From Aadhaar cards to charging electric cars – Meet the Indian company that wants to do it all

• Vakrangee, a listed company, has announced that it will be building 75,000 EV charging stations in India by March 2022.
• The company was earlier involved in making voter ID cards and also Aadhar cards.
• It has also had a troublesome past with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs ordering an investigation into the audit books of the company.

Vakrangee, a company that builds last-mile retail outlets for financial services companies, has announced that it will be building 75,000 electric vehicle recharging stations across India by 2021-22.

The 29-year old listed company aims to achieve this number by building on its existing network of financial services outlets - Nextgen Vakrangee Kendras. According to reports, the company already has 3,504 outlets across 19 states, and 68% of them are in Tier 5 and Tier 6 towns of India.

"Vakrangee plans to leverage this deep presence by being an enabler for the EV charging facility through its network of retail outlets called as Vakrangee Kendras. We continue to focus on expanding the bouquet of services available at our Nextgen Vakrangee Kendras," the company said in a statement.

The company that does it all?

The company went through multiple pivots throughout its journey. It began as a technology company, and went on to make voter identity cards. With the Aadhar revolution, it became a franchise for producing Aadhar UID cards in 2010 and is also a logistics partner for Amazon India, Delhivery, FedEx.

According to the company’s official website, it has gone “from being a sub-contractor and IT enabler for e-Governance projects to a prime bidder in e-Governance projects and further to a fully-integrated retail house offering BFSI, G2C and B2C services.”

Market report

In February 2018, Vakrangee’s stock price crashed by over 60% after the Ministry of Corporate Affairs ordered an investigation into its books. According to reports, market regulator SEBI was investigating it for alleged price and volume manipulation from 1 January 2016 to 30 June 2017.

By the end of 2018, the company’s stock price fell by 92%. However, after SEBI and MCA gave a clean chit to the company, its stock prices went up again.

In May 2019, its shares fell by 5% after the company posted a fall in profits. Vakrangee’s consolidated net profit fell by 91.5% in the last financial year end.