PACT and the ZET Marketplace: NITI Aayog's Push to Electrify India's Freight Corridors

Background

India's transport sector is a fast-rising contributor to energy-related carbon emissions, and within it, road freight is disproportionately dirty: trucks make up a small share of vehicles on the road but a large share of transport-sector emissions, because they run long distances on diesel with few efficient alternatives. India's earlier electric-vehicle push, under the FAME India Scheme, concentrated on two-wheelers, three-wheelers and buses — segments where battery weight and range are manageable and charging can happen overnight at a depot. Medium and heavy-duty trucks were left behind, since electrifying long-haul freight means solving harder problems: heavier batteries eating into payload, longer charging times, and highway charging infrastructure that simply did not exist.

To address this gap, NITI Aayog set up e-FAST India (Electric Freight Accelerator for Sustainable Transport – India), described as the country's first national collaborative platform dedicated specifically to electrifying the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle (MHDV) segment, bringing together shippers, logistics companies, financiers and charging-infrastructure developers on one table.

Recent Development — and Why It Matters for UPSC

On 7 September 2026, at the 5th e-FAST India Summit in New Delhi, NITI Aayog Member Rajiv Gauba launched the Platform for Aggregating Clean Transport (PACT) along with a Zero Emission Truck (ZET) Marketplace; a related NITI Gearshift Challenge was also rolled out under the same e-FAST umbrella. PACT's specific job is to aggregate scattered freight demand from shippers and logistics service providers along identified freight corridors and convert it into concrete deployment opportunities — giving charging-infrastructure planners and financiers the demand visibility they need to commit capital confidently, rather than waiting for the market to prove itself first.

The scale of the challenge is captured in the numbers released alongside the launch: electric MHDV deployments grew more than fourfold, from 201 vehicles in FY25 to 826 in FY26, and over 3,000 electric medium- and heavy-duty trucks are now operating across the country — a rapid growth rate, but still a rounding error against India's multi-million-strong truck fleet. For Prelims, this story is a textbook cluster of testable facts: a freshly coined platform name (PACT), the coordinating institution (NITI Aayog), a specific summit and date, and hard numbers on growth and target-year commitments — exactly the ingredients examiners use to build "which of the statements is/are correct" questions.

Historical Parallel

The natural parallel is the FAME India Scheme (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric vehicles), launched in 2015 and continued through a second phase, which used purchase subsidies to push electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers and buses into the market but left heavy trucking almost entirely untouched. PACT represents a change in policy instrument rather than a repeat of the old one: instead of subsidising the buyer, it tries to de-risk the market itself by aggregating demand and signalling it to financiers and infrastructure builders — an implicit admission that subsidy alone could not crack the freight segment.

Links to the GS Syllabus

Under GS Paper III, PACT connects to the "Infrastructure: Energy" theme and to India's climate mitigation strategy under "Conservation, Environmental Pollution and Degradation," since decarbonising freight is central to meeting India's Net-Zero 2070 target; it also ties into logistics-sector reform and green-infrastructure financing within the Economy syllabus. Under GS Paper II, the episode is a useful peg for questions on the role and functions of NITI Aayog as a non-statutory policy think tank that coordinates cross-sectoral platforms, distinct from a line ministry with executive powers.