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Only people can win India’s battery race
This article is authored by Shilpa Kabra Maheshwari, Group CHRO, Amara Raja.
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Every industrial transformation begins with a bet on technology, capital and infrastructure. But the winners are rarely those who build the most capacity. They are the ones who develop the people who turn capacity into productivity and innovation. From semiconductors to aerospace, human capability has decided how far an industry goes.
India's battery industry is at an inflection point, moving from ambition and investment to large-scale execution. We have announced more than 30 gigafactory projects, with ambitions of over 290 GWh by 2030. But factories and technology alone do not create a competitive industry. The question is not only how much we can build, but whether we have the people and the skills to build, run and continuously improve it.
The challenge is evident. The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers estimates India will need one to two lakh EV skilled professionals by 2030, but we are adding roughly 15,000 a year against a requirement closer to 30,000. Specialised talent lags demand by 20 to 25% across battery sciences, electrochemistry, power electronics and recycling.
This is not only a skilling problem. Certifications get people to the factory gate. The hardest capabilities are built after that. Yield improvement, process discipline and troubleshooting come from repetition, and more often from failure. That knowledge is tacit and somewhere territorial that is nontransferable. It sits with the person who has seen a process fail and knows what to look for next time.
Global experience shows where this learning happens. Scrap rates of 15 to 30% are common in the first years of cell manufacturing and stay near 10% after five years. Yield outputs, material optimisations, applications and flexibility are least understood in the initial phases till the process matures. Every point of scrap is money lost, and a lesson someone must capture and pass on. The shop floor will be India's largest training cell.
That is also why the talent we already have matters. Around 35% of the ICE-trained shop floor workforce needs structured reskilling for battery, software and grid roles. But these are people who already know quality systems and what a process drifting out of control feels like. They learn a new chemistry faster than a new hire learns a factory. The opportunity is to redeploy experience India has already paid for.
This gets harder because lithium ion, sodium ion and solid-state technologies are advancing faster than curricula can follow. Anyone trained only on today's chemistry will be behind in a few years. Professionals need grounding in the fundamentals of electrochemistry, materials science and manufacturing, because fundamentals travel across chemistries in a way product training does not.
The same logic applies to AI and automation. A predictive system can flag an anomaly, but someone still has to interpret it, question the output and respond when the process changes. The faster the technology moves, the more it needs people who understand why it behaves as it does. AI raises the premium on human judgement. The additional challenge is national policy sponsorship or institutions that standardise skills the way NASSCOM has done for IT skills.
India needs a system that builds capability, converts it into expertise, and multiplies that expertise.
Workforce architecture and a pipeline around future skills: Industry, academia and government should define a common battery skills framework covering cell process engineering, electrochemistry, materials, automation, quality, BMS, safety and recycling. Map every role required and for every role: Skills required, proficiency level, scarce skills, India talent availability, salary benchmarks, transferable talent pools. It should shape curricula, apprenticeships and certification, and success must be measured by capability, not by MoUs.
Nurture expertise through apprenticeship: Structured 12-to-24-month pathways across manufacturing, quality, maintenance, process engineering and R&D can turn qualifications into expertise. Take people from adjacent industries and convert them. Then create an industry-backed battery academy where companies can actually hire the graduates.
A destination for battery talent: We compete with China, Korea, Germany and the US, and with semiconductors and aerospace, for ambitious engineers. Battery careers must offer meaningful technology, a steep learning curve and mobility across R&D, manufacturing and leadership. International exposure helps India learn from markets ahead of us.
AI should multiply expertise: Experienced engineers remain essential, but their knowledge should not stay locked in individual teams. AI-enabled knowledge systems can capture process learnings, so expertise moves from one expert to hundreds of apprentices.
Expand the talent pool: Women are still only about a tenth of the directly employed workforce in India's organised factories. This has now moved from a diversity objective to a capacity strategy. Better safety, transport, accommodation and visible career paths can change that.
The battery race cannot be won on capacity alone. The problem is that the talent ecosystem is behind the capital investment. The hardest skills aren't generic engineering skills. They're the combination of electrochemistry + manufacturing + automation + quality + safety + supply chain + commercial understanding.
The industry needs a pre-competitive talent ecosystem where companies, suppliers, OEMs, universities and government share investment in training, applied research, apprenticeships and faculty development. For companies, it also means offering problems worth solving, not just jobs.
Talent cannot sit at the end of the battery strategy. It must be built in from the start. Get that right and India will have more than factories. It will have the people capable of making them globally competitive.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Shilpa Kabra Maheshwari, Group CHRO, Amara Raja.
