Experts say Gujarat’s clean transport transition cannot rely on electric vehicles alone and will require stronger public transport to reduce dependence on private vehicles.
Ahmedabad should have at least 4,000 buses under central service-level benchmarks, but only about 1,100 are currently in operation.
Gujarat is adding electric buses under FAME-II, PM e-Drive, PM e-Bus Seva and state schemes, including allocations for Ahmedabad and Surat.
Electric buses still account for only 2.17% of Gujarat’s registered bus fleet across diesel, CNG and electric categories, with diesel continuing to dominate.
Gujarat is promoting electric mobility, but experts say the state’s clean transport transition will remain limited unless it also curbs the growing number of private vehicles and expands public transport.
They argue that reducing vehicle pollution will require fewer vehicles on the road, not only replacing petrol and diesel vehicles with electric ones.
“Public transport is a long-term solution to curb vehicular pollution and control traffic congestion on roads, but it is still receiving less attention,” Rutul Joshi, associate professor at CEPT University (formerly the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology) in Ahmedabad, told Down To Earth.
Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, has a population of about eight million and should have at least 4,000 buses according to central government service-level benchmarks. But only about 1,100 buses are currently in operation.
According to information obtained under the Right to Information Act and reported by The Times of India, 1,117 buses are operating under the Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Service and Ahmedabad Janmarg Limited.
Of the 867 buses operated by AMTS, 125 belong to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, while 742 are privately owned. Ahmedabad Janmarg Limited operates 250 buses under the Bus Rapid Transit System, which is owned by the municipal corporation but run by four private operators.
Ahmedabad also has about 40 kiloemetres of metro services, carrying around 35,000 passengers a day.
Joshi said focusing only on increasing the number of electric vehicles would not solve the city’s transport problems, especially while fossil fuels remain a major source of power generation in the country.
He said several wider urban transport reforms had not moved fast enough.
One of them is transit-oriented development, or TOD, which promotes dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods around bus, metro and rail corridors so that people can rely less on private vehicles.
Joshi said simply supporting electric vehicles without addressing wider transport planning would not reduce congestion or pollution.
He also pointed to the need to better regulate auto rickshaws, an important form of public transport in Ahmedabad. Accurate data on how many auto rickshaws are operating in the city is still not available, he said.
He added that the sector should be streamlined and auto rickshaws should gradually be converted to electric vehicles.
H M Shivanand Swami, retired professor and former director of the Centre of Excellence in Urban Transport at CEPT University, also said public transport was the only practical way to reduce the number of private vehicles on Gujarat’s roads.
He said the state government was increasing the number of buses in major cities such as Ahmedabad, with a special focus on electric buses.
According to Swami, e-buses are being added to city fleets in phases across six municipal corporations under schemes such as PM-eBus, PM e-Drive and the Chief Minister’s Bus Scheme.
The government is also covering the gap between the cost of operating the buses and fares charged to passengers through viability gap funding.
According to a government release, 200 electric buses have been deployed in Ahmedabad, 150 in Rajkot and 300 in Surat under the FAME-II scheme.
Under the PM e-Drive scheme, 1,200 new electric buses have been allocated for Ahmedabad and 600 for Surat. In addition, 750 buses have been approved for Gujarat under the PM e-Bus Seva scheme, with acceptance letters issued for 555 of them by March 2026.
The Gujarat government is clearly pushing for the electrification of public transport. But compared with the state’s overall bus fleet, the pace of change remains slow. Vehicle registration data shows that 1,496 electric buses are registered in Gujarat, compared with 64,784 diesel buses and 2,789 CNG buses.
This means electric buses account for only 2.17 per cent of the 69,069 buses registered across these three fuel categories. Diesel therefore continues to dominate Gujarat’s bus fleet.
Experts say this gap matters because transport electrification cannot be assessed only by the number of electric vehicles on the road. It must also be measured by whether people have reliable, affordable alternatives to private vehicles.