Why doesn't India produce battery cathode active materials domestically at scale?

Every lithium-ion battery has a cathode, and the cathode active material — the powder that stores and releases lithium ions — is where much of the cell's cost and performance is decided. India makes almost none of it. As of 2025-2026, domestic cathode active material (CAM) production capacity stands at under 3% of requirements, with most of the material still imported from China. Import dependence for CAM is near 100%.

CAM is genuinely hard to make well. It is not a bulk commodity but a precision chemistry: lithium and other precursors combined into powders whose particle size, purity, and structure must be held to tight tolerances, batch after batch, or the resulting cell underperforms. The two dominant chemistries — LFP (lithium iron phosphate) and NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) — each demand their own refined precursor streams. Only five nations produce CAM at scale: China, South Korea, Japan, the United States, and Germany. Production of LFP cathode materials and their precursors remains almost entirely concentrated in China, according to the IEA's Global EV Outlook 2026.

India's position is early but real. The domestic effort's clearest expression is a partnership between the startup Altmin and ARCI, a government research centre. ARCI developed, together with Altmin, a novel low-cost process for LFP — a safe, inexpensive cathode material suited to tropical conditions — and transferred it to Altmin for pilot-scale production. The resulting pilot plant, inaugurated in 2023, produces 100 kilograms of LFP CAM per day. Altmin has announced plans for a commercial cathode giga-factory in Telangana, with an interim target of 12,000 tonnes per annum by 2027 and a stated full capacity of more than 24,000 tonnes per annum.

Set against demand, the scale of the climb is clear. India is projected to require at least 150,000 tonnes of cathode active material annually by 2030 — and even that volume would meet only half the country's battery requirement. A 100 kg/day pilot and a planned 12,000-tonne facility are the first steps up a very tall slope.

The gap persists for structural reasons that sit beneath CAM itself. Cathode synthesis is only as good as its precursors, and India's precursor base is thin. Lithium carbonate refining — the primary precursor for both LFP and NMC synthesis — is only emerging domestically. Battery-grade lithium refining, needed for the high-purity synthesis CAM requires, is likewise at an early stage. Nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate production, the key precursors for NMC and NCA chemistries, effectively does not exist in India. A cathode plant without a domestic precursor supply is a plant that trades one import dependence for another.

Policy has so far concentrated further downstream. India's ACC PLI scheme incentivises cell manufacturing and rewards domestic value capture, but the upstream materials layer — the refining and precursor chemistry that feeds CAM — faces raw-material scarcity that the scheme treats as an external constraint rather than something it directly builds.

What it would take is visible in the structure of the problem. Scaling CAM means moving Altmin's pilot process, and others like it, from 100 kilograms a day to the thousands of tonnes the 2030 demand implies — the 12,000-tonne 2027 target and beyond. It means building the precursor layer underneath in parallel: lithium carbonate and battery-grade lithium refining moving from emerging to established, and nickel and cobalt sulfate production started from a base of essentially nothing. LFP, being cobalt- and nickel-free, offers the shortest path, which is why the domestic pilot chose it. The materials layer, not the cell line, is now the binding constraint — and it is the layer where the fewest foundations are yet in place.