Featured image credit: Image: Daniel Capilla via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Source

By Piyush P. Yadav

India sold about 14 lakh electric two-wheelers in FY2026 and more than 30,000 electric cars a month through the summer of 2026. Every one of those vehicles carries a lithium-ion pack that will, in five to ten years, reach the end of its useful life. NITI Aayog projects roughly 128 GWh of cumulative recyclable battery volume in India by 2030, nearly half of it from EVs. What happens to those packs is governed by the Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022, and the first hard compliance year for EV battery producers is the one that started on 1 April 2026.

This explainer sets out what the rules require of manufacturers, what they require of you as an owner, what the FY2026-27 targets actually say, who the licensed recyclers are and how much capacity they have, what a dead battery is worth, and where the system is still thin. It complements our earlier piece on the Battery Pack Aadhaar identification system, which is the tracking layer that makes the recycling rules enforceable.

The Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022 in brief

Notified on 22 August 2022 by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the rules replaced the Batteries (Management and Handling) Rules of 2001, which had been written for lead-acid batteries and said nothing useful about lithium. The 2022 rules cover four categories: portable, automotive (lead-acid starter batteries), industrial, and electric vehicle batteries. They have been amended three times since, in 2023, 2024 and February 2025, and in February 2026 the Central Pollution Control Board moved the battery EPR portal onto a unified single sign-on system.

The core mechanism is Extended Producer Responsibility. Anyone who places a battery on the Indian market, whether a cell maker, a pack assembler, a vehicle manufacturer or an importer, must register on the CPCB portal and is responsible for collecting and recycling a specified share of what they sold, either directly or by buying EPR certificates from registered recyclers who have done the work.

The targets: collection, recovery and recycled content

There are three separate obligations, and they are frequently confused with one another.

Obligation Who it applies to FY2024-25 FY2025-26 FY2026-27 FY2027-28 onward
Collection (EV batteries) Producers Register and report Register and report 70% of quantity sold in FY2022-23 70% of quantity sold four years earlier, annually
Material recovery (EV and portable) Recyclers 70% by weight 80% by weight 90% by weight 90% by weight
Recycled content in new batteries Producers None None None 5% from FY2027-28, 20% from FY2030-31

The collection target is set against sales four years earlier because that is roughly when the batteries reach end of life. So in the current year, FY2026-27, an EV maker must collect and recycle a volume equal to 70 per cent of the batteries it sold in FY2022-23. For a company like Ola Electric or Ather, whose FY2022-23 sales were a fraction of today’s, that is a manageable number. The obligation grows every year as the four-year-lagged base rises, and from FY2028-29 the lag becomes a rolling annual formula.

The recovery target applies to the recycler, not the producer: from this financial year a registered lithium-ion recycler must recover at least 90 per cent of the battery’s weight as usable material. That is a high bar internationally and it effectively rules out pyrometallurgy (smelting), which loses lithium. Every major Indian recycler uses hydrometallurgy, which dissolves the crushed “black mass” in acid and precipitates the metals out one by one at 90 to 97 per cent recovery.

Who the recyclers are and how much they can process

India’s licensed lithium-ion recycling capacity is around 60,000 tonnes a year, equivalent to roughly 2 GWh of operational processing, against a 2030 requirement of about 80 GWh. The gap is a forty-fold scale-up in four years. The table below lists the largest CPCB-registered operators and their stated capacities; individual figures change often and should be treated as indicative.

Recycler Location Current capacity (tonnes per year) Announced target Process
Lohum Cleantech Greater Noida, UP 20,000 50,000 by 2026 Hydrometallurgy, 95%+ recovery claimed
Rubamin Vadodara, Gujarat 10,000 30,000 Hydrometallurgy
SungEel HiTech India Haryana About 10,000 Not stated Hydrometallurgy
Attero Recycling Roorkee, Uttarakhand 4,000 19,500 Hydrometallurgy
LICO Materials Bengaluru 3,000 10,000 planned Hydrometallurgy
ACE Green Recycling Gujarat Under construction 10,000 (LFP-specific) Low-temperature hydrometallurgy
Tata Chemicals Mumbai Not disclosed Not disclosed Cathode material recovery since 2019

The chemistry mix matters for what recycling is worth. NMC packs, used in most Indian electric scooters and in cars like the Mahindra BE 6, contain nickel and cobalt that pay for the recycling. LFP packs, used in Tata’s cars, the Toyota Urban Cruiser Ebella and the Maruti e Vitara, contain no cobalt or nickel, so the only valuable recoverable metal is lithium, at about 10 per cent of the black mass by weight. That is why ACE Green’s LFP-specific plant is significant: it is designed to be economic on lithium alone. Our earlier report on sodium-ion cells reaching TRL 7 flagged that sodium-ion packs, if they arrive at scale, will have even lower recovery value.

What the rules mean for an EV owner

You are not the producer and you carry no EPR obligation. But the rules do prescribe how a dead pack must leave your hands, and they close the informal route that most Indians use for lead-acid batteries.

  • Return it to the dealer or OEM service centre. The manufacturer’s collection network is legally obliged to accept it. This is the route most scooter owners will use at the point of a battery replacement or a scrappage.
  • Trade it in. When you exchange a scooter or car, the dealer takes the old battery into the OEM’s EPR stream.
  • Hand it to a CPCB-registered recycler directly. Lohum, Attero and others accept packs from individuals and fleet operators, and some pay for them.
  • Do not sell it to a scrap dealer. Informal dismantling of lithium packs is both illegal under the rules and dangerous; thermal runaway in a scrapyard is a fire nobody can put out.

Before any of that becomes relevant, most owners will face the question of when a battery is actually dead. The industry threshold is 70 to 80 per cent of original capacity, and we have set out what the real-world data says on EV battery degradation and state of health in India. A pack at 70 per cent is not scrap; it is a candidate for a second life in stationary storage, which is where a growing share of Indian recyclers’ revenue comes from.

What a dead battery is worth

There is no published price list, but recyclers price packs on chemistry, state of health and weight. Indicative figures from the trade: an NMC scooter pack of 2 to 3 kWh in reasonable condition fetches Rs 1,500 to 4,000 from a registered recycler; an LFP pack of the same size less. A car pack of 40 to 60 kWh with good state of health can be worth Rs 30,000 to 80,000 as a second-life unit, and much less as black mass. The value of the EPR certificate generated when the pack is recycled accrues to the recycler, who sells it to producers that need to meet their collection target; that certificate market is where the real money in the system now flows.

Penalties: Rs 2,400 per kg for lithium non-compliance

The CPCB’s environmental compensation guidelines of 10 September 2024 put a price on missing targets. For lithium-based batteries the compensation is Rs 2,400 per kg of shortfall, against Rs 18 per kg for lead-acid. Procedural violations, such as failing to file returns, attract escalating fines of Rs 20,000, Rs 40,000 and Rs 80,000 for the first, second and third defaults. Unpaid compensation accrues interest at 12 per cent a year for the first month and 24 per cent up to three months, after which the CPCB can order closure and prosecute under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

At Rs 2,400 per kg, a producer that falls 10 tonnes short of its collection target owes Rs 2.4 crore. That is a strong enough number to make buying EPR certificates from recyclers the cheaper option, which is precisely the point.

Government support and the supply-chain argument

The Union Budget 2025-26 exempted waste lithium-ion batteries, cobalt powder, lead, zinc and twelve critical minerals from basic customs duty, which makes it viable to import black mass for processing in India. The Ministry of Mines has a Rs 1,500 crore incentive scheme for recyclers under the National Critical Mineral Mission. The strategic logic is straightforward: India imports close to 100 per cent of its lithium-ion cells and the Reasi lithium deposit in Jammu and Kashmir is eight to ten years from production. Recycling the current 60,000-tonne capacity could yield about 3,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year, enough for around 1 lakh EVs, and that number scales with capacity.

Between October 2022 and the duty exemption, India exported an estimated 350 tonnes of cobalt, 72 tonnes of lithium and 215 tonnes of nickel as black mass because domestic refining capacity did not exist. Reversing that outflow is the policy goal, and it connects directly to the cell-manufacturing push we track in our lithium cell manufacturing scorecard: domestic cells need domestic cathode material, and recycled material is the only near-term Indian source of it.

Where the system is still thin

Four gaps stand out. Reverse logistics for lithium packs from tier-3 towns barely exists; a dead scooter battery in Bhagalpur has no obvious legal destination. The recycled-content mandate of 5 per cent from FY2027-28 assumes cathode-grade recycled material will be available in India at scale, which it is not yet. The workforce is small: about 5,000 trained professionals against a 2030 need of 25,000 or more. And the EPR certificate market is opaque, with no published clearing price, which makes it hard for smaller producers to plan.

None of these is a reason to delay buying an EV. The rules, the recyclers and the tracking system exist, and the FY2026-27 targets are the first real test of whether they work at volume. We will report on the CPCB’s compliance data when it is published.

Sources & Further Reading

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the EV battery recycling targets in India for 2026-27?

Under the Battery Waste Management Rules 2022, producers must collect and recycle 70 per cent of the EV battery volume they sold in FY2022-23, and registered recyclers must recover at least 90 per cent of battery weight as usable material. Recycled content of 5 per cent in new batteries becomes mandatory from FY2027-28.

What should I do with a dead electric scooter battery?

Return it to the dealer or manufacturer’s service centre, trade it in when exchanging the vehicle, or hand it to a CPCB-registered recycler such as Lohum or Attero. Selling lithium packs to scrap dealers is not permitted under the rules.

How much lithium-ion recycling capacity does India have?

Roughly 60,000 tonnes per year across registered recyclers, equivalent to about 2 GWh. Lohum has the largest single capacity at 20,000 tonnes. India needs around 80 GWh of recycling capacity by 2030.

What is the penalty for not meeting battery EPR targets?

The CPCB’s September 2024 guidelines set environmental compensation at Rs 2,400 per kg for lithium-based batteries, plus escalating fines of Rs 20,000, Rs 40,000 and Rs 80,000 for procedural defaults and interest of 12 to 24 per cent on unpaid amounts.