For India's e-rickshaws, price decides what's safe and virality decides if anyone cares

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:00)
If you've been on Instagram this last week, you have seen these videos. A man stands by the road with his phone out, he opens a nap, taps a switch, and an e-rickshaw driving past him suddenly stops, sometimes with passengers inside. The driver is puzzled, he checks his battery and his wiring, and finds nothing because the problem is standing a few meters away taking a video of him.
One clip that kind of stayed with me, and most of us, I think, is the one that showed a driver in tears over losing his daily earnings.
The culprit was an app called Bat BMS. It is a diagnostic software made by a Chinese company called Green Energy, and it is meant for mechanics to check a lithium battery's health over Bluetooth.
Within days, the Government of India ordered at least three of these apps pulled down from the app stores. But the app was actually never the problem. You see, more and more of India's e-rickshaws are moving to cheap lithium battery packs, and it is the fastest growing part of the market. Most of these packs are built around a Bluetooth-enabled battery management system or BMS. The one at the center of this story are made by a Chinese firm called Jaya Baida, which is a major supplier to the low-cost end of the market.
On a lot of these packs, that Bluetooth connection is left wide open. There is no password and anyone within about 15 meters can pair with a battery and cut the power to the motor. The app is basically just the key, and it is a key that anyone with a bit of coding knowledge can copy. Now, a flaw this basic on lakhs of vehicles which are on the road should make you ask, how did it survive? And the answer is that it was never a secret. Engineers documented this exact gap on GitHub back in 2019
A security expert who wrote about this issue in The Hindu found the threat, and in fact, someone had even posted a fix.
So was there simply no regulation?
Turns out there was. The government notified standards for e-rickshaws in 2014, and those rules cover the brakes, the tires, the dimensions, the horn. They describe a mechanical vehicle because that is what an e-rickshaw was when these rules were written. And that explains why that warning from 2019 had no where to go, because there was no office whose job it was to look for it. Which is why what finally gave was actually a prank on social media. Within a week of these videos going viral, the government started an inquiry. Apple and Google were told to pull at least three such apps off their stores. But the apps were never the point. The way these batteries communicate is publicly documented, and there are open-source tools on GitHub right now that can connect to them.
Anybody who can write a little bit code like I said earlier, can rebuild what was banned. So the flaw sat documented in public for seven years and nothing happened. But a reel got results in seven days. And understanding why is really a story about what governs India's informal economy.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host Snigdha Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 9th of July.
Let's stay with the band for a minute, because the closer you look at it, the stranger it gets. Let's start with what the government actually did. On Friday, the IT ministry ordered the app stores to take down at least three of these battery apps. The IT secretary, S Krishnan, confirmed it on the record at a cybersecurity summit the same day. He said, while the investigation is continuing, this is a precautionary measure. And here is what that order ran into. Based on several accounts, the app came off Apple stores. But it stayed reachable anyway because these apps can be downloaded as files from other websites and installed on an Android phone without any store at all. News reports since the order suggest that it was still available to people who went looking. So the thing that was banned was, for many, still within easy reach. And even if every copy of Bad BMS vanished tomorrow, it would change very little. And that's because this app is one of many. There are lots of Bluetooth battery apps that speak the same language, and the way those chips communicate has been picked apart by hobbyists for years. Taking down a few apps does not really close the door. Which brings us to the obvious question. If the ban secures almost nothing, why do it?