From Mobility to the Kitchen: What can we learn from India’s EV Story to scale-up eCooking

Over the last decade, India has quietly reshaped the way people think about mobility. Electric vehicles, once viewed as expensive, impractical, or experimental, are now a visible and growing part of everyday life, from two-wheelers on city streets to electric buses and delivery fleets. This transformation did not happen overnight, nor did it happen by chance. It was the result of deliberate policy choices, market creation, and a steady effort to normalise electricity as a reliable and aspirational fuel for mobility.

A recent World Economic Forum article draws a compelling parallel between this transformation in mobility and an emerging opportunity much closer to home: the kitchen. It argues that the same conditions that enabled India’s EV success could now be harnessed to accelerate the adoption of electric cooking.

Cooking remains one of the most energy-intensive activities in Indian households, yet it has received far less attention in the clean energy transition. For millions of families, the kitchen still depends on fuels that are costly, supply-constrained, and harmful to health. Even where LPG access has expanded, households continue to juggle affordability, reliability, and exposure to indoor air pollution.

Electric cooking offers a fundamentally different pathway. Modern appliances such as induction cooktops and electric pressure cookers are highly efficient, produce no indoor emissions, and are increasingly competitive on running costs. As highlighted in the WEF article, evidence from Indian cities shows that electric cooking can already match or outperform LPG and piped gas in terms of affordability, while delivering significant health and climate benefits. In many ways, electricity in the kitchen today resembles electricity in mobility a decade ago: promising, but not yet fully trusted or understood.

India’s EV journey offers valuable lessons here. The transition to electric mobility was not driven by technology alone. It required policy signals that reduced risk, incentives that supported early adopters, sustained public communication, and an ecosystem that brought together manufacturers, financiers, utilities, and users. Just as importantly, EVs were framed not as a compromise, but as a modern, aspirational alternative to conventional fuels.

Electric cooking now stands at a similar inflection point. The barriers it faces is higher upfront appliance costs, limited awareness, and behavioural hesitation which are are strikingly familiar. These are the same challenges EVs faced in their early years, and they are challenges that India has already shown it can overcome.

As the Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) programme in India, we see electric cooking as more than a technological shift. It is a transition that connects the kitchen to the grid, household health to energy policy, and everyday choices to national climate and energy security goals. Learning from the EV experience, scaling electric cooking will require coordinated action across policy, markets, utilities, manufacturers, and communities—along with a strong focus on user experience and trust.

India’s clean energy transition cannot stop at how we move. It must also transform how we cook. The EV story shows that when electricity becomes reliable, affordable, and aspirational, adoption can happen at scale. Bringing that same momentum from mobility into the kitchen could unlock cleaner air, healthier households, and a more resilient energy future for millions.

 Read the full World Economic Forum article here:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/india-ev-electric-e-cooking-fuels/