India’s electric vehicle (EV) market is growing. In FY2025, EV sales reached 1.96 million, which is an increase of 17 percent from the previous year. Most of the sale volume is from two wheelers and three wheelers.
This demonstrates that India is building a robust electric mobility ecosystem. The question is whether the larger infrastructure, i.e. the management and recycling of the end of life batteries will also scale at the same pace. The answer is complicated. India has made considerable progress in creating the regulatory architecture, but the physical ecosystem remains fragmented.
EV Growth Trajectory and Battery Waste timelines
An accurate waste projection is foundational to infrastructure planning and without it India risks building redundant or insufficient capacity. The EV market sector is projected to scale from USD 51.69 billion in 2025 to USD 277.51 billion by 2035, representing a robust 18.3% CAGR.
Simultaneously, battery demand is forecasted to scale from 4 GWh in 2023 to a projected range of 139 to 248 GWh by 2035. As the demand matures, India faces an impending tsunami of waste batteries.
Waste volumes that are being projected are 36000 tonnes in 2025, up to 600,000 tonnes per annum and exceeding 2 million tonnes annually by 2035.With an average EV battery lifespan being 6 to 8 years, India has about 3 to 5 years to establish systems needed to manage and capture the value of the incoming waste stream before volumes accelerate.
From Waste Management to Resource Security
The overall success of India’s EV transition is also a national security imperative now. The nation imports most of the EV batteries, battery components and battery raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel- the critical minerals that are the lifeblood of modern mobility.
In this context, battery recycling is the only short term solution that is viable. It is a strategic mining asset that can transform end-of-life waste into a domestic resource of high-purity minerals.
Regulatory Infrastructure
India’s Battery Waste management Rules, 2022, established an Extended Producer Responsibility framework mandating producers’ responsibility for battery collection and recycling. The framework becomes progressively more demanding with recycler recovery targets rising from 70 percent in 2024-25 to 90 percent from 2026-27 onwards.
It also introduces minimum recycled-material requirements, creating a market for secondary battery raw materials. Compliance is monitored through the CPCB centralised portal, with a “polluter pay” principle applying for non compliance.
Regulation has established the foundation but it cannot alone make the economics work. Battery recycling economics depend on chemistry, metal prices, transportation costs, battery condition, processing yields, energy consumption and the value of recovered materials.
Is Recycling Capacity Ready for the Waste Wave?
There is a gap between today’s operational infrastructure and future requirements. At present, India has approximately 2-3 GWh (60000 Tonnes approx) of operational capacity whereas 128 GWh of capacity will be required by 2030.
There is a planned expansion by various recycling companies of nearly 500,000 MTPA and the pipeline is encouraging, but announced capacity is not available. On current operational capacity, India is not yet keeping pace with its future recycling requirements.
However, the planned additions indicate that the gap can be closed. The recycling chain starts at collection, transport, segregation for second life, before dismantling and processing. Mechanical recycling produces intermediate products such as black mass, which then undergoes refining to extract and purify metals.
Simple shredding and black mass production should not be the measure of success for this industry. The ultimate metric should be how much useful material is recovered, at what purity, and whether that material can re-enter productive industrial use.
The economics of recycling differ substantially between chemistries. Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) offers greater economic incentives because of its higher valuable metal content while Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP), contains no cobalt or nickel, reducing the intrinsic value available to the recycler.
With LFP becoming increasingly prevalent in most EVs today, recyclers cannot simply build business models around the economics of higher-value battery chemistries. The industry will need better process efficiency, higher recovery rates, lower logistics costs and potentially stronger policy support for low-value chemistries.
The objective must be to make recycling economically viable across the battery mix that India will actually generate. Feedstock, ironically, could also be the industry’s biggest constraint as the collection channels remain fragmented, mostly lying within the informal sector.
What India Needs to Get Right
The next phase of the battery recycling industry should therefore focus on four priorities. First, collection and traceability need to develop alongside recycling capacity, to ensure that volumes end up at authorised recyclers.
Second, recycling processes must become chemistry-aware as LFP becomes more prevalent. Third, India needs to move beyond black mass towards domestic high-purity refining so that recovered materials can substitute for virgin inputs in the future.
Fourth, the regulatory system needs to ensure that EPR translates into actual physical recovery. India is not yet fully equipped to keep pace with the battery waste its EV growth will eventually generate, but it has a critical window to close that gap.
The focus must be not just on adding capacity, but on building the collection, refining and traceability infrastructure needed to make that capacity effective. India’s EV transition is creating a valuable domestic resource stream. Whether that resource strengthens India’s critical-mineral security or becomes another source of material leakage will depend on the infrastructure and systems built today.
Manikumar Uppala is the Co-Founder & Chief of Industrial Engineering at Metastable Materials. All views expressed are the author's own.