India is in the early stages of a planned transition of its automotive sector to EVs. Most (86.38 percent) of India’s 30.7-million-strong automotive workforce is employed in the sector’s downstream segment rather than in automotive manufacturing. The downstream segment, which encompasses post-manufacturing processes, is a services-oriented segment including dealerships, aftersales parts and servicing, vehicle repairs, and commercial drivers.

This segment overwhelmingly comprises informal and unorganized workers who face low wages, job precarity, exclusion from social protection, and inadequate training. This paper is an exploratory study focusing on workers in the downstream automotive segment. It draws from 106 semi-structured key informant interviews of workers from this segment in the NCR of Delhi, a major automotive hub with one of the country’s highest EV adoption rates. It aims to understand the nature of the transition for downstream green job workers, the challenges faced by such workers, and ICEV workers’ perceptions of such jobs, and whether such
jobs qualify as decent work.