Zohra Khan on the business of Indian EV infra
What does it take to charge India's EVs at scale?
Hi folks, Pranav here, taking over “Who Said What” just for this weekend to tell you about our new podcast on our new podcast series, Subtext by Zerodha. I’m biased, but we have had a pretty killer series of guests so far that we’ve love for you to check out, and our next guest is no exception.
India’s shift to electric vehicles rests on the ability to charge. Today, solving that has less to do with the vehicle itself than with everything it plugs into — the charger, the connector, the software, the protocols that charging networks use to talk to one another, and, most importantly, the ageing Indian electricity grid beneath all of it.
To chat about all this, we got Zohra Khan, the founder of IPEC, a Bangalore-based company that designs and manufactures EV chargers for India’s leading two- and three-wheeler OEMs, and is now moving into four-wheelers and buses. She is a third-generation entrepreneur from the MEHER Group, which has been building power quality systems and power electronic components in India for more than forty-five years — a lineage that turns out to matter a great deal when the problem you are solving is a highly-volatile Indian grid.
Me and my teammate Vignesh sat down with her to understand the parts of the EV transition nobody puts on a spec sheet: why two chargers that look identical are really running different software, why public charging has three separate ways to fail, why India is a power-surplus country with a distribution problem, and why a charger built to survive Bangalore in the monsoon might be the most exportable product IPEC makes.
IPEC is also one of three founding members of LEAF, or the Light Electric Vehicle Acceleration Forum, launched alongside Ather Energy and Hero Vida. The aim of LEAD is to standardize charging for the two- and three-wheelers that the rest of the world is watching India figure out.
Here’s 6 interesting quotes from a conversation full of them:
On why two chargers that look identical aren’t
Ask most people what differentiates one EV charger from another and they’ll point at the box — its size, its brand, the connector on the end of the cable. Zohra’s answer is that the box is the part that doesn’t differ. Strip an Ather charger and a Bajaj charger down to their power electronics and you find the same job being done the same way. The thing that actually separates them is invisible: the firmware, and the language each vehicle’s battery insists on being spoken to in.
“So honestly, they have a lot more in common than people think. At the hardware level, what you’re doing is fundamentally moving energy from an AC power grid, converting it into DC, and then charging a battery. That’s essentially what you’re doing. So the main power electronics at the core is mainly a rectifier, then you also have multiple conversion stages and protection circuits which are required to protect these electronics. This is largely the same across all OEMs. Whether it’s an Ather or an Ola or a Bajaj, the basic hardware remains common because the function is the same. Where it actually differs is on the software protocols.”
On the three separate ways public charging fails
Home charging, Zohra says, is a solved problem — the charger comes integrated with the vehicle and behaves like charging your phone overnight. Public charging is where the friction lives, and it’s worth being precise about it, because “the charging network is bad” is actually three distinct failures stacked on top of each other. Your connector might not physically fit. If it fits, the software might not agree on how to talk. And even if both line up, the grid feeding that charger might not be clean enough for it to run at all.
“The first one is the actual physical connector. Let’s say I have an Ather vehicle and I go to any public infrastructure. The first thing I need to see is, is the connector on my vehicle compatible with the connector on the charging station? So this is one distinct layer which could cause friction. This is a physical layer. The second thing is a protocol or software layer. Even if the connector matches, you usually need to also have software interoperability.”
On why standardisation is a land grab
The two-wheeler and three-wheeler segment that India leads globally still hasn’t settled on common connectors and protocols, the way four-wheelers have converged on CCS2. That sounds like a problem. Zohra frames it as an opportunity with a closing window. India is writing these standards more or less from scratch, and the firms in the room while they’re written get to shape them — which is why IPEC helped launch LEAF with Ather and Vida rather than waiting for a regulator to decide.
“And whoever joins this first, or standardizes this first — these are the people who will shape how the standards are written for the future. Every OEM now knows which side of the table they want to be on. And this is what we are leading the effort on, along with Ather and Vida. Honestly, it has been quite encouraging. We thought we’d face a lot of resistance, but OEMs have been quite welcoming, and not just OEMs — different ecosystem players like charge point operators, infrastructure players, charging connector companies, charger companies are all coming together.”
On why India is power-surplus but still short of power
The intuitive story about Indian electricity is scarcity — not enough generation. Zohra’s correction is one of the most useful frames in the conversation: at the level of generating and transmitting power, India has largely caught up. The failure is in the last mile, the neighbourhood-level distribution layer that nobody photographs for a ribbon-cutting.
“If you look at it, we’re actually a power surplus country officially. The amount of power we generate is enough to meet our needs right now. But I think what India has is a distribution problem. And that’s where the DISCOMs and a lot of these players come into the picture. This distribution layer, which is mainly the 11 kV and the 415 volt lines — that’s what actually connects the grid to your neighborhood. Right now a lot of these lines are overloaded.”
On building for the worst grid in the world as a moat
Here’s where the grid-quality problem turns into a strategy. Chargers designed for the stable grids of Europe or China assume a voltage that mostly stays put. India doesn’t offer that. IPEC’s response is to engineer for the worst case as a matter of course — wider voltage tolerance, far higher surge protection — and Zohra’s argument is that a product hardened for India isn’t just a defensive necessity. It’s the most globally competitive thing the company could possibly build.
“And that’s also an advantage, a competitive advantage that I think we would have. Because one, we’re forced to build very reliable products, but India is also a very large market, so you’re also building these products at scale. So it’ll be reliable, but you can also make them cost competitive, and then you can export these to any part of the world, because they will work anywhere. So I actually see that as an advantage. Whether it’s a Chinese charger or a German-made charger, I would say we’ll do it better and cheaper.”
On the one part India can’t make yet
For all the talk of self-reliance, Zohra is precise about where it currently ends. IPEC’s domestic value addition is already past 55% — enclosures, cables, magnetics, and increasingly the capacitors (one of its investors, Deki Electronics, has localised those). But the brain and the muscle of any power electronic device — the microcontrollers and the power semiconductors — still come from abroad, and no amount of will closes that gap quickly.
“So the hardest part, if you ask me, would be the semiconductors and microcontrollers to indigenize or localize. Because right now almost all of these are being primarily imported either from China — these are mainly US, European, Japanese manufacturers, but all their supply chains are in either China or Taiwan. So that’s just the reality of the supply chain and how it exists. But like I said, the government is pushing this, a lot of policies and incentives are in place, and we are going to see that changing in the next three to five years, but not anytime soon.”
The full conversation goes further — into how OCPP and OCPI let any charger talk to any network, who pays when an OEM changes its battery chemistry, the line between IPEC’s intellectual property and an OEM’s, whether OEMs building chargers in-house is a real threat, and why Zohra is certain IPEC will never build a scooter.
Listen to the full conversation on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. The full transcript of the podcast is below if you prefer to read.
