Six years ago, when rare earth magnets were still a footnote in most mobility conversations, Bhaktha Keshavachar was already convinced they would become a problem. “We are going from hydrocarbons to electrons for all of our energy,” says the Co-Founder and CEO of Chara Technologies in an exclusive interaction with Kumar Harshit, Technology Correspondent, ELE Times. “In this electric future, motors will be at the heart of every machine. They will be the engines of the future economy. And if motors are central, they must be sustainable.”
At the time, Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSMs) dominated electric mobility. Efficient, compact, and powerful, they owed much of their performance to neodymium-iron-boron magnets—magnets built on rare earth elements. But to Bhaktha, the efficiency narrative hid a deeper vulnerability.“One country controls 90 to 95 per cent of the rare earth supply chain,” he says. “It’s not about whether that country is good or bad. They will do what is in their best interest. But that may not be good for us.”
That asymmetry, coupled with environmentally intensive mining and rising geopolitical tensions, became the trigger. “Rare earth is a global problem. Everyone is experiencing the same issue. If we build the right product, the opportunity is global.”
Rethinking the Motor
To understand Chara’s bet, one must first understand how conventional motors work. In a PMSM, the stator generates a rotating magnetic field. The rotor, embedded with powerful permanent magnets, locks onto this field, producing torque. “It works really well,” Bhaktha acknowledges. “The magnets help generate larger torque for smaller amounts of current.”
Induction motors avoid magnets but sacrifice efficiency and power density in traction applications. That left a third architecture—reluctance motors. “The principle is simple,” he explains. “Magnetic flux always takes the path of least resistance. Just like water. Our rotor is designed so that it constantly tries to align itself to the lowest reluctance path. That alignment generates torque.”
Instead of relying on embedded magnets, Chara’s motor uses precisely engineered electrical steel geometries. “We depend on the properties of electrical steel to generate torque. That is the source of its simplicity.” Physics is not new. The engineering to make it commercially competitive is.
The Trade-Off No One Sees
Removing magnets means giving up their brute magnetic strength. To compensate, Chara increases copper in the windings and optimises steel design. The result is a motor that is roughly 15 per cent heavier than a comparable PMSM.
“Our most popular motor is for a three-wheeler,” Bhaktha says. “A PMSM motor is about 15 kilograms. Ours is about 18 kilograms.” On paper, that sounds like a disadvantage. But Bhaktha shifts the conversation from component-level comparison to system-level thinking.
“In a three-wheeler with a gross vehicle weight of 750 kilograms, three kilograms is a rounding error,” he says. “But efficiency over the duty cycle is what really determines range.” He explains how PMSMs require flux weakening at higher speeds—injecting additional current to counteract the very magnets that give them low-speed torque. That process consumes energy and complicates control.
“Our efficiency curve is flatter,” he says. “In duty cycle efficiency, we are 5 to 10 per cent better. For the same vehicle and same battery, you can get 5 to 10 per cent more range.” That improvement can eliminate the need for additional battery capacity—often heavier and costlier than the motor difference itself. “At the system level, our motor can actually make the vehicle lighter,” he adds.
From Scepticism to Shipments
After four years of R&D, Chara began commercial sales in 2024. Today, it ships hundreds of motors every month to customers in India and abroad. But market acceptance did not come easily. “Three questions were always asked,” Bhaktha recalls. “‘Where have you deployed this? What about long-term reliability? And how can we depend on a startup?”
Convincing OEMs to replace the “heart of the machine” with a new architecture required more than performance claims. It required patience—and, unexpectedly, geopolitics. “Only after the geopolitical eruption last year did people start seriously looking at our technology,” he says. “Business improved a lot after that.”
The rare earth issue, once dismissed as distant, had become immediate.
Longevity Without Magnets
Reliability is often framed as a risk for new technologies. Bhaktha turns that assumption around. “If you put everything on equal footing, induction motors and our motors should actually have longer life,” he explains. “Permanent magnets can demagnetise because of temperature or external fields. We don’t have that problem.”
By eliminating magnets from the rotor, the design removes a potential failure mode altogether. “In terms of reliability, we are equal or better than PMSM,” he says.
India’s Strategic Moment
The conversation inevitably widens to India’s industrial landscape. Electronics assembly is growing. Semiconductor fabs are emerging. Government schemes like the Electronic Component Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS) are pushing localisation.
“The controller part of the motor is electronics,” Bhaktha notes. “Schemes like ECMS will definitely help. We need that support. It’s like a child learning to walk—the initial support matters.” While motor materials such as steel and copper are already sourced domestically, semiconductor components remain largely import-dependent. “We have to start a strategic drive for components,” he says. “Otherwise, we will face the same vulnerability elsewhere.”
China’s dominance across the value chain looms large in his assessment. “In cost, quality, and timeliness, it is very hard to beat them today,” he says candidly. “But India has a large domestic market. We can deploy new technologies here, nurture them, and then export.”
Capital, Talent, and Conviction
Building deep-tech hardware in India is not easy. “Capital is scarce for projects like us,” Bhaktha says. “Our gestation periods are long. We need patient capital that can wait ten or fifteen years.” Talent, too, presents challenges. “It is easier to find people who write software code than people who understand electromagnetics, thermals, and hardware,” he says. But a reverse migration trend is helping. Engineers trained at global universities are returning, drawn by the opportunity to build foundational technologies.
And then there is the storytelling. “It was very difficult to explain why we were doing this,” he admits. “Rare earth was not even a mainstream phrase when we started.”
The 2030 Mix
Bhaktha does not predict a single architecture winning the future. Instead, he envisions a diversified market. “Just like we had petrol, diesel, and CNG engines, we will have PMSM, reluctance motors, externally excited synchronous motors, and induction motors,” he says.
In traction applications alone, he believes rare-earth-free motors could capture about a quarter of the market by 2030. “It might be more,” he adds. “It is difficult to predict how quickly these things move. But rare earth is a real problem. As long as we keep solving the right problem, there will be opportunities.”
Conclusion
The electric revolution is often framed as a battery story. But as Bhaktha reminds us, every electron must eventually turn a shaft. If that shaft can spin without strategic dependencies embedded inside it, the implications extend far beyond efficiency. They touch resilience, sovereignty, and industrial autonomy.
Rare earth-free motors, once a niche research topic, are now entering production lines. And in that shift lies a quiet redefinition of what powers the electric future.
