India wants to be the alternative. The factory floor the West can trust, the manufacturing platform that rises as China hardens, the industrial power that finally gives substance to all those slogans about sovereignty, scale and strategic autonomy. On paper, the ambition is grand. In reality, it runs into a brutal fact: China still controls the machinery, the know-how, the chemistry, the supply chains and, perhaps most importantly, the time. The case of Reliance Industries says a great deal. The group set out to build one of India’s most ambitious battery plants, a project meant to place the country inside the future rather than at its margins. Equipment was sourced, teams were dispatched, and the industrial logic seemed clear. Then Beijing tightened export controls on critical technologies and equipment for battery manufacturing. The machines reached Jamnagar. The factory rose. But the key remained elsewhere.
That is the problem in its purest form. India can import hardware. It can pour concrete, mobilise capital, assemble teams and announce capacity. What it still cannot do, at least not yet and not at scale, is replicate the ecosystem that made China dominant in the first place. Manufacturing in advanced sectors is not a warehouse full of imported tools. It is a chain of tacit knowledge, supplier depth, process discipline, materials science, trained engineers and accumulated mistakes. China has spent years building that advantage. India is trying to buy time against it. This is why the battery story matters beyond batteries. It reveals the structural contradiction at the heart of India’s industrial strategy. New Delhi wants strategic autonomy while remaining deeply dependent on the very country it is trying to hedge against. Batteries, electronics, rare earths, semiconductors, critical minerals, components, industrial tooling: in each case, China sits somewhere vital in the chain, sometimes at the start, sometimes in the middle, often everywhere at once.
The figures are not flattering. Manufacturing’s share of India’s GDP has not risen with the rhetoric. It has fallen from 17% in 2010 to 13% in 2024. That alone should temper the triumphalism. “Make in India” has attracted investment, yes. It has created momentum, yes. But it has not yet delivered the industrial transformation India needs. The country has proved it can assemble. It has yet to prove, in enough sectors, that it can master the deeper layers of production. That distinction is essential. India now assembles a meaningful share of global iPhones. This is real progress. But assembly is not sovereignty. The higher-value components, the specialist equipment, the chemistry, the upstream control of critical inputs, all too often remain outside India’s grasp and, frequently, inside China’s orbit. The façade of diversification can look impressive right up until one asks who still owns the technology.
The battery sector illustrates this perfectly. India speaks of vast planned capacity. Yet actual operating capacity remains derisory compared with the headline ambitions. Announced numbers suggest scale; operational reality suggests dependence. That gap is not an accounting detail. It is the whole story. You do not become an industrial power by announcing gigawatt-hours. You become one when production works, yields improve, supply chains stabilise, and costs fall without foreign crutches. And the timing could hardly be worse. India is trying to build these industries in a world that is no longer open, benign or patient. The old model of export-led industrialisation flourished in a period of expanding trade, relatively permissive geopolitics and global supply chains built for efficiency above all else. That world is fading. What replaces it is harder, more political and more fragmented. Technology is weaponised. Supply chains are strategic assets. Export controls are instruments of statecraft. China, far from allowing rivals to climb quietly, is defending its commanding heights with increasing discipline.
From Beijing’s perspective, the logic is straightforward. Why train the next competitor? Why transfer the crown jewels of battery manufacturing, rare-earth processing or advanced clean-tech production to a country edging closer to Washington on trade, defence and technology? China is willing to sell products, sometimes even components, but is much less willing to surrender the knowledge that would allow India to break free. That is the real asymmetry: access to goods, but not to mastery. Indian firms are therefore left improvising. Some look to Korea or Japan, but those alternatives are costlier and slower. Some try hybrid arrangements, routing inputs through third countries. Some negotiate with smaller Chinese players, often at the expense of confidence in quality. Some simply delay. None of these routes is painless. All of them carry a cost in terms of time, margin, or strategic clarity. This is already visible across sectors. Tata’s semiconductor ambitions remain exposed to external dependencies in equipment and materials. JSW’s plans have been complicated by the fragility of technology partnerships. Ola has privately warned that scaling local cell manufacturing without proven technology risks magnifying losses. Reliance itself continues building, because stopping would be an admission that the dream has stalled. Yet building is not the same as winning.
India’s response has become more pragmatic, and perhaps necessarily so. Official suspicion towards Chinese capital has not disappeared, but it has softened selectively where industrial necessity demands it. This is not ideology giving way to friendship. It is strategy-bending before physics. If India wants to accelerate industrial capacity, it cannot fully exclude the one country that dominates the supply of machinery, components and process expertise. Hence, the quieter approvals, the narrower partnerships, the carefully structured deals. The posture is no longer one of absolute refusal. It is one of controlled dependence. That may be the most honest description of the current moment. India is not decoupling from China. It is trying to reduce vulnerability while still borrowing from the system it mistrusts. It wants the benefits of Chinese industrial depth without the strategic submission that comes with it. That is a rational ambition. It is also a difficult one.
The bigger risk is that India ends up trapped in the middle: too exposed to Chinese supply chains to claim autonomy, too suspicious of China to secure full technological transfer, too late to enjoy the easy globalisation that lifted earlier Asian powers, yet not fast enough to build complete domestic ecosystems before the geopolitical window narrows further. None of this means India will fail. It means the path will be longer, more expensive and far more contested than the slogans suggest. India has scale, political will, domestic demand and increasingly serious corporate champions. Those are not trivial assets. But scale alone does not close a technology gap. Capital alone does not manufacture competence. And ambition alone does not dissolve dependency. For now, the uncomfortable truth is this: India wants to build the industries of the future, but China still controls too many of the doors. The machines may be in Gujarat. The leverage, still, is in Beijing.