Jamnagar, Faradion, and the Make in India Battery Bet

Drive north from Rajkot along National Highway 27 and the landscape of Gujarat reveals its industrial skeleton: chemical plants, soda ash works, the white salt flats of the Rann of Kutch in the distance. At the highway's end sits Jamnagar, a city whose identity has been defined for three decades by one fact. It hosts the largest oil refinery complex on Earth, processing 1.4 million barrels per day under Reliance Industries' flag. That same complex is now adding a chapter that could matter more to India's future than all the crude oil it has ever refined: a battery gigafactory with an initial capacity target of 40 gigawatt-hours, where sodium-ion production will form a central pillar.

For a country that imports nearly every gram of lithium it uses, that facility represents something the EV transition has so far denied India. Control over its own supply chain.

What Reliance Bought in Sheffield

In January 2022, Reliance New Energy Ltd paid approximately $135 million, reported in some accounts as GBP 100 million, for Faradion Limited, a sodium-ion battery startup founded in 2011 in Sheffield, England. The company's chief scientist was later appointed honorary professor at the University of St Andrews. Faradion was not a PowerPoint company. It held a patent portfolio covering layered oxide cathode chemistry, cell architecture, and manufacturing processes for sodium-ion batteries. It had demonstrated a 32 ampere-hour pouch cell at 160 Wh/kg energy density. It was the first company in the world to publicly power an e-bike and later an e-scooter with sodium-ion cells.

Indian corporate history offers a useful comparison. When Tata Motors acquired Jaguar Land Rover from Ford in 2008 for $2.3 billion, the purchase was met with skepticism. An Indian conglomerate buying a British premium carmaker seemed like hubris. Tata turned Jaguar profitable within four years. Reliance's Faradion acquisition follows a similar pattern: acquiring foreign IP with the explicit intent of building domestic manufacturing at Indian scale.

The difference is the competitive timeline. Tata had years to restructure Jaguar. Reliance may have three to five years before Chinese sodium-ion producers capture the market at costs no newcomer can match.

Gujarat's Hidden Advantage: Soda Ash

Every sodium-ion battery starts with sodium carbonate, commonly known as soda ash. India produced approximately 3.8 million tonnes of it in 2024, making it one of the world's leading producers, though still behind China, the United States, and Turkey. And Gujarat dominates Indian production, accounting for roughly 90 percent of national output.

The names are familiar to anyone who has followed Indian chemicals. Tata Chemicals operates its historic soda ash plant at Mithapur, overlooking the Gulf of Kutch. GHCL runs its operations at Sutrapada in Gir Somnath district. Nirma, better known for detergent but a significant chemical producer, has soda ash capacity in the state. Between them, these companies supply soda ash to glass, detergent, and chemical industries across India. Supplying a battery factory in Jamnagar would be an incremental extension of existing logistics.

The anode side tells a similar story. Sodium-ion batteries use hard carbon instead of graphite. Hard carbon can be manufactured from biomass, specifically from coconut shells, rice husks, or other agricultural residue. India generates roughly 500 million tonnes of crop residue annually. Much of it is burned in the open, contributing to the seasonal air pollution crisis across North India. Converting even a small fraction into battery-grade hard carbon would address two problems simultaneously.

Compare this to lithium-ion. India imports virtually all its lithium, primarily mined in Australia and Chile, processed into battery-grade material in China, and then shipped to Indian battery assemblers. For every lithium-ion cell made in India, the critical mineral has crossed two oceans and passed through Chinese hands. Sodium-ion breaks that chain. The precursors are domestic. The chemistry is Indian-compatible in a way that lithium never was.

The PLI Scheme: Will It Cover Sodium-Ion?

The government's Production Linked Incentive scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells, approved in 2021, commits INR 18,100 crore, approximately $2.2 billion, to subsidizing domestic battery cell manufacturing. The subsidy structure offers up to 20 percent of cell sales price for cells produced in India, a meaningful cost offset in an industry where margins are measured in single-digit percentages.

Reliance is among the companies that received PLI allocations, having secured 5 GWh initially and an additional 10 GWh in a 2025 retender, alongside Ola Electric and Rajesh Exports. The critical question is what "advanced chemistry cells" means in practice. The PLI scheme text does not specify lithium-ion. It uses the broader term, which in principle encompasses sodium-ion, solid-state, and other next-generation chemistries.

In principle. In practice, the Ministry of Heavy Industries has designed its testing protocols, capacity verification processes, and disbursement timelines around lithium-ion parameters. Energy density benchmarks, cycle life testing standards, and safety certification protocols all reflect lithium-ion assumptions. A sodium-ion cell that excels on cycle life and temperature tolerance but falls short on energy density compared to NMC lithium-ion could face bureaucratic hurdles that have nothing to do with its commercial viability.

The administrative challenge is familiar. India's policy frameworks are often more progressive than their implementation. The PLI scheme needs an explicit sodium-ion pathway, with adjusted testing parameters and clear eligibility criteria, before Reliance can factor the full subsidy into its Jamnagar business case.

NITI Aayog's 2022 battery swapping policy provides a modest precedent. It avoids mandating any specific chemistry, which leaves the door open. But leaving the door open is not the same as inviting sodium-ion through it.

Who Will Buy Reliance's Sodium-Ion Cells?

A factory needs customers. As of early 2026, no major Indian vehicle manufacturer has publicly committed to a sodium-ion platform.

Mahindra sources lithium-ion cells from BYD and Farasis. Tata Motors, through its Agratas subsidiary, is constructing a 20 GWh lithium-ion gigafactory in Gujarat. Ola Electric has PLI approval for lithium-ion cell manufacturing. The gravitational pull of the established supply chain is strong.

But India's EV market is not Europe's or America's. In India, two-wheelers accounted for the vast majority of electric vehicle sales in 2025. The country sells over 20 million two-wheelers annually. The electric three-wheeler segment, primarily e-rickshaws, is another high-volume, price-sensitive market. Together, these segments represent the heart of Indian personal and commercial mobility.

For a scooter or a rickshaw, the physics of sodium-ion are not a limitation. They are an advantage. Sodium-ion's lower energy density, the characteristic that makes it unsuitable for a 500-kilometer-range sedan, is irrelevant for a vehicle that travels 60 to 80 kilometers per day and returns to a charging station every night. What matters is cost per cycle, durability across temperature extremes from Rajasthan summers at 48 degrees Celsius to Himalayan winters below freezing, and safety in dense urban environments where crash protection standards are minimal.

Ather Energy, Bajaj Auto, TVS Motor, and Hero Electric are the two-wheeler EV names to watch. None has announced sodium-ion adoption. But the commercial logic is straightforward: if Reliance can deliver cells at INR 2,500-3,300 per kilowatt-hour ($30-40/kWh) at scale, the cost reduction compared to imported lithium-ion cells would be substantial enough to restructure the economics of electric two-wheelers.

The three-wheeler segment may move first. E-rickshaw manufacturers in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar operate on razor-thin margins and source the cheapest available cells, often of questionable provenance from Chinese surplus markets. A reliable domestic sodium-ion cell at a competitive price would find buyers quickly.

Breaking the Import Chain

India spent an estimated INR 1.2 lakh crore ($14.5 billion) on crude oil imports in an average month in 2025. The EV transition is supposed to reduce that bill. But if the batteries powering Indian EVs require lithium processed in China, the dependence shifts rather than disappears.

Sodium-ion offers a different equation. The sodium comes from Gujarat's soda ash plants. The hard carbon comes from Indian biomass. The cell IP comes from Faradion's patent portfolio, now owned by Reliance. The manufacturing happens in Jamnagar. For the first time in the battery era, India has the theoretical ability to control a complete value chain from raw material to finished cell without passing through a single foreign processing node.

This is the argument that resonates in Delhi's policy corridors. The National Mission on Transformative Mobility and Battery Storage, launched by NITI Aayog in 2019, set the goal of reducing import dependence in the energy sector. The mission's original scope was lithium-focused, reflecting the state of technology at the time. Sodium-ion gives the mission a chemistry that aligns with Indian industrial strengths rather than requiring India to compete in a lithium supply chain that China has already locked down.

Reliance's total new energy investment commitment exceeds $10 billion, spanning solar manufacturing, green hydrogen, and battery storage. The sodium-ion bet is one piece of a larger energy independence architecture. But it may be the piece with the most strategic significance, because it is the one where India's natural advantages are greatest and China's head start is smallest.

The comparison with India's solar panel experience is cautionary. India set ambitious solar targets but ended up importing the vast majority of its panels from China. The domestic manufacturing push came late, and Chinese producers had already achieved cost levels that Indian factories struggled to match even with tariff protection. In sodium-ion, the manufacturing race is still early. Reliance has a window, but the window is defined by Chinese timelines, not Indian ambitions.

Whether Jamnagar delivers on its promise depends on execution: how fast the production lines reach capacity, how quickly the PLI scheme adapts, how aggressively Indian OEMs adopt a new chemistry, and whether the cost targets of $30-40 per kilowatt-hour prove achievable outside of conference presentations. The raw materials are in the ground. The IP is in the portfolio. The policy framework is on the books. What remains is the industrial equivalent of the last mile, and in India, the last mile has always been the hardest.