Prashant Kumar, son of NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar, has recently joined Ola as the Director for Public Policy.
Previously, he was the Mumbai head of the US-India Strategic Forum during September 2018 to May 2019.
Sources said Kumar, who holds Masters degree in Global Political Economy from University of Sussex, would work closely with the head of Ola Electric Mobility, Anand Shah.
The development comes at a time when the government is planning to ask taxi aggregators, including Uber and Ola, to convert 40 per cent of their fleet of cars into electric vehicles by April 2026.
The appointment of Prashant Kumar as the Director of Public Policy may also come as conflict of interest as his father is related to the government and is in the top brass of a think tank which is also planning the country’s electric vehicle norms.
The government think-tank has given a proposal calling for replacement of various categories of vehicles by electric vehicles (EVs) within a certain time period. It has also come out with a report titled ‘India’s Electric Mobility Transformation: Progress to Date and Future Opportunities’, detailing the oil and carbon savings the vehicles under Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles II (FAME-II) could deliver.
Under its plan ‘Million Electric’, Ola plans to deploy 10,000 electric vehicles (EVs) over the next one year, including mostly three- wheelers such as e-rickshaws and electric autorickshaws.
Kumar, according to his LinkedIn profile, is a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and Economy from Clark University, Massachusetts.
Rajiv Kumar, the father of Prashant Kumar, an economist, is the Vice Chairman of Niti Aayog since 2017 and holds the post even after the recent recast of the think-tank.
Source: IANS