India Green-Lights 12 Hydrogen Mobility Pilots to Put 70 Fuel-Cell and Hydrogen-Engine Vehicles on the Road

India has taken one of its most concrete steps yet toward hydrogen-powered transport, awarding 12 pilot projects under the National Green Hydrogen Mission (NGHM) to deploy 70 hydrogen-fuelled vehicles on real-world routes across the country. Confirmed at the end of July 2026, the pilots are designed to move hydrogen mobility out of the laboratory and onto freight corridors and public-transport routes, where its technical and economic viability can finally be tested at scale.

The National Green Hydrogen Mission, run under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), has so far been associated mostly with production targets and electrolyser incentives. This tranche of pilots shifts attention to the demand side — the vehicles, refuelling infrastructure and duty cycles that will determine whether green hydrogen can realistically decarbonise heavy road transport.

What the pilots cover

The 12 consortium-led projects together account for 27 buses and 43 trucks, spread across roughly 21 routes in multiple states. Crucially, the programme deliberately tests two competing hydrogen powertrains side by side:

• Fuel-cell electric vehicles (39 in total): 25 buses and 14 trucks that convert hydrogen to electricity through a fuel cell, emitting only water vapour.
• Hydrogen internal-combustion-engine (H2-ICE) vehicles (31 in total): 2 buses and 29 trucks that burn hydrogen in modified engines — a cheaper, more familiar technology that reuses much of the existing automotive supply chain.

To keep those vehicles running, the pilots also fund the build-out of 16 hydrogen refuelling stations, addressing the chicken-and-egg problem that has held back hydrogen mobility everywhere: without fuelling infrastructure there are no vehicles, and without vehicles there is no case for infrastructure.

The government has earmarked around ₹410 crore (roughly $43 million) in financial assistance for the programme, of which a first tranche of about ₹41 crore has already been released to get projects moving.

Why test two technologies at once

The decision to run fuel-cell and hydrogen-ICE vehicles in parallel is the most interesting design choice in the scheme. Fuel cells are more efficient and completely clean at the tailpipe, but they are expensive and demand very pure hydrogen. Hydrogen combustion engines are less efficient and produce small amounts of nitrogen-oxide emissions, but they are far cheaper to build and can be adapted from existing diesel-engine platforms — an advantage in a country with a vast commercial-vehicle manufacturing base.

By deploying both on comparable routes, the pilots should generate hard operational data on cost per kilometre, refuelling time, range, reliability and maintenance — the numbers that fleet operators actually care about. That evidence is meant to guide where India places its bets as it scales hydrogen transport later in the decade.

The trucking angle

The weighting toward trucks — 43 of the 70 vehicles — is telling. Long-haul freight is one of the hardest segments of transport to electrify with batteries alone: the payload penalty and charging times of very large battery packs make hydrogen an attractive alternative for heavy, high-utilisation trucking on fixed corridors. Concentrating trucks on defined freight routes, each anchored by a refuelling station, is exactly the kind of setting where hydrogen's advantages over batteries are most likely to show up.

Where this fits in India's hydrogen push

India has committed to producing 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030, and much of the policy conversation to date has centred on making that hydrogen — through electrolyser manufacturing incentives, transmission waivers and green-ammonia projects. Building demand is the necessary other half. Transport is a natural early market: it is visible, it is a large diesel consumer, and it lets the country validate the full chain from production to dispensing to end use.

These pilots will not, by themselves, decarbonise Indian freight. But by putting 70 vehicles and 16 stations into daily service and rigorously measuring what happens, they give policymakers and industry something they have lacked so far: real Indian operating data on which hydrogen mobility technologies work, where, and at what cost.

Sources

• Renewable Watch — GoI awards pilot projects for hydrogen-powered vehicles
• gasworld — India to deploy 70 hydrogen trucks and buses in $43m pilot programme
• Green Hydrogen Organisation of India — India accelerates hydrogen mobility with new pilot projects