What if India's electric vehicles never had to depend on a single gram of imported lithium or nickel? That is the precise question Union Coal and Mines Minister G. Kishan Reddy is now framing as a national inflection point, anchoring it to the Cabinet-approved CAPEX Support Scheme for Critical Mineral Processing driven by the Ministry of Mines on Wednesday, November 11, 2026.

The scheme India's EV battery chain has been waiting for

The CAPEX Support Scheme for Critical Mineral Processing is designed to do one thing with surgical clarity: put capital expenditure support behind domestic facilities that refine and process minerals — primarily lithium and nickel — the two materials sitting at the heart of every electric vehicle battery pack. Without a processing base at home, India's EV ambitions have rested on supply chains running through China and Australia, a vulnerability that policymakers have flagged for years. This scheme is the financial lever meant to close that gap.

Minister Reddy framed it as a deliberate strategic bet under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership — not a routine subsidy, but a structural shift in how India intends to compete in the global clean-energy economy.

From auction reform to processing incentive: the policy chain

The scheme does not arrive in isolation. The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2023, cracked open commercial auctions of critical and strategic minerals for the first time, creating a pipeline of domestically sourced raw material. The National Mineral Policy, 2019, had already set the target of reducing import dependence through exploration and downstream value addition. The CAPEX Support Scheme is now the downstream piece — turning auctioned ore into processed, battery-ready material inside India's borders.

Together, the three moves sketch a coherent arc: legislate faster access to the ground, extract it through competitive auctions, and then refine it at home with government-backed capital. The logic is industrial policy built for a world where battery supply chains are as strategically sensitive as oil fields once were.

What EV makers and battery processors stand to gain

For EV manufacturers and battery cell processors, the scheme signals that the government is willing to de-risk the capital-intensive first steps of building a refining industry from scratch. Processing critical minerals requires specialised infrastructure and carries significant upfront costs — historically the reason private capital has stayed away and import dependency has persisted.

Detailed guidelines on eligible projects, the subsidy quantum, and the selection of private players for processing facilities are yet to be announced. Watchers will also track how the scheme links with the proposed National Critical Minerals Mission and how individual states implement their end of the bargain.

India has set itself ambitious 2030 EV penetration targets. Whether domestic mineral processing can scale fast enough to actually feed those targets — that is the bet Kishan Reddy is now publicly staking his ministry on.