From Mobile To Mobility

Rahul Sharma has put his Micromax days aside to launch India’s first electric motorbike, but it may well be another import-from-China gambit

- Manu Balachandran

Rahul Sharma had many reasons to start making electric bikes.To begin with, there were the dwindling fortunes of his company Micromax Informatics, once India’s second-largest phone maker with a market share of over 20 percent in 2014; today it is a fringe player, with less than 2 percent market share. Then there is his manic obsession for embedded technology, which he nurtured since he was a teenager. The third, and perhaps more compelling, reason is that Sharma knows a business opportunity when he sees one. And with major auto makers from Mercedes and BMW to Maruti Suzuki scrambling to jump onto the electric mobility bandwagon, Sharma couldn’t hold back.

Yet, it was none of these that convinced him to throw his hat into the ring. It was fatherhood. “My wife and my 20-month-old child are mostly in Kochi, and they come to Delhi when the pollution levels are very low,” says Sharma, who flies every Friday to Kochi where his wife, actor Asin, stays. He returns by Monday. “The air is bad here, and as they say it’s like smoking 20 cigarettes a day. A major cause for that is vehicular pollution. And that’s where we want to make an impact with our new product.”

Sharma’s new company, Revolt Intellicorp, has introduced what it calls India’s first artificial intelligence (AI)-based electric bike. The RV400 was showcased in New Delhi on June 18, and will be on road before August 15. Sharma claims there were prebookings to the tune of one every 35 seconds on the day it was launched. The company is yet to announce the price of the bike, but it is expected to be around 1 lakh. Rivals such as Punebased Tork Motors are yet to start taking orders for their electric bike.