on petrol or diesel.
While the government’s public transport push has focused on electrifying its own bus fleet, officials said tourism represents an equally significant, though harder to regulate, source of vehicular emissions.
“Alongside public transport, our major focus has been tourism because that is one of the largest contributors to vehicular movement in the state,” said Varsha Parmar, project officer at ICLEI South Asia, a sustainability network working with the state transport department on electric mobility.
The adoption of electric mobility by individuals depends largely on whether visitors can find reliable charging infrastructure along their journeys and at their destinations. “The idea is to ensure that people travelling to Himachal in electric vehicles don’t hesitate because of charging concerns,” Parmar said.
The state is developing a network of EV charging stations along major tourist highways under its Green Corridor initiative and has notified six Green Corridors:
Parwanoo-Nalagarh-Una-Hamirpur-Dehra-Amb-Mubarikpur-Sansarpur Terrace-Nurpur
Paonta-Nahan-Solan-Shimla
Parwanoo-Solan-Shimla-Rampur-Peo-Pooh-Tabo-Kaza-Losar
Shimla-Bilaspur-Hamirpur-Kangra-Nurpur-Banikhet-Chamba
Mandi-Jogindernagar-Palampur-Dharamshala-Kangra
Kiratpur-Bilaspur-Mandi-Kullu-Manali-Keylong-Zing-Zing Bar
These routes span roughly 2,000 kilometres of state and national highways, connecting Himachal’s major tourist circuits, including stretches such as Chandigarh to Losar in Spiti Valley, a continuous run of about 200-250 km.
The government initially hoped to set up 500 charging stations across these corridors through a public-private partnership model. That number has since been scaled back sharply, with tenders now covering 41 sites, spaced roughly 25 km apart on average, officials told Down To Earth. Only two of the 41 sites are currently functional in the state, each with 90 kiloWatt chargers and four charging guns. “It will take one year to complete all 41 sites,” Parmar said.
These charging stations are being designed as more than just places to plug in. Vijay Saini, senior manager at ICLEI South Asia, said the plan is to build them as integrated hubs, with washrooms and cafes, so that a charging stop can also serve as a rest stop for tourists on longer highway journeys.
“We realised just providing charging points wouldn’t be enough, so we came up with an integrated model,” Saini said. “The idea is that while your vehicle charges, you shouldn’t be standing around with nothing to do. This gives larger flexibility to the tourist.”
Another part of the model involves partnering with oil marketing companies to set up charging stations under the Union government’s Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles in India (FAME II) scheme.
For this, 80 petrol pump sites have been identified along the six Green Corridors for EV charging stations.
But building EV infrastructure in a hill state like Himachal Pradesh comes with challenges different from those in many other parts of the country. Parmar said the government had earlier identified more petrol pumps, but the number had to be reduced because many pumps in Himachal are built on retaining walls constructed to stabilise hillside construction. “This triggers a different set of licensing norms than a standard flat-ground pump, and many sites couldn’t clear that requirement,” she said.
Alongside highway corridors, the state’s other major push has been to persuade hotels to install their own charging points.
Unlike the oil marketing company and public-private partnership routes, which involve government tenders and central subsidies, this effort has largely relied on direct engagement and persuasion, because there is no subsidy available for private hotels to install charging infrastructure.
Convincing hoteliers to invest in charging infrastructure took sustained effort. Between 2024 and 2025, the transport and tourism departments, along with ICLEI, held nine workshops with the hospitality sector, making the business case directly to hotel owners.
“We showed them data from neighbouring states, how electric cars are increasing there, and told them that it would be beneficial only when the customer sees it while booking the hotel,” Parmar said. Today, more than 66 hotels in Himachal Pradesh, including more than 20 in Shimla, have EV charging stations.
At Hotel Snow Valley in Shimla, the trend is already showing up in numbers. The hotel’s charging point, installed six to seven months ago, now sees eight to 10 cars plugged in on an average day. “People are shifting to electric vehicles, and when tourists are travelling for a trip, they look for electric chargers,” said Prateek Jamwal, reservation manager at the hotel.
“Around 70 per cent of tourists in Shimla in a year come from Chandigarh, Haryana, Punjab and Delhi, the states where EV ownership is rising fast. When tourists search for hotels, they will of course give preference to our hotel if a charger is available.” The hotel does not turn away travellers staying elsewhere either, he added. “Ultimately, it is giving a boost to Himachal’s tourism,” Jamwal said.
At The Oberoi Cecil hotel in Shimla, chief engineer Rohit Kumar said the hotel has seen a clear trend: charging access has improved and more tourists with electric cars are arriving. The hotel has two 30kW chargers, with two guns, open to any traveller, not just guests staying there.
The hotel does not formally track how many cars use its chargers, but Kumar gave a rough estimate. The previous day, the chargers had drawn 72 units of electricity, enough for about two cars, while consumption rises to around 300 units during the peak tourist season. Averaged across the year since the chargers were installed in 2024, he estimated that three to four cars charge there on a typical day.
However, not every hotel in Shimla can offer this facility. One of the main problems for many hotels in the city is limited parking space. Setting up a charging station requires dedicated parking, which both Snow Valley and Cecil have, but many of the city’s more centrally located properties do not.
Another challenge in the hotel-led charging push is power outages. During outages, many hotels fall back on diesel generator sets, which momentarily undercuts the purpose of offering cleaner charging. Hotel executives, however, said this is not a frequent concern and is usually confined to a few winter days.
With a population of roughly 8 million, Himachal Pradesh’s own vehicle market offers limited room for EV demand to grow organically, officials said. Of the 716,097 cars registered in the state, only 3,120 are pure electric or battery-operated vehicles, less than 0.4 per cent, according to data from the government’s Vahan dashboard.
Two-wheelers, which typically lead EV adoption in other Indian states, have found little traction in Himachal Pradesh. Just 1.2 per cent of scooters registered in the 2025 calendar year were electric, compared with 2.1 per cent of cars registered during the same period. “Acquisition of two-wheelers is less compared to cars as they are less suitable for our terrain,” said Neeraj Kumar, director of the state transport department.
“They remain more popular in the lower plains, in districts like Una and Kangra. In the mountainous regions, every third Himachali has an economical car, and EVs are largely a second-car preference. So our main focus is on tourists.”
Second-car ownership, in other words, is emerging as the more common entry point for private EVs in the state, making the transient tourist market a larger, faster-moving opportunity than resident demand alone.
An electric transition approach built only around dense urban centres, however, risks leaving out much of Himachal Pradesh’s geography, where reliable electricity supply and road connectivity are already inconsistent, even before charging infrastructure is added.
To address this, the transport department has proposed 178 charging sites under the PM E-Drive scheme at government-owned locations such as rest houses, circuit houses, hospitals and colleges. More than 50 of these are in rural areas.
Officials chose these sites partly because they already have backup power infrastructure, in the form of diesel generator sets, though the department says it is now working to shift these to solar power so that the transition is not undermined by fossil fuel-based backup.
Every site under this plan is required to remain open to the public 24 hours a day. “This will give confidence to the general public that if they think of buying an electric car, they can buy one,” Kumar said. He added that the broader trend, despite the constraints, is encouraging. “There are definitely encouraging signs of e-mobility. Vehicle acquisition rate is also increasing, so in that component, electric vehicles are increasing,” he said.
Kumar described the state’s approach as working through what was initially a chicken-and-egg problem. “EV should come first, or charging should; now we are focusing on charging infrastructure. It’s not a perfect system yet, but we are working on that,” he said.
Even as hotels and highways get electrified, one part of Himachal’s tourist traffic remains largely outside the state’s control: commercial vehicles that bring tourists from other states. “Most taxis ferrying tourists into Himachal are registered elsewhere, and the capital cost of converting them to electric isn’t a call the state can make on its own,” Kumar said.
“One policy challenge is how we can reduce the capital cost, but that has to be done by the states where these commercial vehicles are registered,” he added.
Delhi has made a start on this, under its new EV policy, under which ride aggregators will have to adopt EVs in their newly onboarded fleets, and we hope other states do too.