For decades, India’s growth story has been written in a familiar script: take a technology invented elsewhere, strip it down, re-engineer it for cost, and scale it for the masses. Generic drugs, low-cost telecom, frugal automobiles are examples of this approach. It is a script that India has performed brilliantly. The question India must ask now is whether it is ready to move from optimisation to creation.
There are signs that it already has. Digital payments existed long before Unified Payments Interface (UPI), yet UPI reimagined the entire architecture of a transaction and created a model good enough that other countries want to emulate. Retail existed long before quick commerce, yet ten-minute delivery rewired consumer expectations in a way no global template had. In both cases, India moved beyond the familiar script and engineered a new category of implementation for existing systems. These models are suited to India’s density, informality, and scale. Now, they are travelling across borders. Mobility presents a similar opening.
Vehicle retrofitment
Vehicle retrofitment sits at the centre of the new opportunity. Retrofitment, which converts an existing petrol or diesel vehicle into an electric one by replacing the powertrain, keeps the chassis intact. It is a useful technical fix, but a genuine innovation opportunity arises from everything that needs to be built around it — from diagnostics for legacy vehicles, battery and power-electronics systems designed for retrofitted architectures, calibration software, testing protocols, safety certification, financing solutions, installation networks, and a skilled service workforce. Innovation arises from moving beyond a single product to creating an entire operating system for a new industry, whose definitive version is not built yet.
India has the raw ingredients to attempt it: a deep automotive supply chain, engineering talent that has already proven itself in frugal design, a fast-growing EV sector, credible software capabilities, and critically, a domestic market large and varied enough to pressure-test solutions.
The decentralisation edge
India’s advantage is structural. Unlike new EV manufacturing, which rewards scale and centralisation, retrofitment rewards distribution like local workshops, local technicians, and local entrepreneurship. India has already shown what decentralised infrastructure delivery looks like at scale.
The PM Surya Ghar Yojna (PMSGY) on rooftop solar has now reached over 63 lakh households, built through a network of more than 34,000 empanelled vendors that has generated more than 4.6 lakh jobs across the solar rooftop value chain. Here is the blueprint for what a retrofitment ecosystem could look like, encompassing not a few large factories, but thousands of certified local centres. Each centre can convert, service, and maintain vehicles while generating an average of at least 20 direct and indirect jobs.
India’s automotive geography is not confined to its metros. Millions of vehicles run in Tier-II and Tier-III towns and rural India, held together by an enormous, largely informal network of mechanics, garages, and spare-parts dealers. With the right standards and training, that existing workforce can be absorbed, converting neighbourhood mechanic shops into certified retrofitters. That proximity between service providers and vehicle owners also solves a trust problem that new technologies always face.
An opportunity for the Global South
The opportunity extends beyond India’s border. Countries across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America share the same three conditions that make retrofitment relevant in India. They have large fleets of ageing vehicles, price-sensitive consumers, and ownership cycles far longer compared to wealthier markets. Collectively, the Global South spends more than $550 billion a year importing oil, a dependence that new EV sales alone will take decades to meaningfully dent, since new vehicles replace only a fraction of the fleet each year.
Retrofitment offers these countries a faster and cheaper route to displacing that fuel bill using vehicles already on their roads.
This is precisely the shape of opportunity UPI has already proven India can capture. UPI-linked payments are now live in eight countries, and India has signed digital-infrastructure cooperation agreements with 23 more. This was realised not because India sold a payments app, but because it exported a replicable model and an implementation playbook that other countries could adapt to.
Retrofitment could follow the same arc. If India builds the certification standards, financing models, safety protocols, and training pipelines for retrofitment near home, and at scale, it will have effectively built an exportable system.
Other nations with similar vehicle fleets and fuel-import pressures would rally behind it.
None of this happens by accident. It requires India to treat retrofitment, not as a stopgap measure to be tolerated until new EVs become universally affordable, but as a genuine innovation category to be engineered deliberately. India has the right pieces, the engineering talent, the manufacturing base, the technician networks, and the domestic testing ground. Now it needs the intent to bring these pieces together for retrofitment at the scale of PMSGY.
(Jaideep Saraswat is the Associate Director of the Clean Power, Electric Mobility & Emerging Technologies vertical at Vasudha Foundation. Ashish Dokania is the CEO of Green Tiger Mobility Private Limited. The authors declare no competing interest.)