Around 24% of the three wheelers in India are electric, possibly more. Uday Narang's point about that number is not that policy delivered it. It is that a driver can do the sum himself and the sum comes out positive.
Here is the sum. A two wheeler sells for roughly a thousand to twelve hundred dollars. A three wheeler is now under four thousand. Omega Seiki's Stream City Qik takes a 15 minute fast charge, which Narang says supports as much as 400 kilometres of driving in a day and puts a working driver at six and a half to eight and a half thousand kilometres a month. Once the monthly instalment, the financing charges, the maintenance and the charging are paid, the driver is still ahead.
Everything else he argues follows from that arithmetic, including the parts that other people in the Indian battery industry would rather he did not say out loud.
From the London Metal Exchange to a three wheeler factory
Narang spent about thirty years in the United States and Europe, latterly as a hedge fund manager, and at one point was one of the larger commodity traders in the world on the London Metal Exchange. Nine years ago he was sitting in his headquarters on Mount Street in London, which he calls Hedge Fund Alley, and decided he wanted to make a difference.
His conclusion about where to make it is the reason he is now in Delhi rather than at his home in Zug. The front lines of green energy, as he sees them, are not in the United States or Europe. They are in India, Africa and Asia.
He backs this with the least abstract argument available: 31 of the most polluted cities in the world are in India, and the country has the youngest population in the world. He also brings up Nari Shakti, women's power, and the 48% of the population it refers to, as a constituency the transition is being run for.
Thirty years abroad have left him with an unusual view of his own market. He describes himself as something of a foreigner in the country, and says the customer is genuinely different in the south and the north, the west and the east. Omega Seiki's response is to tailor vehicles for those regions at volume. Different horses for different courses is his phrase for it, and he attributes it to England.
Where he thinks India can beat China, and where he does not
On two and three wheelers, Narang will say plainly that Indian manufacturers can compete with Chinese ones on both price and quality. He will not extend that any further. He is never going to say India is at the level of the Chinese, who currently hold the top five positions in the EV business.
What he says instead is that the market is big enough for more than one winner. BMW and Mercedes were there, he notes, and Tesla came from behind.
The export case is the strongest part of it. India is the largest three wheeler market in the world and the largest exporter of three wheelers, and Indian combustion manufacturers already ship to Africa, Latin America and beyond. He expects electric to follow the same routes, and is setting up a unit in Africa himself.
He is equally clear about the limits of state help. The government understands the problem and is supportive, but the support will never reach the level of the United States or Europe.
Why the cells can wait
This is the part that sits least comfortably with the room he was speaking in.
Asked whether India needs its own cell manufacturing, Narang's answer is not yet. Build the market first. Get vehicles on the ground. If cell capacity goes up before the domestic demand exists, the output has to be exported, and on export Indian producers will not beat Chinese cost. That cost, he points out, carries infrastructure spending and government support that never appears as a visible line. European and American cost structures are unaffordable in a market this price sensitive.
So the order he wants is the 80% first: vehicles, charging infrastructure, powertrains, motors, the industry around the vehicle. Cells afterwards.
He is not against domestic cells in principle, and is specific about what it would take. Not fast money. What he calls patient money, a ten to fifteen year vision carrying a lower rate of return. Having run a hedge fund, he is well placed to say which of the two is actually on offer.
The elephant in the room
Narang flags his own next sentence as controversial before he says it, which is a reasonable warning.
A great many companies signed up for the production linked incentive scheme. His question is how many of them have built anything in the three or four years since. His answer is that the scheme does not work, because the economics do not sit.
He calls this the elephant in the room, and the implication is that everyone at the conclave he had just come from knows it.
Alliances, because cells have become commoditised
The alternative he does believe in is partnership, and his example is one that would have sounded absurd a decade ago: Mahindra aligning with Volkswagen.
Narang knows the CATL and BYD teams, and his read on Chinese producers is that they are always looking for another market, which makes them available as partners in a way the politics might suggest they are not. He is just as happy with Korean or Japanese partners. His condition is scale, not nationality. Making cells, as he puts it, is not a kid's play, and an alliance is how a country buys that experience rather than repeating it.
Underneath this is a judgement about where value now sits. Cells, in his reading, have become commoditised, and the returns on a commoditised product are not great. India should put its effort into the technologies that give it something extra, in the way that AI is now valued above what more traditional players do.
He has watched the composition of the industry change around him. When Omega Seiki started eight or nine years ago, none of India's large industrial groups were in the game. Now most of them are.
Passenger cars need a different instrument
The three wheeler sum does not transfer directly to a private car, and Narang does not pretend it does.
For passenger vehicles the total cost of ownership has to be brought down some other way, which means battery as a service, leasing, and lower monthly payments. It also means charging that does not stop at the metros. He is insistent on this: tier two, tier three and tier four cities, not just tier one.
On timing, he had just come back from Iceland, Norway and Sweden, where Omega Seiki has been testing vehicles at minus 20 and close to Arctic glaciers. He is a Martin Luther King admirer and offers his forecast in that spirit, as a dream rather than a model. Two and three wheelers pass petrol and diesel within about three years. Commercial four wheelers in five to seven. Others are betting differently, and he notes that Toyota talks about hybrids.
Who has understood the timescale
The advice he gives foreign companies is the same thing he tells his own investors. India is a marathon, not a sprint, and the equity market here rewards a long-term view.
His evidence is other people's returns. Hyundai's Indian listing, a 25,000 crore IPO valuing the business at around 18 billion dollars. Walmart's decade with Flipkart.
His assessment of who actually stays is more pointed. He finds Europeans more open than Americans, who in his account come and go. The Japanese and the Koreans, he thinks, understand the market, and he offers one company as the proof. Maruti Suzuki controls the majority of India's passenger market because it took a long-term view, was careful about pricing, was careful about quality, and made the system work.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.