Rechargion builds sodium-ion battery cells from materials India already has
The Pune-based CSIR-NCL spin-off has developed sodium-ion cells using its own hard carbon and electrode materials and has put them through independent safety testing at ARAI.
India's battery problem is not demand. It is that almost every lithium cell installed here arrives from somewhere else, along with the cathode, the anode and the electrolyte inside it. The raw materials are concentrated in a handful of countries, none of them this one, and the price is set elsewhere.
Sodium is the obvious hedge. It sits directly below lithium in the periodic table and behaves similarly enough to run a battery on; it is abundant, and the other materials a sodium-ion cell needs are cheap and available domestically. The catch has always been performance: sodium ions are larger and heavier, so the cells hold less energy for their weight.
works on that trade-off. Founded in Pune in 2021 by Vilas Shelke and Manjusha Shelke, the latter a chief scientist at CSIR's National Chemical Laboratory, the company is officially based on the work from Shelke’s research group.
Hard carbon and a polymer anode
The company's work centers on the materials rather than the cell design. It has patented hard carbon, the anode material that sodium ions move in and out of, along with proprietary electrode materials and sodium compounds. It also uses a polymer as an anode material, which it describes as the change that makes the cells commercially viable.
The commercial case is cost and supply. All the raw materials are domestically available and considerably cheaper than lithium equivalents, and the cells do not use cobalt or nickel. In 2023, the company put the projected cost at Rs 11 to 12 per watt-hour with a battery life of 12 to 15 years.
Safety is the other argument, and sodium-ion chemistry has a genuine advantage there. A sodium cell can be discharged to zero volts for transport without damage, which a lithium cell cannot, and the chemistry is less prone to thermal runaway.
Applications the company has demonstrated run from solar storage, shown to a United Nations Industrial Development Organisation team, to a sodium-ion-powered bicycle and a drone application. It has built what it describes as India's first dedicated sodium-ion cell fabrication pilot plant.
Two months of testing at ARAI
In August 2025, the Automotive Research Association of India completed a two-month evaluation of Rechargion's cells at its Chakan centre, testing them under the IEC 62660 protocol. The tests covered vibration, mechanical shock, crushing, high-temperature endurance, short circuit, overcharge and forced discharge.
The validation report was handed to the founders by ARAI's director. The company says this makes it the first in India to achieve IEC 62660 compliance for sodium-ion batteries. Independent testing by a national homologation body is a stronger form of evidence than most battery claims rest on.
Its backing has come through government and development channels rather than venture capital: the Ministry of Heavy Industries through the ARAI-AMTIF accelerator, UNIDO, the US-India Science and Technology Endowment Fund, Social Alpha, and the Venture Center at NCL. No funding amount has been disclosed.
The company is setting up a facility to produce 500 cells a day, which is a step towards manufacturing. No customer, order or revenue figure is public.
Five hundred cells a day is a small number against the scale Indian demand implies, but the harder problem in cell manufacturing is consistency rather than volume, and that is what a pilot line establishes.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)