Last Tesla contact was CEO’s post-election message to PM: DPIIT Secretary

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s post on his social media platform ‘X’ last month congratulating Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his election victory was the last that was heard from the company, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh has said, indicating that the automotive company has made no attempt to move forward with its investment plans in the country. 

“The tweet after the election is the last we have heard from Tesla, so let’s see,” Singh said at a media briefing on Thursday when asked if the government had heard anything new from Tesla following the company’s flip-flop on investing in India.

Musk had posted that he was looking forward to his companies doing “exciting work in India” in his congratulatory message addressed to Modi on June 7.

The process of finalising the guidelines for the new Electric Vehicle (EV) policy by the Heavy Industry Ministry is nonetheless on, the DPIIT Secretary said. “They have more than any one inquiry, as I understand. We have always said it (EV policy) was meant to be a generic policy for any takers. We’ll wait and see at the end of that window, when it is opened and after it is closed, how many takers there actually are,” Singh said.

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Musk postponed a planned trip to India in April this year, where he was to meet Modi. There were speculations before the trip that the Tesla CEO would announce the company’s entry into the Indian market during the visit. Musk, however, cancelled his trip, citing “heavy Tesla obligations,” and stated he aimed to reschedule the visit for later this year.

The postponement of Musk’s visit was a surprise for many, as just a month before, the Indian government had announced an EV policy — offering import duty concessions to companies that committed to investing a minimum of $500 million — which took into account the interests of foreign players such as Tesla and Vietnam’s VinFast.

Musk and former Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar engaged in a minor confrontation on social media during the elections last month when the Tesla chief posted that electronic voting machines should be eliminated as the risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, was still too high. Chandrasekhar retorted that these concerns did not apply to Indian machines. To this, Musk replied, “Anything can be hacked.”