EV Localisation Must Go Beyond Assembly, Says Times of India

India's electric vehicle policy has spent a decade chasing assembly plants. The Times of India argues that's no longer enough. In a piece published on 14 September 2026, the paper makes the case that the country must move from "Make in India" to "Engineer in India" if it wants a real EV supply chain.

The distinction matters. Assembly is the easy part. Bolting together imported cells, motors and controllers creates jobs on a factory floor, but it leaves the hard work, cell chemistry, motor design, power electronics, software, in the hands of suppliers abroad. The Times of India says that gap is the difference between a manufacturing address and an engineering base.

Why assembly alone won't cut it

Localisation targets in India have often been measured by how much of a vehicle is screwed together inside the country. That metric flatters the numbers. A pack assembled in Pune from cells shipped in from China still counts as local value addition on paper. It doesn't build the skills, patents or supplier depth that make an industry resilient.

The paper points to the next layer: designing battery management systems, developing rare-earth-free motors, writing the firmware that runs a vehicle. Those are the capabilities that stay when a company shifts a plant. They're also the ones that create higher-wage engineering jobs, not just line-worker roles.

There's a policy angle too. India's production-linked incentive schemes have drawn investment into assembly and cell manufacturing. The question the Times of India raises is whether the next round of support should target design and R&D, not just factory capacity. Without that, the country risks becoming a large workshop for other people's technology.

The skills gap is real

Engineering talent is not the bottleneck in the way it's often described. India produces plenty of engineers. The problem is that few of them get to work on cutting-edge EV systems because the design work happens elsewhere. Companies that do set up R&D centres here find it easier to hire than to retain, as global firms compete for the same people.

The paper doesn't offer a single fix. It suggests a mix: stronger industry-academia links, targeted funding for component design, and procurement rules that reward deeper local engineering rather than just final assembly. None of that is quick. All of it is slower than inaugurating a plant.

That's the uncomfortable part of the argument. Assembly plants make for good ribbon-cutting photos. Engineering capability doesn't. It shows up in patents, in supplier ecosystems, in the ability to redesign a battery pack when cell prices move. Those things take years and don't fit a press release.

The Times of India's headline puts it plainly: localisation must go beyond assembly. The rest of the piece is a reminder that the hard part of an EV industry isn't the factory floor. It's the drawing board.