Inside Unified Bharat e-Charge (UBC)

If you’ve ever driven an EV vehicle, you know your struggles. Multiple apps, wallets, support calls, trial and error to even get the charging started. Unified Bharat e-Charge promises to change that.

Till date, the story of EV charging networks everywhere for users was fragmentation. Different operators, different apps, different wallets, different rules. The result for charging infrastructure operators was predictable: low utilisation, poor user confidence, and a charging experience that felt far more complex than it needed to be.

Unified Bharat e-Charge (UBC) exists to fix that, not by adding another platform, but by creating a national interoperability layer for EV charging. Much like UPI unified payments without replacing banks, UBC unifies charging without replacing charging network operators. This is why it represents a genuine inflection point for India’s EV ecosystem.

What Unified Bharat e-Charge Actually Does

UBC is a protocol-based national framework that allows any EV driver to discover, book, charge, and pay at any participating charger using any compatible app, regardless of who owns the charger.

This is not roaming through bilateral partnerships. It is not aggregation through a single super-app. It is system-level interoperability, headed by Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI).

Who does what under MHI?

Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI): Leads the UBC framework and PM E-DRIVE scheme for public EV charging stations. Oversees guidelines, approves proposals, disburses subsidies, and requires charger integration into its National Unified Hub.

Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL): Appointed by MHI as Project Implementation Agency (PIA). Responsibilities include evaluating proposals, supporting eligible entities, and developing the National Unified Hub plus a national mobile app for discovery, booking, real-time status, and payments.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI): Collaborating with MHI on a unified digital platform (aligned with UBC). Builds interoperability for 100+ EV apps, enabling seamless discovery, slot booking, and UPI payments across networks without app-switching.

Through UBC EV chargers publish availability, tariffs, and session data in a standardised format. Apps consume this data uniformly. Payments and settlements flow through common rails. Making the EV Charging experience consistent across networks.

That consistency is the breakthrough.

What UBC Means for Each Stakeholder

Drivers get one-touch access to any participating charger without separate app downloads, accounts, or RFID cards. Payment happens through wallets they already use — UPI, Paytm, or similar — and data is shared only when a transaction requires it, not tracked continuously in the background.

Charge Point Operators stop competing for app downloads and start competing on uptime and pricing. Integrating once with UBC exposes a CPO’s entire charger network to every UBC-compliant app, without negotiating a separate deal per platform.

OEMs can build charging discovery and booking directly into a vehicle’s native navigation or companion app, rather than partnering individually with each charging network.

Fleet operators get the biggest structural change: one login instead of per-CPO accounts, consolidated billing instead of reconciling invoices from five or six networks, and a single dashboard for tracking utilization across every station a fleet touches — regardless of who owns it. For a fleet running even 50+ vehicles, this removes a back-office burden that otherwise scales with fleet size.

Policymakers get a network that grows public value with every new charger installed under PM E-DRIVE, rather than one where public subsidy dollars end up locked inside a single operator’s app.

How UBC Actually Works: The Protocol Layer

UBC runs on the Beckn Protocol, an open network protocol built in India that lets unrelated apps and platforms talk to each other without a central intermediary owning the transaction. Four components make this work:

• Beckn Application Providers (BAPs) — the user-facing side. Any app a driver uses to find and start a charge: a CPO’s own app, an OEM dashboard, a maps app, or a wallet app. If a driver opens it to charge, it’s a BAP.
• Beckn Platform Providers (BPPs) — the charger-owning side. This is the CPO or e-Mobility Service Provider that actually runs the charging station and fulfills the session: starting it, metering it, and ending it.
• Beckn Gateway (BG) / Registry — a lightweight directory of every registered BAP and BPP. When a driver’s app searches for a charger, the query goes to the Gateway, which broadcasts it to relevant BPPs. Once a match is found, the Gateway steps out — the rest of the session happens directly between the app and the charger’s backend.
• Catalog & Discovery Service (CDS) — standardizes how charger metadata (location, connector type, tariff, live status) is described, so results look consistent no matter which operator responded.

A full charging session moves through a fixed sequence of Beckn messages: discover → select → init → confirm → start → stop → status. That sequence is what replaces the old model of “install this operator’s app, create an account, hope it works” — the driver’s app handles the whole lifecycle against any participating charger.

How UBC Relates to OCPI

Europe’s OCPI standard solves interoperability through bilateral agreements, two networks sign a contract, then their apps can talk. That works at small scale but doesn’t hold up across hundreds of fragmented Indian operators, since every new pair needs its own agreement.

UBC doesn’t replace OCPI or OCPP underneath, an operator can still run OCPP to talk to its own hardware or use OCPI for existing roaming deals. UBC sits above that layer, translating a driver’s request into whatever format the operator’s backend expects. In practice, this means an operator that already shares data over OCPI can map it into Beckn messages and become instantly discoverable across the whole UBC network — no new bilateral deal required.

Where UBC Stands Right Now

UBC isn’t a future promise, it’s an active rollout. A pilot involving the Central Government on the UEI/UBC framework has already been underway, and once it concludes, the APIs and registration flows are expected to be published for wider operator onboarding.

EV users can open the BHIM app, locate a UBC enabled charging point, scan the QR code and pay directly from their bank account through UPI. The unified approach is aimed at reducing fragmentation in India’s EV charging ecosystem, where drivers often need multiple applications, accounts and wallets to access charging networks operated by different companies.

The initial rollout will be available through the BHIM app, with participating charging points being added across cities and national highways. The network is expected to subsequently become accessible through other payment, mobility and automotive applications, enabling consumers to discover and use UBC enabled chargers through platforms they already use.

For operators, this means the earliest movers get the clearest advantage: UBC’s value compounds the way any network effect does — more UBC-enabled chargers make UBC-compatible apps more useful, which pulls in more users, which increases demand for UBC-enabled chargers. Operators who integrate early aren’t just checking a compliance box; they’re positioning ahead of that curve.

Why Charging Needed a UPI-Style Intervention

Before UPI, India already had digital payments. What it lacked was interoperability. Money moved, but only within closed loops. You remember the days no? You could NEFT if you wanted to send money across accounts and banks, but you had to install your bank’s app, set up all the information and then, go through the multiple OTPs, finally sending the money across, and then if you ended up getting the account number slightly wrong, now there’s a lengthier process to getting the money back. UPI solved that by standardising how transactions worked, not by dictating who could participate.

EV charging has reached the same point. Infrastructure exists, but access to it is gatekept behind multiple apps, partnerships, and sketchy payment regulations. It currently exists, fragmented. Drivers have to guess which app would work. Fleets struggled with fragmented billing. Operators built apps not because they wanted to, but because they had to, otherwise, how would their network show up?

UBC removes that obligation. Operators can focus on running reliable infrastructure, and users stop caring who owns the charger.

UBC by the Numbers

The urgency behind UBC isn’t abstract. India’s EV market is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 29% by 2033, making it roughly worth $178.2 billion, and the EV charging infrastructure market alone is expected to expand from about $557.4 million to $3.85 billion over the same period. Charging access is the bottleneck standing between that demand and adoption.

The government’s PM E-DRIVE scheme has backed the buildout with real capital of ₹2,000 crore allocated to deploy approximately 72,300 public EV charging stations by the end of FY2026, including 22,100 fast chargers for cars alone. That’s on top of the stations already live and operating across FAME-I and FAME-II-funded networks. Without an interoperability layer like UBC sitting on top of this infrastructure, every new charger just adds to the fragmentation problem instead of solving it, more stations, but still no single way to find, book, or pay for any of them.

The Ecosystem, Simplified

Charge Point Operators own and operate the physical chargers. Under UBC, they expose their chargers once to the national network instead of integrating separately with every app or platform.

Interoperability is enabled through standardised provider and aggregator layers that handle discovery, session management, billing, and settlement. Consumer-facing apps,  whether mobility apps, fleet systems, or OEM platforms,  connect to the same network and gain access to the same charging infrastructure.

Governance and trust sit with national institutions, ensuring security, compliance, and payment integrity at scale. This is critical, because charging is not just a mobility service ,  it is an energy transaction.

What a UBC-Powered Charging Session Looks Like

Walk-in charging. A driver in Pune opens an app that’s plugged into UBC, it could be a maps app, an OEM app, or any participating platform. She searches nearby and, within seconds, sees a single consolidated list of chargers across every operator in the area: connector type, live availability, and tariff, side by side. She picks one, taps “Start,” and the app sends that request straight to the charger’s backend. No new account, no separate download, no RFID card. When she’s done, she taps “Stop,” gets a metered bill, and pays by UPI inside the same app.

Reservation and slot booking. For highway trips or fleet routes, drivers can reserve ahead instead of just searching live availability. The app requests a future slot; the operator’s system holds it and confirms back. If the driver doesn’t show, the slot releases automatically. This is the same underlying protocol as walk-in charging — the only difference is timing.

Both flows run on the same rails. That’s the point: the driver never needs to know or care which operator owns the charger.

Where Kazam Fits In

Kazam operates at the infrastructure layer of this ecosystem.

We build and run UBC-compliant platforms that allow charging operators to participate in the national network without rebuilding their digital stack. This includes charger integration via open protocols, real-time telemetry, tariff exchange, session control, UPI-linked billing, and automated settlement.

Kazam is also a founding member of the Unified Energy Interface (UEI) stack, being built on Beckn, which underpins UBC. Our role has been to translate open-network principles into production-grade systems that work at fleet, depot, city, and national scale.

In simple terms: we make interoperability operational.

What This Changes for EV Users

For users, the biggest shift is reliability.

Instead of juggling multiple apps and wallets, drivers see a unified view of charging infrastructure with live availability and transparent pricing. Charging sessions behave the same way across networks. Payments are familiar. Receipts are consistent.

Over time, this architecture allows charging to be embedded into the apps people already use ,  mobility apps, fleet tools, OEM platforms, and potentially even payment-led interfaces. Charging stops being a separate mental task. It becomes an expected utility.

What This Means for Operators

For operators, interoperability increases value rather than diluting it.

By participating in UBC, operators gain access to a larger demand pool without additional marketing spend. Charger utilisation improves. Idle time reduces. Revenue reconciliation becomes automated. Performance data becomes standardised and comparable.

This is the same dynamic that played out with UPI. Merchants did not lose control. They gained volume.

Why UBC Is the Real Inflection Point

UBC matters because it shifts EV charging from a collection of private networks into shared national infrastructure. It ensures that public investment creates public access. It prevents ecosystem lock-in. And it allows innovation to move up the stack ,  toward smart charging, grid integration, clean energy optimisation, and fleet intelligence.

India did not scale digital payments by building the best wallet. It scaled by building the right rails.

Unified Bharat e-Charge applies that lesson to EV charging. And that is why it represents the true UPI moment for India’s charging infrastructure.

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