By subsidising electric vehicles, the government is trying to speed up the changeover from internal combustion engines to electric, but it has yet to tackle in a meaningful way the biggest hurdle in the whole affair, the availability of chargers. The scheme will provide Rs 100.36 billion in subsidies for electric bikes, rickshaws, loaders, cars, buses and trucks. The first phase will target 41,000 vehicles, the second 78,170. If the stress on two-wheelers is maintained, it will help reduce the pollution afflicting the country, but there must be provision of adequate charging facilities. While it is presently possible to charge an EV from a domestic connection, if EVs charge in sizeable numbers, they might cause battered distribution systems to collapse. Plans to mass-convert to EVs may run up against the bitter reality that while there might be the generation capacity, the distribution network is in bad shape.
While EVs are much cheaper than ICE vehicles to run, there is the problem of resale value. When an EV battery dies, replacing it is usually as expensive as replacing the entire vehicle. In other words, such vehicles do not have any resale value. Both two-wheelers and four-wheelers here have a resale value which makes them seen as stores of value, representing a substantial portion of the family savings. The prospect opens up of used EVs crowding landfills or garbage dumps, and new ones filling up dealers’ lots. The conversion will only be beneficial if it means a reduction in the petroleum import bill to counterbalance the imports of EV kits, for at the moment, assembly is all that is contemplated. Pakistan does have the rare earths and other minerals needed to make batteries, and the situation must be avoided where the ore is exported, processed and manufactured abroad, and then exported back as car batteries. That would mean the return of colonialism.
One of the problems is that these subsidies wo; have to be run past the IMF, which may want to shoot them down, even though it has got Pakistan on a Resilience and Sustainability Facility. Another problem is that Pakistan might make a heroic effort with little result, because unless the West carries out a similar exercise, the problem of global warming will remain. At the same time, the benefits of reducing pollution, like reducing or even eliminating the annual winter smog in Punjab, is worth the effort.
