Home charging — not public fast chargers — is the real backbone of India's EV transition, and much of the country's housing stock isn't ready for it. That's the headline finding of "The Net-Zero Transition Starts at Home: Enabling EV-Ready Residences in India", a report released this week by charging company Kazam and the Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE), drawing on more than 80,000 real residential charger installations across 10,000+ pin codes, plus field surveys and consumer interviews.
Home charging carries 80–90% of India's EV energy
The study estimates that residential charging currently supplies 80–90 percent of India's daily EV energy demand across two-wheelers, cars and autorickshaws, and is typically 2–4 times cheaper than public charging. That economics matters most to commuters and gig workers — a workforce projected to reach 23.5 million by 2030 — whose earnings depend directly on cheap overnight charging. It also matches what we've long told readers: charging at home is by far the cheapest way to run an EV in India.
The access gap: only ~55% can plug in today
The report's most striking numbers are about who can't charge at home. Only about 55 percent of prospective EV buyers currently have feasible home-charging access — parking plus basic electrical readiness. Roughly 30 percent could get there, but only after upgrading wiring, load capacity or safety systems, while around 15 percent are structurally blocked altogether. Overall, nearly 45 percent of Indian homes need electrical upgrades before they can support EV charging safely. The usual culprits are inadequate earthing, voltage fluctuations, ageing or undersized wiring, and the widespread use of ordinary 5A/15A sockets and extension cords instead of dedicated charging points — improvised setups that raise fire risk and can hurt battery health. With 70–75 percent of urban households living in apartments, parking and RWA or landlord permissions are often the real bottleneck, a problem we've covered in depth in our guide to EV charging in apartments and housing societies.
What the report recommends
EV-related electricity use is projected to grow from about 0.2 percent of India's power demand in 2024 to roughly 6 percent by 2035, and DISCOMs currently have little visibility into it — in Delhi, only 2 percent of EV owners have a separate metered EV connection, a gap the new Delhi EV policy's charging push will need to close. The report proposes a national residential EV-readiness framework: certified charging hardware instead of domestic sockets, dedicated EV metering, financial support for electrical upgrades, large-scale electrician training, and smart charging with time-of-day tariffs so overnight EV load helps rather than strains the grid. For anyone planning a bigger setup, our charging-station setup guide covers the wiring, load-sanction and approval side in detail.
Sources
Report findings as published by EVreporter · AEEE (report page) · Manufacturing Today India