India’s cabinet has approved two linked measures to build a domestic battery materials chain. The larger is 145 billion rupees, about $1.5 billion, for grid scale storage, targeting 92 gigawatt hours of capacity through fiscal 2030-31, including 30 gigawatt hours of batteries with a minimum 40 percent domestic content requirement. The second is a capex support scheme of 28.14 billion rupees for critical mineral processing, running over five years from fiscal 2026-27.
The processing scheme will cover 30 percent of eligible investment in four plants. Two lithium plants must each have capacity of at least 30,000 tonnes, and two nickel plants at least 50,000 tonnes each, converting ores and intermediate products into high purity compounds, with cobalt potentially recovered as a byproduct of nickel processing. Government support is capped at 500 crore rupees for each lithium beneficiary and 900 crore rupees for each nickel beneficiary. The cabinet announcement named no beneficiaries and identified no feedstock suppliers, and it did not specify whether the tonnages refer to feedstock, finished compounds or contained metal.
The demand side is narrower than the headline suggests. Pumped hydro accounts for most of the supported storage capacity, and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which use neither nickel nor cobalt in their cathodes, hold a share above 90 percent of battery energy storage systems, according to the International Energy Agency figure cited by The Northern Miner. The processing plants therefore serve electric vehicles, electronics, defence and speciality steel demand more than the storage program itself.
The constraint is upstream. Analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis have pointed to feedstock uncertainty, price volatility and global overcapacity as deterrents to refining investment, and a Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy analysis published on October 28 argued that India’s processing ambitions depend on securing foreign minerals, technology and financing. The subsidies address the financing gap. They do not secure the ore, which is the part of the chain India does not control.