India’s largest lithium-ion battery plant is located in which State?

Concept

For a “largest facility” question, the superlative is settled by the plant’s own rated manufacturing capacity — for a battery factory this is the installed capacity of its assembly lines, measured in gigawatt-hours (GWh) — and not by how industrialised the host State is or by which State announced a project first.

Two nearby labels are often confused with it: “first” marks the earliest plant of its kind to start up, and “largest upcoming” marks capacity that is still being built. Only a plant already operating at the highest rated capacity carries the “largest” tag.

Application

India’s largest lithium-ion battery plant is the Nexcharge facility at Prantij, near Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Nexcharge is a joint venture between Exide Industries of India and Leclanché SA of Switzerland.

The Prantij plant began mass production in May 2022 with an installed capacity of about 1.5 GWh across six fully automated module and pack assembly lines, built with roughly ₹250 crore of investment, and it supplies batteries for electric vehicles and for grid and industrial energy storage.

Cross-check

Applying the same installed-capacity test to the other States offered rules them out for this superlative:

• Andhra Pradesh — Tirupati hosts Munoth Industries’ unit, inaugurated in September 2022 with about 270 MWh of installed capacity; it is remembered as the country’s first lithium-ion cell manufacturing line rather than the one with the largest installed capacity.

• Tamil Nadu — the Krishnagiri–Hosur belt carries large electric-vehicle and cell projects, but that capacity was still being commissioned rather than already in production.

• Maharashtra — the Pune–Chakan automotive belt runs battery-pack assembly and R&D lines whose individual installed capacities stay well below the 1.5 GWh mark.

Hence the State is Gujarat.