Greater Noida resident Rachit Katyal has moved the Supreme Court after his housing society allegedly failed to act on his request to install a private EV charger.
The petition seeks implementation of the Ministry of Power’s 2024 guidelines on EV charging infrastructure in housing societies.
Katyal says Nirala Estate, which has nearly 4,000 flats, had only two charging points for an estimated 56 electric vehicles.
The case raises a wider question over whether India’s EV owners have an enforceable right to charge their vehicles at home.
Rachit Katyal bought an electric vehicle (EV) and sought to do what the Union Ministry of Power’s guidelines and rules appeared to permit: Install a private charger in his allotted parking space, with the permission of his housing society. That was in May 2025. Seven months, six emails and one “final reminder” later, he was still waiting. So in January 2026, he moved the Supreme Court of India.
Katyal, a resident of Nirala Estate in Greater Noida, first wrote to the society’s management on May 26, 2025, seeking a No Objection Certificate (NOC) to install a certified EV charger at his own cost. According to the petition, the request was forwarded “to the upper management” the same day, but then went unanswered despite follow-up emails.
In July, the management replied that a charging station already existed near Tower 31, without addressing Katyal’s specific request for a charger in his own allotted parking space. In December, Katyal sent what he described as a “final reminder”, noting that the society, which has nearly 4,000 flats, had provided only two charging points for what he estimated were around 56 electric vehicles in the complex.
With no resolution, Katyal filed a Public Interest Litigation directly before the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution, rather than first approaching the Allahabad High Court. The petition names the Union of India and the State of Uttar Pradesh as respondents, along with Nirala Estate’s secretary and its facility manager, Cushman & Wakefield Property Management Services India Pvt Ltd. It remains pending, with the matter not yet taken up for hearing and tentatively listed for August 18, 2026.
Down To Earth spoke to Sriram P, counsel for the petitioner, to understand the case and the broader question it raises: does India have a “right to recharge”?
The Supreme Court has jurisdiction under Article 32 to hear petitions alleging a violation of fundamental rights. In this case, Sriram said, the underlying grievance is that the power ministry’s 2024 guidelines exist on paper but are not being implemented.
That distinction matters because of the relief the petition seeks. Its primary prayer asks the Court to direct state governments to ensure the “proper and effective implementation” of the power ministry’s Guidelines for Installation and Operation of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure, 2024. Only if the Court declines to go that far does the petition fall back to a narrower request specific to Uttar Pradesh.
The case differs from a similar petition in Maharashtra, where Mumbai resident Amit Dholakia approached the Bombay High Court after being denied an NOC for a home EV charger. The Katyal petition cites that case and states that “the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India has upheld the Hon’ble Bombay High Court’s order”.
In January 2025, the Bombay High Court directed Maharashtra’s Registrar of Cooperative Societies to finalise rules for EV charging infrastructure in housing societies. That relief was confined to Maharashtra, as it was granted by a state High Court under Article 226 of the Constitution. Katyal’s petition, by contrast, seeks directions from the Supreme Court with wider application. No ruling has yet been passed in his case.
Asked what the housing society told Katyal when he pursued the matter, Sriram said the response was, in effect, “deal with it yourself”.
Sriram also laid out what he described as the real scale of the problem: having your own charging connection would require a commercial connection even though the 2024 guidelines say supply can be availed through the resident's existing meter or a separate sub-meter. Sriram was clear that this isn’t the guidelines contradicting themselves, it’s the difference between what a guideline says on paper and what actually happens when someone tries to get a connection. A guideline saying something doesn’t automatically make it enforceable law.
At Nirala Estate specifically, the Resident Welfare Association’s position, as recorded in its own reply to Katyal, was that two charging points were sufficient for the society.
Sriram described the dispute as, at its core, one between minority and majority homeowners, both within Nirala Estate and in housing societies more broadly. EV owners, he said, remain a minority in most residential complexes. RWA boards — where lobbying by majority, non-EV-owning members is common — may therefore have little incentive to prioritise expenditure for a few on charging infrastructure.
In his view, a Supreme Court ruling in Katyal’s favour would put an end to that lobbying dynamic by making implementation a matter of legal compliance rather than internal society politics.
Sriram also walked through what it would take for a “right to recharge” to move from government guideline to binding law: a policy paper, as already exists from 2024, would need to become a draft law, go through committee, and finally be passed as an Act. That process does not have to take as long as it often does, he said, pointing to India’s social media rules as an example of comparable legislative change moving considerably faster.
For now, Katyal’s case sits in a queue. The matter has not yet been taken up for hearing, and the Court has not indicated whether it will grant the nationwide relief the petition seeks or the narrower, Nirala Estate-specific fallback. Until then, the question of whether India’s millions of EV owners have an enforceable right to charge their vehicles at home remains, like Katyal's own charger, unresolved.