On 15 July 1926, the coastal city of Bombay received a new, convenient means of public transport: a big, bright red motor bus.
A century later, these buses throng the congested streets of what is now Mumbai. From early morning well into the night, their deep, low honk punctuates the incessant din of the city. The buses belong to the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST), a body run autonomously under Mumbai’s municipal corporation, BMC.
BEST buses transport over 5.5 million people daily, second only to the city’s arterial railway network. Having grown in parallel with Bollywood, the red buses are immortalised in art and cinema.
But these buses have been changing over the past decade, switching from diesel to compressed natural gas, and now electricity.
As of December 2025, almost half of Mumbai’s 2,743 BEST buses were electric, according to multiple reports, making it one of India’s most ambitious public transport decarbonisation efforts. BEST aims to achieve 100% electrification by 2027.
E-buses are expensive to purchase and maintain, so state-owned public transport providers like BEST have been attempting to shift the cost by getting private operators involved. Much of the electrification has taken place through a “wet-lease” model which sees private operators procure the e-buses and manage their operation and maintenance. BEST pays the operator a per-kilometre cost in return, known as a “gross cost contract”.
The transition has altered how drivers are employed, paid and treated. The wet-lease contract model replaces permanent BEST employees with short-term contractual workers lacking long-term job security, notes Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of the Centre for Science and Environment and a researcher of low-carbon mobility. This pushes drivers into a precarious “informal gig-worker category”, she tells Dialogue Earth.
In recent years, workers under the wet-lease contracts have staged protests and strikes calling for permanent jobs, higher salaries and better working conditions. On 18 August, several members of the BEST Workers’ Union staged an indefinite hunger strike over demands associated with wet-lease workers and retired staff. The strike reportedly ended four days later, upon BEST indicating it would discuss the demands at its next committee meeting.
Precarity of labour
Suresh Gaikwad (name changed to protect identity) has been driving a BEST electric bus since 2019, but is not employed by the state-owned enterprise. He was hired by a private contractor after a two-day recruitment test, followed by a five-day workshop on road safety, traffic laws and other aspects of bus driving.
Seven years later, he receives a monthly salary of INR 19,300 (USD 202), a 13.5% increase from when he started. Gaikwad receives one day off a week and no other benefits, he explains. On some days, his shifts last 12-15 hours, excluding rest breaks, and he is not compensated for overtime, he adds.
“When emergencies demand that we go on leave, the contractors deduct salaries,” Gaikwad tells Dialogue Earth. “Traffic infractions are sent directly to the contractor [and not BEST], which is then cut from the salary. In such cases, what comes into our hands is just INR 12,000-13,000 [USD 126-136].”
“How are we supposed to handle household and personal expenditures?”
Shashank Rao, general secretary of the BEST Workers’ Union, tells Dialogue Earth that a newly recruited permanent BEST driver would have earned a minimum of around INR 39,000 (USD 410) a month, in addition to annual and sick leave and other employee benefits. But BEST has not hired for a permanent position since 2015, he says. Dialogue Earth couldn’t independently verify this detail with BEST.
Driver salaries also differ among contractors, says Rao, who led the union’s hunger strike.
Rao argues that because driving is a permanent function at BEST, it should not be contracted out. But if it is, “the pay and service conditions should be equivalent between the contract and permanent employees”. The BEST Workers’ Union protest this month sought equal pay for wet-lease workers employed by contractors.
Gaikwad also notes that contracted workers are denied medical benefits and access to washrooms at depots, available to permanent drivers. He is particularly worried about women conductors who change into their uniforms at work. “Where will these women change if they are denied access to washrooms?”
Jobs are not secure, and drivers fear that raising concerns could lead to termination, he says. Both Gaikwad and Rao say poor working conditions push workers to leave, creating a constant shortage of staff at BEST that eventually affects the city’s residents.
“We now have to think through how the contractual model can be reviewed and reformed to bring in new labour laws and requirements, while ensuring wage parity, social security, labour rights, social protection, occupational safety and gender inclusivity across the entire bus sector,” says Roychowdhury of CSE.
From subsidies to private contracts
Mumbai’s push for the electrification of BEST buses sits at the crossroads of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan, India’s broader decarbonisation goals, and its 2047 vision for energy independence.
According to the action plan, in 2019, transport accounted for 20% of Mumbai’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The city has committed to achieving emissions reduction of 30% by 2030 and 44% by 2040, reaching net zero by 2050. The life-cycle emissions of EVs in India sold since 2021 are around 65% that of internal combustion engine vehicles, with that figure expected to improve, according to a study by the International Council on Clean Transportation and the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.
E-bus registrations in India have been increasing in recent years, with 3,730 in 2024, 4,441 in 2025 and 2,944 in the first half of 2026 alone, according to figures obtained by the outlet Sustainable Bus.
India’s early electric mobility policies of the 2010s focused on subsidising the purchase of electric buses for state-owned public transport providers like BEST. Under this model, such providers “carry the responsibility of performance, maintenance, technology [and] risk related to battery degradation, range anxiety”, says Roychowdhury of CSE.
But procuring and operating these buses has proven costly for struggling public transport providers, experts told Dialogue Earth.
The International Energy Agency notes that an e-bus can cost between 30-70% more than an otherwise comparable diesel bus, “and there is little ability for [public transit] operators to recoup this marked up investment, as fare hikes are typically limited by regulation”, it stated in a case study of electric transportation in India. “As a result, there are even fewer financing options available for e-buses than for EVs.”
However, this model was feasible for established transport agencies such as Bengaluru’s BMTC, Mumbai’s BEST and Chennai’s MTC, which already had the infrastructure and workforce to operate buses, notes Roychowdhury.
More recently, policies including the National Electric Bus Programme in 2022 and PM e-Bus Sewa in 2023 promoted a public-private partnership model through gross cost contracts (GCCs) which, as mentioned, pay a per-kilometre fee to operators.
“With the GCC model, the operational, technological and asset availability risks are shifted to a third party,” Roychowdhury says. The operator also takes on responsibilities related to asset management, maintenance and human resources. She describes this as a shift from capital to operational expenditure, as it allows governments and state-owned public transport providers to convert a high fixed procurement expense into payments over 10-12 years.
According to Rao, “there was this idea that [wet-leasing] would cut costs and provide efficient services”. However, labour unions across the country, including in Bengaluru and Chennai, have argued that the GCC model is leading to a shrinking public-sector workforce, putting drivers in a precarious and often unsafe position.
Poor maintenance and safety standards
In Mumbai, a series of accidents involving electric buses has raised questions about their safety and maintenance. In June 2026, a BEST e-bus rammed into multiple vehicles, leaving one person dead and six injured. The driver reportedly blamed the crash on a technical issue in the vehicle. This month, an accident involving a wet-lease BEST e-bus injured three people, with bus driver error reported as the cause.
Drivers Dialogue Earth spoke to say contractors make candidates drive just a few rounds in the BEST bus depot before clearing them for Mumbai’s roads. “[Contractors] can’t be choosers,” says Rao, because they are always short-staffed. Dialogue Earth reached out to Sonia Sethi, the general manager of BEST, for comment on contractor recruitment, salary differences and benefits, as well as the maintenance of electric buses, but had not received a response by the time of publication.
Meanwhile, BEST’s own training, when it hired permanent drivers, lasted between three and six months, drivers say.
Driving a bus in Mumbai requires certain skills. Motorbikes and pedestrians can emerge in front of the bus without warning, so drivers must be able to brake quickly and accelerate to make up for time lost in traffic, Gaikwad says. But the EV buses are poorly maintained by contractors, resulting in brake failure and other mechanical issues, he adds.
In the event of a mishap, wet-lease drivers are left to fend for themselves, he says, with neither BEST nor the private operator providing any support. Due to these maintenance and safety issues, “permanent BEST drivers are afraid to drive contractor-owned buses”, says Gaikwad.
“There have been several instances where electric buses have not been maintained in accordance with the required standards,” says Rupesh Shelatkar, founder of Aapli BEST Aaplyachsathi, a citizen advocacy group standing against the privatisation of BEST.
“In many cases, contractors appear to be primarily focused on maximising their financial returns rather than ensuring proper maintenance of the buses,” he tells Dialogue Earth.
“This lack of adequate attention to preventive maintenance has resulted in a decline in fleet reliability and has raised concerns regarding operational safety. This is a matter of serious concern for the travelling public.”
According to Roychowdhury, private contractors are “legally responsible for hiring trained drivers, providing fleet insurance and conducting routine vehicle maintenance” under the GCC model. But state-owned public transport operators like BEST must ultimately “ensure that [contractors] are delivering on the GCC contract and are held accountable for accidents”, she says.
Safeguards must be built into the electric bus transition, including labour standards, social security, grievance mechanisms, upskilling and reskilling programmes and independent compliance monitoring, she adds.
The electrification industry is only growing and there needs to be some protections in place for the labour involved, she notes. “The market is going to be huge.”
