India's Cell Gigafactories Rise as the PLI Scorecard Lags

Two things are true about India's battery-manufacturing push at once, and the tension between them is the story. The gigafactories are unmistakably rising, and the official scorecard is badly behind.

The visible progress is real and large. Agratas, the Tata Group's battery arm, completed the steel superstructure of its lithium-cell plant at Sanand, Gujarat, a building 700 metres long, 150 metres wide and 34 metres high with about 105,000 square metres of built-up area, consuming 24,000 tonnes of steel and peaking at more than 2,500 workers on site. Reported around 2 April 2026, the milestone puts a Phase-1 capacity of 20 GWh a year on track for cell production in 2027.

The build-out

Agratas is not alone. Reliance Industries is preparing a battery gigafactory at its green-energy complex in Jamnagar, targeting an initial 40 GWh per year scalable toward 100 GWh, built partly on the Faradion sodium-ion technology it acquired in 2022 alongside lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry. Ola Electric holds 20 GWh of allocation and has been first to put cells on a line. Between them, these projects are meant to build, from a near-standing start, a domestic alternative to the imported cells, overwhelmingly from China, that today power India's electric vehicles and its grid-storage systems.

The strategic rationale is straightforward import substitution, and the stakes are unusually high. The cell is the single most expensive component of an electric vehicle and of a battery-energy-storage system, often a third or more of the total cost, and India currently buys almost all of its cells abroad. A domestic cell industry keeps that value at home, removes a serious strategic dependency on a single supplier nation, and is the precondition for any credible EV or storage ambition. Without it, every other part of the clean-energy stack rests on an imported foundation.

The scorecard

Then there is the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells (ACC), the policy designed to seed 50 GWh of capacity. Of that, roughly 40 GWh has been awarded, split between Reliance (15 GWh), Ola Electric (20 GWh) and Rajesh Exports (5 GWh). But as of early 2026, only about 2.8%, around 1.4 GWh, had actually been commissioned within the scheme's timelines, all of it by Ola. The government reportedly fined Reliance for missing a first-round deadline and, by late 2025, was considering relaxing both deadlines and localisation requirements. Amara Raja's cell plant in Telangana slipped its start to FY27.

The gulf between awarded and commissioned is the whole lesson. Capacity awarded is a signed agreement and a press release; capacity commissioned is a factory that actually ships qualified cells. Those are very different things, and the distance between them is measured in years.

Why cell-making is so hard

It is worth being honest about why. Building a cell gigafactory is nothing like scaling a software business, where the marginal cost of growth approaches zero. It is a slow, capital-heavy exercise in importing or developing precision manufacturing equipment, qualifying a long list of materials to exacting specifications, climbing a yield curve where early output is largely scrap, and training a workforce with skills that India does not yet possess at scale. Each of those is a bottleneck in its own right. Cell-making equipment is itself concentrated among a handful of mostly Asian suppliers; battery-grade materials such as anode and cathode powders are a separate import dependency; and yields on a new line can take many months to reach commercial levels. A factory can be physically complete and still be years from passing the qualification tests that let its cells into a vehicle.

That is the context for the 2.8% figure. It is not evidence that the ambition is wrong, nor that the operators are not serious, the Agratas steel frame and the Reliance complex are proof that serious money and serious companies are committed. It is evidence that the hard part of battery manufacturing is the manufacturing, and that policy targets set on paper collide with the physics and logistics of building real plants.

The strategic stakes

What hangs on getting this right is considerable. China dominates the global battery supply chain at every level, from refined materials to finished cells, and has shown willingness to use that position as leverage. For India, a domestic cell industry is as much an economic-security project as an industrial one. The PLI scheme's job was to catalyse it; the scheme's struggle to convert awards into commissioned capacity is a warning that subsidies alone do not manufacture cells.

The honest read, then, is that India's battery-cell industry is simultaneously real and behind schedule. The right metric over the next two years is not how many gigawatt-hours are announced at ribbon-cuttings, but how many actually come online, pass qualification and ship. On that measure, the Agratas topping-out is genuine progress, and the scorecard is a reminder of how much progress is still required.