Vikas Vij assesses why Reliance abandoned its plans to manufacture lithium-ion batteries in India, while a Chinese battery startup has taken the chance.
Entrepreneur Vikas Vij hasn’t pulled any punches in his explanation of why Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) quietly walked away from its lithium‑ion battery manufacturing ambitions in India. His take has reopened a tough but important conversation: how serious is India, really, about building deep technological capability rather than just announcing big plans?
At the centre of his argument is an uncomfortable comparison — India’s largest conglomerate on one side, and on the other, a relatively obscure Chinese battery startup that’s a fraction of its size.
Chinese startup wins while Reliance drops plan?
The company in question is Hithium, a private Chinese lithium battery manufacturer founded in 2019. By Vij’s estimate, Hithium is roughly 1/200th the size of Reliance. Yet this much smaller player reportedly chose not to license its battery technology to one of India’s most powerful corporate groups.
Was this about politics or posturing? Vij doesn’t think so. In his view, the refusal comes down to something far more fundamental: capability.
Hithium has spent years building hard, defensible intellectual property — proprietary cell chemistry, manufacturing know‑how, process expertise — through sustained investment in research and development. That deep tech stack, Vij argues, is exactly what Reliance lacks in this space.
This is despite the fact that Reliance generates close to $10 billion in annual net profit and has made loud public commitments to pivot from fossil fuels to clean energy. The money is there. The intent, on paper, is there. But according to Vij, the willingness to take real technological risk is not.
He points to a deeper cultural problem: after decades of operating in a largely protected domestic market, big Indian conglomerates haven’t been forced to build a true innovation mindset or compete aggressively on a global technology playing field. As a result, when it comes to next‑generation lithium‑ion cells, Reliance is starting from behind — with limited in‑house patents, no proprietary cell designs, and a lack of process and manufacturing expertise at the bleeding edge.
Battery tech isn’t a plug‑and‑play business
One of the most important points Vij makes is that battery manufacturing is not a turnkey project you can simply buy off the shelf.
Companies like Hithium don’t get to high‑yield, safe, reliable production overnight. They typically pour hundreds of millions of dollars every year into R&D, pilot lines, and testing before they reach scale. That includes:
- Building pilot plants and iterating on real‑world processes
- Running extensive safety and reliability labs
- Hiring top‑tier scientists, materials experts, and process engineers
- Living through years of failures, redesigns, and dead ends
The payoff is a stack of hard‑won knowledge that can’t be easily replicated through shortcuts. It’s difficult to reverse‑engineer, hard to copy, and rarely available on generous licensing terms — especially to a potential long‑term rival.
In other words, the kind of capabilities Reliance needed here can’t simply be “rented” on attractive terms. They’re the result of patient capital, a high tolerance for failure, and a culture that sees experimentation as a necessary cost of progress.
India’s missing ecosystem
Vij’s criticism doesn’t stop at a single corporate decision. He argues that India, more broadly, doesn’t yet have the ecosystem required to back a world‑class battery manufacturing push from scratch.
According to him, the country still lacks:
- A deep, integrated supply chain covering everything from critical minerals to chemical precursors and advanced manufacturing equipment
- Robust testing infrastructure for large‑scale, safety‑critical technologies
- A sizeable, specialised talent pool of battery chemists, process engineers, and automation specialists
These gaps aren’t the result of just a few bad years. They’re the accumulated outcome of decades of under‑investment in industrial R&D, fragmented policy thinking, and a tendency to prioritise short‑term wins over long‑term capability building.
Without this foundation, even a cash‑rich conglomerate like Reliance struggles to stand up a competitive, homegrown lithium‑ion cell business — especially if it’s trying to negotiate access to someone else’s hard‑earned IP instead of building its own from the ground up.
A bigger question about India’s growth model
Ultimately, Vij’s commentary isn’t just about Reliance or one cancelled gigafactory plan. It’s a pointed critique of India’s broader economic model — one that, in his view, often celebrates stock market valuations and financial engineering more than genuine technological breakthroughs.
His core argument can be summed up like this:
Unless India is willing to:
- Commit long‑term capital to research and innovation
- Reward companies that take real R&D risks instead of just dominating protected local markets
- Build institutions and policies that push firms to be globally competitive, not just domestically dominant
…it will keep finding itself dependent on foreign technology in precisely those sectors that are most strategic for its future — including batteries, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing.
The scrapping of Reliance’s lithium‑ion battery plans, then, becomes more than a boardroom decision. It acts as a mirror held up to India’s innovation deficit. It’s a reminder that headline investments and ambitious press releases are the easy part; building serious, world‑class technology capabilities is the grind few are truly committing to.
If the concerns raised by voices like Vikas Vij go unanswered, India risks walking into its energy transition — and its broader industrial future — on someone else’s technology rails.
