Driving uneven development: The emerging geography of India's electric vehicle transition

One of India's most important decarbonization strategies involves transitioning its automobile industry from combustion engine to electric vehicles. In this paper, we examine the emerging geography of India's nascent EV sector toward understanding how policy and technological changes surrounding the energy transition are intersecting with regional development pathways, and with what implications for uneven development. We utilize sectoral and workforce data on firms, employment and skills; qualitative interviews with industry experts; and a policy analysis of state-level industrial strategies to attract and grow the EV sector. Our findings indicate that India's ICE-to-EV transition has the potential to amplify regional disparities in India's economic development patterns. The mechanism underlying this effect is the skill-biased technological change inherent in the EV transition, which benefits regions such as southern India, where high-skilled workers and information technology firms are clustered. If India's EV industry continues to concentrate in its most prosperous and innovative regions, this may accelerate advancements in low-carbon technologies, but it will sharpen the country's patterns of uneven development. The paper calls for discourses on the “spatially just” transition to look beyond the energy and resources sector itself, examining the wide spatial-economic reverberations of decarbonization and consequences for spatial inequality.