Tata Group and JSW Group is not establishing another assembly line. They are developing the intellectual apparatus the know-how of chemistry, the expertise of designing cells, the architecture of software which has so far been almost entirely beyond the shores of India. This is a completely different type of wager, and it is being made at a time where global EV industry is in the midst of a structural reorganisation which will decide who will be the producers of future and who will just be the purchasers.

Bengaluru and Pune/Maharashtra are India's two R&D corridors, which are set to become the country's Battery Sovereign Hubs. Based upon Company announcements and Bloomberg, 2026.

Certainly let's be clear what each group is doing, details matter. Tata's battery business, Agratas Ltd, is investing more than $400 Million in a special R&D centre in Bengaluru. It centres on two chemistries lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) in both of which India is in the bluntest of terms dependent on China. The Bengaluru lab will do what Agratas can't now grow those cells from scratch, have the know-how of the manufacturing process and ultimately produce them under Indian IP. Agratas already has nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) battery technology which is from South Korea, but NMC is 20 to 30 percent more expensive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis than LFP. That's the cost maths that has made LFP the preferred choice for mass-market EVs in Asia.

Meanwhile, JSW Motors, a part of the passenger car business of Sajjan Jindal's conglomerate, has its own parallel yet separate goal. CEO Ranjan Nayak has pledged to invest at least $500 million over 5-6 years in a research campus in Maharashtra, not only on battery hardware, but on software-defined cars, connected car architectures and the AI-driven systems that more and more drive the difference between a 2010s and 2020s car. This was formalized in April 2026 with the setting up of the JNEXT JSW Next Gen Technology Center at Pune in collaboration with Tata Elxsi. The mandate spans from frameworks for over-the-air updates, to digital twins, 5G powered systems and cybersecurity. JSW is also developing a greenfield manufacturing plant on 630 acres in Bidkin, Maharashtra the groundwork for whatever the software and chemistry labs build.

By 2026, every significant Indian conglomerate that vowed to construct India's battery future from 2021 to 2023 has backed off to wrap Chinese cells within Indian shells.

The China question no one wants to call out specifically.

India imports battery cell manufacturing machinery to the value of $1.5 billion every year from China. It imports raw materials, such as lithium and cobalt, mostly from the Chinese supply chain. Over half of the EV companies in India have a localisation rate less than 50%, and are therefore not eligible to receive full benefit of the EV subsidy scheme FAME-II, which is aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturing. Such structural dependency is not abolished by the mere fact that two conglomerates make R&D investments. It does start to get cracks however.

The world of batteries is not just a business battle. It's a geopolitical one. China's China Automotive Battery Technology Group provides 80 per cent of Chinese electric truck batteries, and dominates global cell manufacturing. At the beginning of 2026, the lithium price is over double that of a year ago, as the demand growth was faster than expected, and the supply chain was impacted by disruptions such as temporary shutdowns at CATL's own mines. In 2023, India announced the discovery of 5.9 million tonnes of lithium in Jammu and Kashmir, a discovery that has the potential to change the country's battery raw material landscape. The catch: to date, two rounds of auction, have not yielded any buyers mainly due to the security situation in the region close to the Pakistan border. The government is now readying a third go at it with improved incentives. If it works out, it alters the game of the whole Tata JSW deal in India's favour.

This is actually a race against time for several reasons.

In 2025, India's EV market reached a new high of 2.3 million unit sales, driven by a 75 percent increase in the number of electric cars sold. This is one of the best growth stories in the world, according to the International Energy Agency, which was only outdone by Southeast Asian countries' doubling of electric 2- and 3-wheelers. With global EV sales seeing a forecast of 23 million units by 2026 and India's share rising to 28 per cent of total car sales, the Indian domestic market is rapidly gaining momentum and whoever wins the battery market here wins a prize that it adds up every year.

Though Tata Motors currently dominates the Indian EV market with a share of nearly 40 per cent of all passenger EV sales in FY2026, it has seen a decline in its market share over the years, previously enjoying near-monopoly status in the Indian EV market. Mahindra has been filling in a lot of ground. With its positive volume growth of 136 percent till CY2025, JSW Motors, which registered as an entity only in 2024, currently accounts for about 8 percent of the EV passenger car market. The rivalry is fierce and both sides realize that maintaining their market position over the next decade will depend not only on sourcing and assembling the technology stack, but actually owning it.

Building is not a Strategy. Chemistry Is.

The investment announcements are juxtaposed with this uncomfortable reality: India's operational battery manufacturing capacity at the end of 2025 was around 1.4 GWh, compared to the government's target of 50 GWh. It's an 97 percent disconnect between ambition and reality. The firms that proclaimed the future of the batteries in the country in 2021 and 2022 have, in effect, been nothing more than repackagers of Chinese-made batteries. The business of making cells is punishing expensive to build and take long time to pay off and China has been climbing the learning curve for 15 years. No one makes that curve short by just saying that they are going to invest.

That is why Tata and JSW need to invest in R&D and not just another gigafactory announcement needs to be read differently. Agratas has already started a 20 GWh gigafactory in Sanand, Gujarat, with its steel frame work now finished in April 2026 and production slated to begin in 2027, one year delayed from the original schedule. Equipment is NOT made locally, but from Korea. It has a license for its cell chemistry from AESC, South Korea, for the NMC formats. In Bengaluru the $400m lab is upstream of all that, it is the attempt to own the science first, before the factory runs out of licensed technology to manufacture. The difference lies in making a battery and making a battery chemistry. India does not have the same today, but it is the latter which actually creates independence.

To conclude, the new generation of batteries is software.

JSW's play merits a separate discussion as it suggests an alternative theory of competitive advantage. The conglomerate came late in the passenger car business it was incorporated in 2024 and all the current volumes are based on the MG brand, which includes Chinese parent SAIC's technology under a partnership. JSW also utilises vehicle platforms of Chery Automotive, such as the models Chery and Jaecoo that will be manufactured at its new Marathi plant at Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar. In India, selling someone else's technology is a good short-term business but it is not a sound long-term industrial strategy and the JSW leadership does seem to realize this.

The JNEXT centre in Pune, in addition to the earlier Software partnership with KPIT Technologies for Electric propulsion systems and Battery Innovation, is an indication that JSW's long-term differentiation will be supported through software-defined vehicle architecture, and not just hardware assembly. This is as important as cell chemistry, in a world where the ability to update, personalise and evolve through software is a major factor in cars vying against one another. When these two groups are put together, the Bengaluru chemistry lab and the Pune software hub, it doesn't seem like two independent corporate investments, but two halves of a tech ecosystem that India has never been blessed with.

While sales of electric cars in India surged by more than 75 percent in 2025, it is one of the world's best growth stories as India has no ownership in the technology. The IEA Global EV Outlook 2026 data were synthesized.

The Global Stakes

Read this in the light of the international context, and the lines become even more drawn. In 2025, almost 60 percent of electric cars sold globally were produced by Chinese manufacturers, 15 percent by European manufacturers and 15 percent by North American manufacturers. The global EV market is moving towards 23M units in 2026, and adding 28 percent EV market penetration. With domestic players such as Tata and Mahindra taking approximately 60 per cent of sales in the country and India projected to grow at a CAGR of 18.3 per cent till 2030, it is already the most significant emerging EV market that is not led by Chinese brands. That status will not go quietly. India either develops its technology capabilities or becomes a big market of Chinese-battery-powered cars with Indian names.

Indeed, India's EV aspirations have begun to attract the interest of Western capital and policy focus. The group's success in Somerset's UK gigafactory, which Tata invested £4 billion in a 40 GWh plant, proved that the group can perform on an advanced economy at scale. The Bengaluru R&D lab is an effort to bring that ability to India with Indian IP for Indian & then global markets.

Cynicism has its place but at the same time, ambition does.

All of these are no guarantees of success. The sobering reality is that each investment has a potential for actual execution. R&D labs take years, not quarters, to generate intellectual property. The cell chemistry part is tricky, the distance between a lab result and a cell that can be manufactured on a commercial scale is vast, and dozens of western battery start-ups have found out that at a massive cost. India don't have a large pool of talent like Seoul or Shenzhen in electrochemistry and material science. The regulatory environment in lithium mining, land acquisition and export controls are still works in progress.

The simple point is that both Tata and JSW are, at the moment, to greater or less extent relying on the same Chinese and Korean technology which they wish to replace. AESC's cell formats are licensed by Agratas. JSW is a based on Chery's vehicle platforms. The R&D investments are not an immediate end to today's dependency, but a hedge against future dependency. The Sanand factory will be based on Korean processes and licensed for cell production when it starts operations in 2027. If the Bengaluru lab succeeds, the Bengaluru picture will change 10 years after the output of the lab.

However: Indian EV market grew by 75% during 2025. In January 2026, the sales of electric cars increased 51 per cent compared to the previous year. EVs will have a 5 per cent rate of GST. Nationwide, charging infrastructure is growing out as it is still limited with only about 29,000 charging stations available at public locations. The demand story is true, the supply story isn't yet. Whatever the caveats, a billion dollars being invested in the intellectual underpinning of that supply story is more than India has done before, and it's from the private sector, rather than a government scheme that can be overturned with an election cycle.

What really needs to be answered is whether Tata and JSW can establish R&D centres. They clearly can. Whether, five years from now, those labs will have created cells and software that factories in India will make under Indian IP that will be sold into an Indian market that is expanding at almost 20 percent a year. If the answer is yes even a partial yes then India will have altered with a bang the map of global battery supply, with relevance to all nations seeking to build an EV future beyond Chinese-dominated supply chains. It's a tale to be seen, and seen well.