India's electric vehicle story has, until now, largely been told through the lens of vehicles rolling off assembly lines, charging infrastructure expanding across cities, and a policy architecture that has genuinely accelerated adoption. What gets discussed far less is what sits upstream of all of it: the cell, and within the cell, the materials that make it work. That gap in attention is becoming a liability.
Over the past five years, India has methodically built the visible layers of its EV ecosystem. The Production Linked Incentive scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells gave the country its first serious push into domestic cell manufacturing, and the PLI scheme for automobiles and auto components extended that momentum into the broader vehicle supply chain. FAME and state level EV policies did the work of stimulating demand. Together, these have moved India from being purely an assembler of imported technology toward becoming a genuinecell manufacturing base,though still at its nascent stage.
But cell manufacturing is only as strong as the materials feeding it, and this is where geopolitics has quietly shaped the entire industry's options. China's dominance in battery materials was never accidental. It was built over two decades through control of lithium refining, rare earth processing, and, critically, anode grade graphite production and graphitization capacity, where its share of global capacity is beyond 90%. With geopolitical volatility, industry has now started flagging this concentration, specially synthetic anode material production as arguably a bigger structural risk to the global battery ecosystem, given how technologically complex and energy intensive it is.
This matters enormously for India. The anode, built predominantly from synthetic graphite, typically accounts for roughly 10 to 15% of a battery cell's cost, and its performance characteristics including cycle life, charging speed, and thermal stability, directly determine how competitive a cell can be. Anode determines key parameters such as range and charging time, governing how efficiently lithium ions move in and out of the cell during every charge cycle.It is graphite's layered crystalline structure, achieved only through high temperature graphitization, that delivers the electrochemical stability, capacity, and cycle life a battery needs across thousands of charge cycles. For an electric vehicle, this translates directly into range and power. For stationary energy storage systems, it means dependable cycle life over a project's operating lifetime. For applications such as drones and defence platforms, it is the higher energy density that determines flight time and payload. Get the anode wrong,and every downstream promise made to the customer becomes harder to keep.
Further, the graphitization process itself, a key process step requiring heating carbon source to temperatures upward of 3000 °C in specialised furnaces, requires deep process expertise and reliable, cost competitive power that has taken decades to build at scale in China.Process consistency at commercial furnace scale, not just laboratory validation, is what ultimately determines whether pilot performance translates into dependable, in specification supply once volumes rise, and that kind of scale up confidence typically comes only from process metallurgy expertise built over a long period of time.
This is precisely why building domestic synthetic graphite based anode active material capacity is not a an option for India's EV ambitions, it is foundational. A gigafactory built on imported anode material is, in effect, an assembly operation wearing the costume of a manufacturing one. If India wants its battery industry to be resilient rather than merely operational, backward integration into active materials including anode has to happen in parallel with cell capacity.
To its credit, the government has recognised parts of this challenge. Graphite has been featured among the thirty minerals identified under India's critical minerals list, and the National Critical Mineral Mission has begun directing meaningful capital and policy attention toward securing upstream supply. However, this listing centres on natural graphite as a mineral resource, while the material actually driving battery demand is synthetic graphite, which accounts for more than 80% of global battery grade anode demand and remains the preferred material across cell chemistries, including both LFP and NMC, owing to its superior consistency, purity, and cycling performance.
This distinction and inclusion matters, because natural graphite mining& processing and synthetic graphite manufacturing sit on entirely different parts of the value chain, with completely different capital, technology, and policy requirements. Extending explicit recognition and incentive support to the latter, along with the anode active material it feeds into, would better reflect where the actual supply chain vulnerability sits.
The Ministry of Heavy Industries is also reportedly working on a new PLI scheme aimed at components, which, if it extends meaningfully to battery materials such as synthetic graphite based anode could be a genuine turning point for domestic producers navigating the long gestation periods and high capital intensity that this industry demands. Further, faster single window industrial clearances and policy stability over the 10 to 15 year horizon that this industry requires would meaningfully de-risk investment decisions that domestic playershave already made.
India does not need to replicate China's scale to matter in this industry. It needs to own the materials science, the processing capability, and the intellectual property that sit beneath the cell. The EV story India tells five years from now will depend less on how many vehicles it sells, and more on how it secured its upstream capacity for synthetic graphite anode.
Ankur Khaitan is MD & CEO, TACC Ltd. Views expressed are the author's personal.