Why doesn't India manufacture carbon fibre?

India makes prepregs, fabrics and finished composite parts. It does not make the fibre those parts are built from. As of 2024, the country imports 100 per cent of its carbon fibre.

Carbon fibre is a material of enormous strategic weight and correspondingly few makers. Only five nations hold meaningful production capacity: Japan, the United States, China, Germany and South Korea. China alone reached nearly half of global operating capacity by 2023, while high-performance grades used in aerospace remain concentrated among Japanese and US firms. The reason so few can do it is that the process is unforgiving. The fibre is spun from a precursor — polyacrylonitrile, or PAN — and then carbonised under precisely controlled heat and tension. Small deviations ruin strength. The precursor chemistry itself is a distinct capability India has not yet mastered domestically.

The consequence is a strategic dependence. Aerospace, defence and wind energy applications all rely on imported high-performance grades, and those grades are subject to export controls. The Indian carbon fibre market was valued at just USD 31.5 million in 2023 — small, but entirely served from abroad.

Where India stands is a cluster of programmes, all still at research-and-development stage, none yet producing fibre at scale.

The largest commercial move is Reliance Industries, which has announced construction of an integrated 20,000 MTPA plant at Hazira, Gujarat — described as India's first world-class carbon fibre facility — with the first phase targeted for completion during 2025 and an ambition to rank among the top three global players.

Alongside it, a defence-oriented consortium is pursuing the harder, high-performance end. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is working with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and Mishra Dhatu Nigam Limited to develop T100-grade carbon fibre, with output targeted within roughly two-and-a-half years of 2024. MIDHANI has issued an Expression of Interest for 60 TPA production facilities across various grades, drawing on technology developed by CSIR-NAL, and signed an MoU with HAL in 2021 for composite raw materials. Separately, Jindal Advanced Materials partnered with Italy's MAE S.p.A. in 2024 for a 3,500 MT plant, expandable to 10,000 MT by 2027. In September 2024, the Union Textiles Minister stated that carbon fibre will be produced in India in 2025-26.

Why has the gap persisted this long? The answer lies partly beneath the fibre itself. High-performance carbon fibre cannot be separated from its precursor: without indigenous PAN precursor fibre production, a domestic plant remains tethered to imported feedstock, moving the dependence one step upstream rather than removing it. The precursor is itself listed as an emerging, high-criticality capability — the foundation on which the visible programmes rest. Building the carbonisation line is one problem; securing the chemistry that feeds it is another, and both must be solved together for the capability to be genuinely sovereign.

What it would take is now largely a question of execution against announced timelines. The commercial scale exists on paper at Hazira; the high-performance grade is being pursued by the BARC–HAL–MIDHANI consortium; the industrial-market volumes are covered by the Jindal–MAE line. The distinct challenges are scaling from research to reliable output, mastering the precursor chemistry domestically, and qualifying the fibre for the aerospace and defence grades that carry the export-control risk. Each targeted date — first phase in 2025, T100 output around 2026-27, the ministerial 2025-26 marker — is a milestone against which progress can be measured.

For now, the status is honest and clear: multiple credible programmes launched, first output targeted, none fielded or scaled. The scoreboard reads emerging. The next two years will show whether the announcements become tonnes.