According to the industry, Telangana is still in an old system for correlating the sales data and therefore, not included in the sales data every month.
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KYLE GRILLOT
Automakers are being hemmed in by Telangana, the only State where vehicle retail sales data is not being uploaded on the Vahan (Ministry of Transport & Highways) portal. It is preventing the industry from establishing a clearer trend about vehicle sales based on the retail number.
According to the industry, Telangana is still in an old system for correlating the sales data and therefore, not included in the sales data every month.
Till now, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have been basing their estimates on the wholesales (dispatches to dealers). However, Passenger vehicle (PV) market leader, Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) has been proposing since last year that Vahan numbers should be the benchmark. From this financial year, MSIL will be sharing retail sales numbers instead of the wholesale numbers.
“We are expecting that they (Telangana) will be coming into the Vahan system within a month or two. But, internally to all our dealers, whatever schemes, whatever is happening, we are going on the Vahan system. I think fundamentally we believe that reporting the Vahan data across the industry is much better system than to share the wholesale numbers because wholesale number is just pushing the metal from the factory stock to the dealers stock,” Partho Banerjee, Senior Executive Officer, MSIL, said.
Similarly, ‘Punch’ maker Tata Motors suggested that the focus should be on Vahan data.
“For Tata Motors Limited, as we have seen in the past couple of quarters, the focus continues to remain on maintaining Vahan market share and correcting our wholesales for having optimal level of channel inventory,” the company said in an analysts call recently.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI) has also written to the Telangana government to soon start the process of sending vehicle registration to the Vahan portal.
“We have sent a letter to Telangana. Reply is awaited,” a senior official at MHI told businessline.
“A lot of OEMs are getting in to the retail numbers now. We have been talking to Telangana and they have said that they will move to Vahan sometime in the future. The State is still in an old system that predates Vahan’s dashboard…We have been meeting them and have been liaising with them,” C S Vigneshwar, President, Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations, told businessline.
According to Vigneshwar, Telangana contributes to around 4 per cent of the total PV sales.
“On several occasions, the network stock is coming very high. Last year, Maruti Suzuki took a conscious call that we are not going to have too much of growth in the wholesale numbers and we focused on the retail. That is why we had a growth in the Vahan share, but in the wholesales, we did not have too much of growth. In fact we had a flat growth. So, I think everyone should move to Vahan data,” Banerjee of MSIL added.
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Published on April 6, 2025