India's Battery Manufacturing Ambitions: PLI, Make in India, and the Road Ahead
India's Production-Linked Incentive scheme commits ₹18,100 crore to advanced battery manufacturing. With domestic EV demand surging and import dependence on China exceeding 80%, India is racing to build sovereign battery capacity. How Indian deep-tech companies are positioning to lead.
India imports over 80% of its lithium-ion battery cells from China, creating a strategic vulnerability that policymakers have moved aggressively to address. The Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells (ACC) commits ₹18,100 crore ($2.2 billion) to incentivise domestic battery manufacturing, targeting 50 GWh of annual production capacity by 2030. It is the largest single investment in India's energy storage sector and a cornerstone of the National Electric Mobility Mission.
The PLI scheme awards incentives based on domestic value addition — manufacturers must achieve progressively higher local content thresholds to qualify for subsidies. This design encourages not just cell assembly but the development of domestic supply chains for cathode materials, electrolytes, separators, and anode materials. Companies like Reliance New Energy, Ola Electric, and Amara Raja have secured PLI allocations, but the race extends far beyond gigafactory construction.
The deeper challenge is chemistry ownership. Most PLI applicants plan to manufacture standard lithium-ion NMC or LFP cells using licensed Chinese or Korean technology. This approach scales capacity but does not eliminate technology dependence. The real strategic prize lies in developing indigenous chemistries suited to Indian conditions — high ambient temperatures, cost sensitivity, and the need for non-flammable solutions in dense urban environments.
This is where Indian deep-tech R&D companies play a critical role. Nordische Energy Systems, headquartered in Bangalore, has developed aluminium-graphene battery technology entirely in India — from active material synthesis to commercial-grade pouch cell manufacturing. The technology uses aluminium (India is the world's second-largest producer) and graphene derived from domestic graphite reserves, creating a fully indigenous supply chain with zero dependence on imported lithium, cobalt, or nickel.
India's geographic and demographic advantages are underappreciated. The country has 3,000+ hours of annual sunshine for solar-powered manufacturing, a young engineering workforce (800,000+ engineering graduates per year), and a domestic EV market projected to reach $100 billion by 2030. What India lacks is not capability but ecosystem — the clustering of materials science R&D, cell manufacturing, and system integration that made China dominant in lithium-ion.
The PLI scheme is a necessary first step, but building true battery sovereignty requires indigenous chemistry development, not just licensed manufacturing. India's path to energy storage leadership runs through companies developing novel, India-suited technologies — not through replicating yesterday's Chinese lithium-ion playbook.