Arshad Mahmood Awan
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is not wrong. Framing electric mobility as a strategic necessity, particularly at a moment when energy prices are climbing and regional instability is deepening, reflects a sound reading of Pakistan’s situation. But the case for electrifying transport does not begin and end with the current crisis. It is a structural imperative that will outlast every geopolitical turbulence and every fiscal emergency. The future of transport — passenger vehicles, freight, rail — is electric. That is not a prediction. It is already the direction in which the world’s major economies are organising themselves. Pakistan needs to move with that current, not drift against it.
For a country as climate-vulnerable as Pakistan, this is not a luxury debate. Floods that submerge a third of the country, heat waves that kill and displace thousands, glaciers retreating across the north — these are not distant projections. They are recent memory. Transport electrification, when paired with cleaner power generation, addresses multiple crises at once. It reduces emissions. It modernises decaying infrastructure. It clears the toxic air hanging over Lahore, Karachi, and every other city where two-stroke engines and ageing buses have made breathing a health risk. The logic is compelling. The urgency is real.
What is missing is the execution.
Pakistan announced its EV adoption targets for 2030 nearly five years ago. Those targets were ambitious, and the announcement generated the usual coverage and the usual optimism. But announcements are not policies, and targets are not plans. In the years since, progress has been slow, patchy, and supported by little in the way of serious institutional commitment. The charging infrastructure that any EV transition depends upon remains embryonic. Grid readiness has not been seriously assessed. Financing frameworks that would allow ordinary households and commercial operators to actually afford electric vehicles have not been put in place. The regulatory environment remains confused. Rhetoric, as so often in Pakistan’s governance story, has run far ahead of readiness.
A genuine transition to electric mobility requires building an entire ecosystem from the ground up. Charging networks must reach not just elite urban neighbourhoods but also arterial highways, secondary cities, and eventually rural routes. The electricity grid must be capable of absorbing additional demand without collapsing under the load. Industrial policy must incentivise local assembly and, over time, local manufacturing. None of this happens by announcing targets. It happens through sustained, coordinated policy work across multiple ministries and regulatory bodies — the kind of work that Pakistan’s fragmented governance structures make genuinely difficult but not impossible.
The foreign exchange argument, often cited as the central justification for EV adoption, deserves some scrutiny. It is valid but incomplete. Reducing petroleum imports would indeed ease pressure on Pakistan’s chronically stretched foreign exchange reserves. That part of the argument holds. What is less honestly acknowledged is that in the short to medium term, importing electric vehicles, batteries, and components would itself impose a significant import burden. The dollar savings on fuel would be partially offset by the dollar costs of the hardware. The arithmetic only becomes favourable over time, and only if Pakistan moves decisively to localise production rather than simply swap one category of imports for another.
This is where the real opportunity lies, and it is an opportunity Pakistan has not yet seriously grasped. China dominates global battery and EV production. Chinese manufacturers are expanding aggressively into new markets. Pakistan, given its existing economic ties with China, its labour cost advantages, and its large domestic market, is positioned to attract investment in local EV assembly and manufacturing. Integrating Pakistani industry into the Chinese-led global EV supply chain could lower vehicle costs, reduce long-term import dependence, create meaningful employment, and revive an auto parts sector that has been struggling for years. This is the transformative economic opportunity that electrification presents. Without it, the transition risks becoming precisely what Pakistan does not need — another import-driven consumption shift that modernises the surface while leaving structural vulnerabilities intact.
There is one further dimension that must not be treated as an afterthought. Electrifying transport while continuing to generate power from imported fossil fuels does not solve the emissions problem. It relocates it. An electric vehicle charged by coal or furnace oil is not a clean vehicle. It is a vehicle whose pollution has been moved from the exhaust pipe to the power plant chimney. For electrification to deliver its environmental promise, it must be accompanied by a rapid, serious expansion of solar and wind energy, backed by battery storage to address the intermittency that has historically made renewable scale-up difficult.
Pakistan has extraordinary solar potential. It has wind corridors that remain largely untapped. The technology to exploit them has never been cheaper. The combination of transport electrification and renewable energy expansion is not a distant ideal. It is an achievable, affordable transition if the political will to pursue it is sustained beyond the life of the current crisis.
That is the test. Pakistan has announced this ambition before. The question is whether, this time, ambition will be followed by architecture.
