Visa delays for Chinese staff threaten India's battery ambitions
India's big plans for making lithium-ion batteries are hitting a snag—visa delays for Chinese engineers.
Companies like Ola and Reliance need these experts to set up and run their factories, but most only get six-month visas.
This means projects keep getting interrupted whenever workers have to leave and reapply.
Why should you care?
These visa holdups have left around 4,000-5,000 applications stuck in the system, slowing down clean energy progress just when India needs it most.
The government is trying to speed things up and might relax some rules.
But with battery demand set to jump 40 times by 2050—and $15 billion plus 100,000 jobs already lost in the electronics sector since 2020—fixing this bottleneck is key if India wants to stay in the global race for green tech and jobs.