01 · the listing
It says it’s online.
Every map in India can tell you where a plug is. That is where all of them stop.
02 · the arrival
Drivers say it’s dead.
A tripped breaker. A grid cut. A transformer sanctioned three years ago that never arrived. An unpaid electricity bill. Some of those are nobody’s fault and one of them is a decision, and the listing reads exactly the same either way.
03 · the gap
Nobody counts the driver.
Every status you can look up came from the charger, reported by the operator. India has no mandated uptime standard either: the only line in the PM E-DRIVE charging guidelines asks nodal agencies to “ensure continued availability and uptime”. No percentage. No penalty. And nothing, anywhere, counts whether the person who drove there got a charge.
04 · the other half
And nobody tells the operator you came.
A charging session exists only if somebody charged, so the driver who arrived and drove on is missing from every report the operator has. Meanwhile a site runs at around five percent utilisation against the thirty to thirty-five it needs to break even. The power bill is visible. The customers who turned up and left are not. Switching off reads as free.
05 · the commitment
Both numbers.
For the driver: of the people who arrived at a site intending to charge, the share who charged. For the operator: how many arrived while the site was dark. One missing measurement, read from opposite ends. Not what a charger reports about itself.
06 · the record
Every month. Per operator.
With the method, the sample size, the sites we withheld and the raw CSV. And with the cause, because a score with no cause attached is not a measurement, it is an accusation. The grid took you down, that goes on the record. Nobody paid the bill, that goes on the record too.
07 · the hard part
Including the months it embarrasses us.
Our own chargers sit in the same table, scored the same way. The CSV carries an ownership column, so you can recompute the whole index with us removed and check the ranking does not move.