This is the fourth and final part of a series focusing on why India faced gas and oil shortages almost immediately as the US-Israel war on Iran began, leading to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here. Between March and July 2022, India’s Ministry of Heavy Industries was briefly ecstatic.In October 2021, it had unveiled its PLI (Production-Linked Incentive) scheme for developing rechargeable batteries in India. It was a moment laced with potential. Between rising EV sales and India’s transmission grid needing to store surplus power, India’s need for advanced chemical cell (ACC) batteries was rising. Indigenously-developed batteries would not only reduce India’s dependence on China, they could help India become a global supplier of these batteries. Commenting on the scheme, Mahendra Nath Pandey, the Union cabinet minister for heavy industries at the time, said as much. “Today big companies are investing in electric vehicle manufacturing in India and are interested to join us,” says a PIB release quoting him. “We should give them more encouragement and keep trying to make India a manufacturing hub.”For that to happen, though, a lot hinged on the government. While developing the PLI scheme, the Modi government had junked India’s previous industrial policy and embraced a new approach of “national champions”. In each sector, as South Korea did with the chaebols, it wanted to groom no more than three or four firms. Between the scale of India’s market and lowered market fragmentation, it said, these firms would find it easier to grow into a world-beating scale.The claim seemed debatable. Over the last two decades, the supply chain for renewable equipment (like solar panels and batteries) has evolved into a form where global manufacturers have come to focus on one or two steps in the manufacturing process (polysilicon, ingot, wafer, cell and solar panel), amassing scale and technical expertise within these. The Modi government, however, wanted chosen firms to straddle the entire manufacturing process, a decision which called for both deep pockets and wider technological knowhow.The government’s plan to choose “national champions” felt tricky as well. Even experienced venture capitalists struggle to spot the winners of tomorrow. And so, could the NDA’s ministers and bureaucrats do a better job?Nonetheless, the PLI was a consequential affair. “In solar, we were too late,” a Pune-based ACC battery expert had told me in 2022. “That was not the case with battery storage. The global race for advanced battery manufacturing was just starting to take off.” And so, firms and sector observers waited to hear about the winners.Rajesh Exports, Hyundai Global MotorsWhen it came, the final list was jaw-dropping.Amongst the 10 companies which applied were Exide and Amara Raja, both already working on ACC batteries. Neither, however, made the cut. Instead, Reliance New Energy Solar, Ola Electric Mobility, Rajesh Exports and Hyundai Global Motors did.The first three were new to batteries. Ola hailed from ride-sharing. Reliance, from petrochemicals and telecom. As for Rajesh Exports, it is the gold-refining firm currently in the news for inflating its revenues by Rs 15 lakh crore. Hyundai Global Motors was, perhaps, the only understandable choice.Or so observers thought. That July, though, Hyundai Motor Company of South Korea released a statement saying: “Hyundai Motor Company and HMIL urges the general public, traders, business associates and all government and non-government bodies to proceed with caution while dealing with Hyundai Global Motors Co. Limited, South Korea as they are not related to our company.” Someone had created a URL (www.hgm.co.kr, now defunct), passed themselves off as a part of Hyundai, and successfully bluffed their way through the PLI selection process, even bagging 20 GWh of the scheme’s targeted capacity of 50 GWh.No explanations emerged from the government. It just retooled its press statements to say PLI support would go to three firms. India’s newsrooms too relayed this shift to readers instead of asking further questions. Thereafter, half of the capacity allotted to Hyundai Global Motors was awarded to another Reliance subsidiary: Reliance New Energy Battery.How have these firms fared? As recently as October 2025, Rajesh Exports was still struggling with land acquisition. Ola and Reliance were marooned because their business model was predicated on the arrival of manufacturing equipment from China — a novel problem for a scheme meant to rid India of its dependence on China. In all, no more than 1.4 GW of the targeted 50GW had come up.Creating policy for technological self-sufficiencyWhen it came to power in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government faced a large question. The global energy transition was underway but most of its raw materials, technologies and equipment were produced by one country — China. Like other governments, the government too had to decide how to respond to Chinese hegemony in these sectors.Should it, like Pakistan, decarbonise cheaply, but end up with a dependence on China? Or should it try and develop its own competencies? The latter choice, however, was a hard decision to execute. China, after all, has invested decades and trillions in its renewable energy sector. Catching up would call for immaculate execution.In 2020, with the PLI scheme, the Modi government opted for the second option.Deciding it would take too long to address the root causes of India’s manufacturing uncompetitiveness, PLI was designed around five pillars: a disability cost India would pay manufacturers to offset their higher costs given India’s lack of manufacturing competitiveness, a focus on creating a few champions in each sector where India wants competitive advantage, atmanirbharta, or maximal localisation in each value chain to reduce dependence on other countries, import barriers to give these champions a temporary respite from global competitors, and, given the NDA’s assumption that technologies can be bought, low investments in R&D.Six years down the line, this mix of industrial policy measures has reaped subpar results in not just ACC batteries but also solar panels. In the latter too, a fraction of targeted manufacturing capacity has come up.The reasons extend beyond the selection of firms.1) For India to indigenously develop renewable energy technologies, it needed R&D. However, the NDA’s parameters for choosing national militated against fundamental R&D. One such parameter was speed — or ‘time to production’. “Speed means I cannot pick up long-duration research on alternatives,” an executive at Ola Mobility Institute, Ola’s policy thinktank, had told me in 2022. “I can only work on existing technologies that can be quickly brought to market. This is very different from the CSIR type of fundamental research.” And yet, as he said, creating new battery technology will take years. When the Modi government insisted on a quick rollout, firms working with mature technologies like Lithium Ion trumped firms developing alternatives. 2) Budgetary allocations were low as well. The allocation for the solar PLI was Rs 4,500 crore — a second tranche adds another Rs 19,500 crore — all to be paid out over five years of production. That sum, just Rs 24,000 crore, was to help India set up 39 GW of module manufacturing capacity. This scale is too low for India to compete with Chinese firms globally. By the end of 2026, for instance, China’s Longi Green Energy aims to have a cell manufacturing capacity of 100 GW and a 150 GW capacity in photovoltaic modules. Add other Chinese manufacturers to the mix and the country’s module manufacturing scale is expected to touch 1,000 GW by the end of this year.Why were allocations low? One explanation lay, as the second part in this series said, in the NDA’s simultaneous splurge on imported fossil fuels. Another had to do with its decision, after pressure from bodies like the RSS-affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch, to splinter the PLI budget — Rs 1.97 lakh crore — across 14 sectors, including old ones like textiles. With that, the idea of investing in emergent sectors took a beating. 3) Frugal engineering — and targeted research — could still have helped firms rise in these emerging sectors. R&D by India’s pharma sector is an instance. This prospect, however, was undone by two decisions from the Modi government.One, it told PLI winners to straddle entire value chains. Instead, as Pranay Kotasthane, who researches high-tech geopolitics at Bangalore’s Takshashila Institute, said: it should have taken a two-pronged measure. In sectors where the country is entirely reliant on China, it needed to find alternatives to either the technology or find fresh suppliers. Second, it should have focused on segments it could dominate. “Ninety percent of all chips made in the world have some design work done in India. We should double down on the incentives there,” he had said. That is the tack taken by other governments. South Korea, for instance, focused on solid-state batteries — an alternative to Lithium Ion batteries.Thereafter, compounding matters, NDA chose national champions poorly. In solar too, as with ACC batteries, two of the winners were Reliance and Adani. “Adani is now active in battery, cell, solar module, gas, LNG, city gas, thermal, solar, hydrogen, ports and refineries,” said a RE industry veteran in Hyderabad. “Why are we not supporting new companies in each of these verticals?”With PLI, the government pays firms only once they start production. At one level, this is smart calculation. Since the subsidy is not front-loaded, the government doesn’t lose money if a firm fails to go to market. These savings, however, are dwarfed by the opportunity cost of failing to crack these emerging sectors — be it the rise and persistence of import dependence in RE or the loss of an export engine.The Wire asked MNRE to explain these choices. It also asked whether the three firms chosen for the PLI scheme have filed any patents so far. This article will be updated when it responds. None of these issues, however, has received a substantive discussion in Indian media.Doomsday predictions from the naysayersOn June 29, Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, published a celebratory op-ed in the Economic Times and followed it up with an equally celebratory tweet. “Even as the world faced one of the worst energy crises and disrupted supply chains, India under the leadership of PM Sh @narendramodi Ji effectively shielded the energy consumers from any negative impact,” he wrote. “Despite doomsday predictions by the naysayers, our people, particularly those on the margins, were insulated and protected.”This was a misrepresentation. As the first report in this series said, people, particularly those on the margins, were the worst-affected by the crisis. Closing LPG supplies to unregistered and commercial users, the NDA protected only registered users. With that, as firms supplying LPG to unregistered users began buying the gas from open markets, migrant workers and others found themselves paying close to global rates for LPG. Lakhs, unable to afford those prices, fell back on firewood. Clusters like Morbi shuttered. Their workers returned home. One could go on. In his tweet, Puri also alluded to “the widening of (India’s) crude basket from 27 countries to 41, the doubling of our import terminals, and the pipelines and reserves built across a decade,” calling them “the very reason the lights stayed on”.This is a misrepresentation as well. Under pressure from the US, NDA curbed oil buys from Iran and Russia. It did not create adequate strategic petroleum reserves; went slow on coal gasification; and, given state elections, didn’t use price hikes to moderate demand for fertiliser and fossil fuels once the energy shock began. In addition, over a longer span of time, the NDA has doubled down on fossil fuels imports while under-investing in renewables; pushed firms like Tellurian; followed policies which, bucking the global trend, saw solar panel and tariffs get costlier in India; and chose firms like Rajesh Exports for PLI despite the huge opportunity costs of missing the renewable energy manufacturing bus. The country did stave off an economic collapse, of course, but its resilience lay elsewhere. The powergrid, running mainly on renewables and coal, stayed unaffected.Within oil and gas, much of the shock was absorbed by state-owned oilcos, not private refineries. Nayara, for instance, closed for maintenance in the middle of the Iran War. It made one wonder how the crisis would have unfolded had the NDA privatised HPCL and BPCL in 2020.Consumers coped with the LPG shortfall by falling back on alternatives like induction stoves or firewood. The informal economy stepped in too. Even as the NDA turned its back on unregistered users, it began matching available supply to demand.That said, the Iran war will eventually end. The longer-term costs of the Modi government’s mismanagement in energy will be with us for far longer – be it the expensive imported fuels we have to pay for; the mounting costs of solar panels and tariffs; the country’s failure to emerge as a producer of RE technologies or equipment; slower decarbonisation and, ergo, extended dependence on fossil fuels exporting countries and companies. As things stand, India’s energy beat is a synecdoche. The mess one sees here is far from unique. Elsewhere in India too, despite the complexity hardcoded into each sector, the NDA has moved unmindfully, often self-servingly. In defence, overriding concerns, it has created a private-sector led military industrial complex. Pushing chosen businesses like Adani, it has turned capital-state relations in India into something predatory. Even such decisions, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. Look beyond the economy at society itself – health, education, ecology, etc – and the list of costs will lengthen further. India needs to reckon with these costs.M. Rajshekhar is an independent reporter who writes on energy, climate change and oligarchy. He is also the author of Despite The State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope.