According to officials, the UK will help West Bengal develop a technical workforce for maintaining its EV charging infrastructure, which is expected to expand quickly as India transitions to electric mobility over the coming years. With help from the UK government, the state government is developing a Center of Excellence (CoE) for the upkeep and production of electric vehicles (EVs) as part of the initiative, they claimed.
According to Peter Cook, the British Deputy High Commissioner in Kolkata, skill development in the area of electric mobility is a crucial part of the net-zero strategy and will aid in the creation of new green jobs and attract investment to the EV sector.
“The UK government is keen to deepen our engagement with West Bengal through the creation of an EV skills roadmap, and wider knowledge exchange with UK experts to help drive forward West Bengal’s EV policy. Collaborations like these will help to create the highly-skilled, dynamic transport workforce that Bengal will need in the future,” he said, speaking at a workshop here on ‘Building EV charging Infrastructure’.
S Suresh Kumar, Additional Chief Secretary of West Bengal Power Department, stated that it is essential that technical support be offered for the EV charging infrastructure as well as for the upkeep of such vehicles.
“The Centre of Excellence will introduce innovation and this will help in the dynamic development of infrastructure and manufacturing. The Technical Education and Skill Development Department is the right destination for the COE, which will come through with the technical assistance of the UK government,” he said.
Technical Education Secretary Anoop K. Agrawal stated that West Bengal was the first state in India to introduce EV courses for diploma engineers in 2021, adding that the government’s priority is to skill people at all levels to manage the switch to EVs.
The workshop was put on by the Wales-based NPTC Group of Colleges with assistance from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom. It was announced that the group was looking to collaborate with Bengali educational institutions to help develop a sizable workforce for the project to develop EV charging infrastructure.
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