Top EV Leaders in India Driving the Electric Vehicle Revolution

Ten years ago, if you’d told a room of Indian auto executives that electric vehicles would become one of the most fiercely contested corners of the industry, most would have smiled politely and moved on.

And you couldn’t really blame them. Back then, EVs were a science project. Charging points were scarce, batteries cost a fortune, and buyer confidence barely registered. The country’s automotive giants had their attention fixed firmly on petrol and diesel, and electric mobility lived in the footnotes of industry panels, the topic everyone acknowledged and nobody prioritised.

That conversation has since flipped entirely.

Electric scooters now fight for space on the streets of nearly every major city. Legacy carmakers are pouring billions into electrification. Startups are squaring up to manufacturers with a century of history behind them. Battery plants, charging networks and software platforms, once treated as far-off ideas, have become the assets companies actually compete over.

But fixate on the vehicles alone and you miss the more interesting story.

India’s EV shift was never going to be won by technology on its own. Industries rarely turn on the arrival of a new gadget. They turn when a handful of people decide to stake their careers, their reputations and their capital on a future almost nobody else can see yet. That’s the real engine of what’s happened here.

Some of the names below built companies from nothing. Others swung enormous industrial groups toward electrification. A few were working on electric mobility long before there was a market to sell into. Between them, they’ve shaped the whole chain, scooters, passenger cars, battery manufacturing, charging infrastructure, commercial fleets, energy storage.

What makes it genuinely interesting is that there was no shared playbook.

Ola Electric chased scale and manufacturing muscle. Ather Energy obsessed over technology and product feel. Tata Motors dragged EVs into the mainstream. Others went after the charging bottleneck, or after commercial transport, where the economics of going electric often add up fastest. Different bets, different markets, and, in the end, the same result: an industry that looks nothing like it did a decade ago.

This isn’t an experiment anymore. It’s one of India’s most consequential industrial opportunities, and the people driving it deserve at least as much attention as the products they’ve put on the road.

Here are nine of them.

The Founders Who Forced India to Take EVs Seriously

Every big industrial shift has its agitators, the ones willing to bet before the market is ready to reward them. In India’s EV story, that job fell largely to startup founders who walked into a category most investors, buyers and industry veterans still considered a gamble.

Some of them moved faster than anyone expected. Others hit walls. But strip out their willingness to break with convention and the ecosystem we have today looks very different.

1. Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder who made EVs a national conversation

Admire him or not, Bhavish Aggarwal is impossible to ignore, and that’s rather the point.

Few entrepreneurs have moved the public conversation on electric mobility as forcefully as the founder, chairman and CEO of Ola Electric. While the established manufacturers were still workshopping their long-term electrification decks, Aggarwal was out talking about gigafactories, battery cells, software-defined vehicles, and the idea of building a global EV company from India rather than importing the future wholesale.

The scooter was never the real headline. The scale of the ambition was.

Ola Electric pushed the industry to think past incremental, cautious electrification. It picked a fight with the assumption that Indian companies would stay dependent on imported technology, and steered the conversation toward local manufacturing, home-grown battery production and integrated EV ecosystems.

The ride has been anything but smooth, and it’s fair to say so. Deadlines have slipped, launches have been bumpy, and the company has faced a rough stretch of market and regulatory pressure since its 2024 listing. But disruption almost never arrives on schedule and gift-wrapped. What Aggarwal actually pulled off was arguably more valuable than any single milestone: he made electric mobility something the rest of the industry could no longer afford to shrug at.

2. Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, building an EV brand people actually wanted

Before Ather Energy showed up, most buyers filed electric scooters under “sensible but dull”, a practical substitute for a petrol two-wheeler, nothing more.

And that framing was a problem, because people buy appliances for utility. They buy vehicles for aspiration. Ather’s co-founders, Tarun Mehta, now the company’s CEO, and Swapnil Jain, its CTO, seemed to grasp that distinction earlier than most.

Rather than lean on environmental virtue alone, Ather built around the experience of the product, touchscreen dashboards, connected features, over-the-air software updates, performance engineering, design that didn’t apologise for itself. The pitch shifted the electric scooter from compromise to something you might actually want.

What tends to get overlooked is everything Ather did beyond the vehicle itself. The company put real money into charging through Ather Grid at a point when public networks were still thin on the ground, not just to keep existing owners happy, but to chip away at one of the biggest psychological blocks to adoption in the first place.

Plenty of companies sold electric scooters. Ather did something subtler: it helped make “electric” read as better, not merely greener.

The Corporate Leaders Betting Their Legacy on Electrification

Startups grab the headlines, but India’s EV shift would never have reached this scale without the big, established groups getting off the fence.

It’s hard to overstate why that matters. When a legacy manufacturer commits billions to electrification, it doesn’t just add another logo to the market, it brings manufacturing depth, supply-chain relationships, distribution reach and hard-won customer trust that a startup can spend a decade trying to build.

3. N. Chandrasekaran, the architect behind Tata’s EV ecosystem

If one executive understood early that winning in EVs would take far more than building cars, it’s N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company at the centre of the entire Tata Group.

Under his watch, the group went after a strategy that reached well past the vehicle. Car production, battery manufacturing, charging infrastructure, software, renewable energy, supply-chain development, increasingly treated not as separate initiatives but as connected pieces of one larger system.

That joined-up view is exactly what gave Tata a position rivals are still trying to reverse-engineer. Tata’s run in electric passenger vehicles didn’t happen in a vacuum; it sat on top of a group-wide commitment to electrification.

His imprint will outlast his tenure, too. Chandrasekaran has said he won’t seek another term as Tata Sons chairman when his current one ends in early 2027, and the group has begun its succession process, which makes the ecosystem he built, rather than any single decision, the more durable legacy.

4. Shailesh Chandra, making EVs mainstream

Building an electric vehicle is one problem. Persuading a middle-class Indian family to actually buy one is a completely different and arguably harder one. Shailesh Chandra, managing director and CEO of Tata Motors’ passenger-vehicle and electric-mobility businesses, deserves a lot of the credit for closing that gap.

Under his leadership, Tata turned EVs from a curiosity into a genuine option on the shortlist for ordinary buyers. EV Cars like the Nexon EV and Tiago EV

And the most important shift there wasn’t technological, it was psychological. Tata gave people the confidence that an electric car could be practical, reliable and backed by a name they already trusted. (Editorial note: since 2025, Tata Motors’ passenger and commercial-vehicle businesses operate as separate listed entities, with the EV business housed under the passenger-vehicle arm)

5. Anish Shah and Rajesh Jejurikar, Mahindra’s long-term EV gamble

Mahindra’s approach runs on a different logic.

Instead of chasing affordable urban runabouts, the company has funnelled serious resources into electric SUVs and next-generation vehicle platforms, its “Born Electric” range being the clearest expression of that bet. It’s a bold call. The premium EV segment is brutally competitive and success is anything but guaranteed, but Mahindra seems convinced that electrification will eventually reshape the very categories it has always been strongest in.

Under Anish Shah, the group’s CEO and managing director, and Rajesh Jejurikar, executive director and CEO of its auto and farm sector, the message has been fairly unambiguous: Mahindra isn’t in the EV market to look modern. It’s in it to compete hard.

The Pioneers Who Started Before the Market Existed

Every industry that eventually takes off has its early believers, the people who show up years ahead of the customers, the investors and the policymakers. In India’s EV story, few names earn that description more than Chetan Maini.

5. Chetan Maini- the man who arrived too early

Timing is one of the most underrated forces in business. A great idea launched too early can struggle every bit as much as a weak one launched too late, and Chetan Maini lived that lesson firsthand.

Through the Reva Electric Car Company, which he founded in the 1990s, he spent years making the case for electric mobility while batteries were expensive, charging barely existed, and public awareness was close to zero. Reva went on to become India’s first mass-produced electric car, but commercial success stayed frustratingly out of reach, and the company was eventually absorbed into the Mahindra Group.

Historical significance did not slip away with it. As adoption now accelerates across the country, a lot of people in the industry look back at Maini’s work as part of the groundwork the modern ecosystem was eventually built on, and he remains active in the space today as co-founder and chairman of the battery-swapping venture SUN Mobility.

History and the market don’t always keep the same scorecard, and Maini is about as clean an example of that gap as you’ll find.

Also Read: Top 5 Most Selling EV Scooters India 2026