India's Battery Ambitions Run On Borrowed Volts

New EV battery plants risk entrenching the same old technology dependence

India is set to begin mass-producing electric-vehicle batteries within 18 months, a step hailed as a leap towards industrial self-reliance. Yet the structure of this new industry looks troublingly familiar, echoing a pattern of dependence that has long marked India’s economy.

Nowhere is this dependence clearer than in the heft of intellectual property. The portfolios of India’s largest battery-makers, Amara Raja and Exide, contain just seven patents combined. This pales in comparison to the industry’s giants: China’s CATL sits on a hoard of over 43,000 patents, while South Korea’s LG Energy Solution possesses some 70,000.

Having largely missed the global lithium-ion boom, India’s established lead-acid manufacturers built a business model on licensing technology rather than inventing it. This long-standing habit is now reflected in deals that create deep technological dependency.

A 2022 agreement between Exide and China’s SVOLT, for example, calls for SVOLT to not only transfer intellectual property but also to oversee plant construction, supply the equipment and integrate the factory into its own Chinese supply chain. Amara Raja’s deal with Gotion High-Tech in June 2024 follows a similar template.

This is a familiar story across several industries in India, including defense to solar energy. The country’s major companies have often preferred the safety of manufacturing with proven foreign technology to the risk and expense of developing their own. The histories of the battery-makers themselves show this pattern clearly. Amara Raja was founded in 1997 on an alliance with America’s Johnson Controls and depended on it for two decades of new technology. Exide, after starting with technology from its British parent, collected a string of foreign partners from Japan, America and China.

China’s approach offers a sharp contrast. Its dominance was no market accident but the result of deliberate state planning, backed by some $231 billion in support between 2009 and 2023. A pivotal 2016 policy required electric-vehicle makers to use local batteries to qualify for subsidies. This move forced global firms like BMW and Volkswagen into partnerships, triggering a vast transfer of market share and know-how to new Chinese champions.

Still, a few Indian firms are trying to break the cycle. Ola Electric, an electric scooter-maker that has hired talent from global leaders, developed its own battery cells and filed 92 patents, according to Bernstein.

We also have smaller firms like Godi India, which has put together a team of specialists to get its own cell designs certified. Others are taking a different approach: Reliance Industries has chosen to acquire technology by purchasing Lithium Werks, a Dutch battery firm, and Faradion, a British developer of sodium-ion batteries. The Tata group’s Agratas is funding university research in Britain, playing a longer game on future battery technologies.

But innovating independently is risky, as the story of Log9 Materials shows. After raising over $90 million from well-known investors, the firm bet on a novel battery technology called LTO. The technology worked, but the economics did not, according to Bernstein: the cells were more than four times as expensive as their Chinese rivals. The startup, last valued at about $230 million, is now close to bankruptcy.

As India’s new gigafactories start production, they risk deepening the country’s economic vulnerabilities instead of fixing them. The real test is not whether India can make batteries, but whether it can own the technology behind them. Without a major shift away from this reliance on imported ideas, the country’s latest industrial ambition may become just another chapter in a long history of dependence, merely swapping old foreign partners for new ones.