India is home to 20 of the world’s 25 most polluted cities — and Hyderabad just took one of the largest single steps yet toward cleaning up its air. The Telangana State Road Transport Corporation awarded a contract for 915 Telangana electric buses to a consortium of GreenCell Mobility and EKA Mobility in March 2026, marking the first phase of a deployment that could eventually bring 2,000 zero-emission buses to the city.
- GreenCell Mobility and EKA Mobility will supply 100 nine-meter and 815 twelve-meter fully electric buses — all zero-emission and designed for Hyderabad’s urban routes.
- The contract falls under India’s PM E-DRIVE scheme, a national program targeting the deployment of more than 14,000 electric buses across nine major cities.
- The Indian electric bus market is on track to grow at roughly 18% to 20% per year through 2030, driven largely by government procurement programs.
The order covers standard-floor, non-air-conditioned buses built for urban operations. The consortium will handle not just the vehicles themselves, but also operations, maintenance, and the construction of charging infrastructure. The Telangana transport authority pays a fixed per-kilometer fee while keeping fare revenue — a model designed to reduce financial risk for the city.
Why Hyderabad’s air quality makes this urgent
The air quality crisis in India’s cities is not abstract. The World Health Organization estimates that outdoor air pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019, with 89% of those deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
India sits at the center of that crisis. Loni, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, recorded average PM2.5 levels of 112.5 micrograms per cubic meter in 2025 — more than 22 times the WHO’s recommended safe limit of five micrograms per cubic meter. New Delhi and Byrnihat also rank among the four most polluted cities on Earth.
Diesel buses contribute meaningfully to that pollution load. Replacing them with fully electric vehicles removes tailpipe emissions entirely, with no hybrid compromise.
What the PM E-DRIVE scheme is actually doing
The Hyderabad contract is one piece of a much larger national effort. India’s PM E-DRIVE program — which stands for Electric Drive Revolution in Innovative Vehicle Enhancement — provides subsidies and procurement support to accelerate electric vehicle adoption across the country.
The government agency Convergence Energy Services Limited manages the program. By December 2025, CESL had concluded tenders for 10,900 electric buses nationally, with contracts spread across nine major cities including Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Chennai. Hyderabad’s total allocation under the program reaches up to 2,000 buses, making this 915-bus order the first phase of a larger rollout.
The scheme targets domestic manufacturing alongside clean transport — a deliberate effort to build India’s electric vehicle supply chain at the same time it cleans up city air.
How this plays out for everyday commuters
For the people who ride Hyderabad’s public buses every day, the change will be direct and physical. Diesel engines produce noise, heat, exhaust fumes, and particulate matter inside and outside the vehicle. Electric buses eliminate all of that.
Each new bus will carry advanced passenger information systems, real-time vehicle tracking, and accessibility features for differently-abled riders. The 100 nine-meter buses are specifically sized for narrower residential streets and colony routes — the kind of neighborhood-level transit that often gets the least investment.
Hyderabad’s population exceeds 10 million people. Cleaner public transit at this scale doesn’t just improve commutes; it reduces the cumulative health burden on the city’s lower-income communities, who rely most heavily on bus networks and live closest to high-traffic corridors.
The companies behind the contract
GreenCell Mobility and EKA Mobility’s joint deployment builds on an established partnership. The two companies already operate 750 electric buses across 11 cities in Andhra Pradesh and 75 buses in Puducherry under separate government programs.
GreenCell currently manages more than 1,200 electric buses across India, supported by over 270 charging stations. In January 2026, the company raised $89 million in financing to expand its fleet to 3,700 buses operating across Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Puducherry. EKA, meanwhile, ranked as the second-largest national awardee in the PM E-DRIVE tender overall, securing orders for 3,485 buses out of 10,900 vehicles awarded nationally.
That scale matters. The infrastructure, expertise, and supply chains these companies build through programs like PM E-DRIVE strengthen the entire electric mobility ecosystem in India — not just the cities currently receiving buses.
Challenges remain. Charging infrastructure must be built and maintained. Fleet expansion at this pace strains manufacturing capacity. And the per-kilometer contract model depends on consistent government payments over the life of the program. Whether the full 2,000-bus Hyderabad allocation materializes on schedule will depend on execution and funding continuity.
Still, the direction is clear. India is using the scale of its public transit system to drive one of the world’s fastest electric bus transitions — city by city, contract by contract, bus by bus.
This story was originally reported by CleanTechnica.
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