Multiphase induction motor (MIM) drives are popular in the area of high power traction and ship propulsion for their advantages of higher efficiency, lower torque pulsations and greater fault tolerance. Further, using pole-phase modulation (PPM) for these MIM drives widens the speed-torque ranges effectively. But, using multiphase space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) to control these MIM drives yield lesser dc link voltage utilization (DLVU) compared to their three-phase (3-φ) counter parts. This is because the offset value added to the sine references in multiphase SVPWM is always lesser compared to the third harmonic order offset value in case of 3-φ SVPWM. Adding third harmonic order offset value even for multiphase sine references yields extra DLVU same as 3-φ SVPWM. But, this introduces dominant third harmonic order currents into the multiphase phase windings in a star connected multiphase drives. A simple and effective technique to avoid dominant lower order harmonic currents in to the phase windings by grouping them into three 3-φ groups is proposed in this paper. The proposed phase grouping technique is implemented on a pole phase modulated nine-phase induction motor (IM) having a pole ratio of 1:3. Finite element model of nine-phase PPMIM is developed in ANSYS Maxwell two dimensional (2-D) and is fed from a two-level inverter in Simplorer circuit simulator. The proposed PPMMIM drive is experimentally validated for 5 hp nine-phase IM, fed from a two-level inverter. SPARTAN 6 FPGA board is used to implement the inverter control algorithm coded using VHDL. © 2016 IEEE.