Designing a Real-World Telemetry Study of E-Rickshaw Batteries in Odisha: Duty Cycle, Thermal Exposure and Degradation from a Simulation-Calibrated Pre-Study

E-rickshaws dominate short urban trips in Odisha, yet the public evidence on how their batteries are used and how fast they wear out rests on a 2019 energy test and on driver surveys from Delhi and Bihar that disagree with each other. This paper designs an instrumented telemetry study for Bhubaneswar and Cuttack and, before any hardware is deployed, tests that design with a coupled duty-cycle, electro-thermal and degradation simulation of a 24-vehicle fleet over 730 days. The simulator is calibrated to published field anchors and its outputs are labelled as synthetic throughout. It reproduces published energy use (median 49.1 Wh/km for lead-acid) and charging time, and attributes the conflicting range reports to pack size. Within the model, lead-acid packs run hottest during overnight absorption charging rather than on the road; stand-side top-up charging raises the distance delivered per pack by about 8 % without shortening its life in days; and lithium iron phosphate fade (7.4 % in year one) is dominated by calendar ageing at full charge overnight, which a 90 % charge ceiling or charge timer reduces. For instrumentation, the study shows that point sampling at 30 s gives a 95th-percentile throughput error of 5.2 %, that hardware charge integration with a recorded mean of current squared is needed, that capacity anchored on every pre-charge rest outperforms scheduled rest tests, and that rest-voltage capacity estimation is weak for lithium iron phosphate packs seldom discharged below 25 %. The planned fleet can track individual fade within three to six months but is under-powered for group comparisons; design changes are proposed. Code, synthetic data and logs are released.