After two decades inside India's largest energy company and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, I take on a small number of advisory and consulting engagements in the areas below, available now.
Network strategy and rollout: siting and corridor planning, the hard trade-offs between fast and slow charging, utilisation and uptime, operations and maintenance models, and the failure modes that only show up once thousands of units are in the field. I lead Indian Oil's alternate-energy vertical, including an EV charging programme of 6,000 fast and 10,000 slow chargers backed by USD 60 million, and the battery-swapping build alongside it.
How central and state schemes actually work in practice: eligibility and claim design, compliance and documentation, and the realities of getting a subsidy through. I have served as nodal officer for PM E-Drive and FAME-II at a public-sector oil marketing company, and sit on industry and standards committees on charging and swapping infrastructure.
Evidence for energy-transition decisions, for think tanks, development agencies and public institutions: scheme reviews, implementation analysis, stakeholder mapping across ministries and public-sector companies, and forecasting grounded in how programmes actually run. I spent four years advising the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas on Ujjwala, PAHAL, Give It Up and daily fuel pricing, and my MBA dissertation forecast India's 2030 energy mix.
OCPP and OCPI in the real world: writing technical specifications that a vendor cannot wriggle out of, defining conformance and acceptance criteria, evaluating charge-point and management-system vendors, and designing the testing that keeps a network honest after the purchase order is signed.
CNG, CBG and city-gas distribution; premium and alternate fuel programmes; large retail networks and the economics of running them. Includes a multi-billion-dollar city-gas infrastructure portfolio and clean-fuel expansion across several hundred retail sites.
The engine room: large SAP landscapes, utilities and customer platforms, terminal and field automation, data centres and national networks — and, more usefully, how to modernise them without stopping the business that depends on them.
Where AI genuinely helps an energy business and where it quietly fails: forecasting and analytics, document and tender workflows, customer contact, field productivity, and how to evaluate an AI system honestly rather than by demonstration. I bring 25 years of Python, 15 of data science and 5 of generative AI, and I build these systems myself, which mostly means I know what they cannot yet do.
ChargeMark. Self-serve OCPP conformance testing and compliance scoring for EV chargers. Indian public chargers must support OCPP, yet protocol behaviour is rarely verified before purchase. Validated with 128 automated tests against compliant and faulty simulators. It complements, and does not replace, Open Charge Alliance certification.
Shramik Setu. A system of record for contract and migrant labour: verified identity, attendance, an append-only wage ledger and statutory registers. Core platform built and tested; field pilots are the next step.
Pilot partners welcome: charge-point operators, manufacturers and buyers for ChargeMark; employers, contractors and public agencies for Shramik Setu.
Most usefully in one of three shapes: a short diagnostic — a few days to look hard at a specific decision and write down what I actually think; an advisory retainer — a standing call and a reviewer who already knows your context; or a defined project with a deliverable, such as a technical specification, a vendor evaluation, a rollout plan or a policy submission.
I would rather tell you a project is a bad idea than bill you for it, and I take on few enough engagements to be genuinely available for each. Fees depend on scope and we agree them in writing before anything starts.
Charge-point operators and fleets; oil marketing and energy companies; EV and component manufacturers; ministries, state agencies and urban bodies planning charging infrastructure; think tanks, development agencies and policy institutions; investors doing technical diligence on any of the above; and technology teams who need someone who has run the operations side.
Tell me the problem rather than the brief — write to me and I will say honestly whether I am the right person for it.