The EU's Battery Passport was built to track a battery's carbon footprint and recycled content. India is building its own version for a different reason: after a string of electric two-wheelers caught fire in 2022 and a power bank set off a mid-flight scare on an IndiGo aircraft in October 2025, the missing piece in both cases turned out to be the same thing — nobody could verify what was actually inside the battery, or whether it had been tested at all. A passport built for recycling and a registry built for safety turn out to need almost identical data, and India currently has five separate systems collecting pieces of it without any of them talking to each other.
The Battery Passport Was Built for Recycling. Now It's Also the Fix for Battery Fires.
What the EU Battery Passport actually requires
The EU's Battery Regulation (2023/1542) makes a digital Battery Passport mandatory from 18 February 2027 for electric-vehicle batteries, industrial batteries above 2 kWh, and light-means-of-transport (LMT) batteries — e-bikes and similar. Each battery gets a unique identifier, accessible via QR code, linked to a structured record. For EV batteries specifically, the passport carries roughly 80 mandatory data points grouped into seven clusters: general battery and manufacturer information; compliance and labelling; carbon footprint; supply-chain due diligence; materials and composition; circularity and resource efficiency; and performance and durability. The carbon-footprint declaration alone has to cover four separate lifecycle stages — raw-material acquisition, manufacturing, distribution, and end-of-life/recycling — and must be third-party verified and publicly accessible. Access to the underlying data is tiered: the general public, regulators, and battery service/end-of-life processors each get different read-and-write permissions.
The regulation's stated purpose is circularity: knowing a battery's exact chemistry and history makes it possible to recycle it properly, verify recycled-content claims, and hold manufacturers to their carbon-footprint declarations. Safety is not the passport's design brief. But the same underlying data — chemistry, cell age, manufacturing origin, whether it has passed the relevant safety tests — turns out to be exactly what two separate, very live Indian safety problems are missing.
India's own Battery Passport, and why it exists for a different reason
Checking directly against PIB rather than relying on secondary aggregation turned up a clearer, better-dated origin story than this piece's first pass had, and a different lead ministry. The initiative traces to a PIB-recorded announcement at Battery Summit 2025 on 28 May 2025: Union Minister of State Dr Jitendra Singh announced the launch of a "Battery Aadhaar Initiative" under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), describing it as a "game changer" that would assign each battery pack a unique digital identity tracking manufacturing origin, chemistry, safety certifications, lifecycle performance, thermal events, and end-of-life status — explicitly framed, in the same release, as a tool to curb counterfeit batteries and support recycling. NITI Aayog does not appear as the lead body in this or any subsequent primary document this piece located; that attribution in this piece's first pass traced to secondary aggregators, not to PIB.
DST's initiative got a concrete technical form roughly eight months later. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways published draft Guidelines for Implementation of a Battery Pack Aadhaar System around 3-4 January 2026, introducing a 21-character Battery Pack Aadhaar Number (BPAN) that every battery producer or importer would be required to assign to each battery placed in the market or put to self-use. The number must be displayed in a position "clearly visible and accessible" and chosen so it "cannot be destroyed or deteriorate." BPAN stores both static data (manufacturer identifier, battery descriptor, material composition, carbon footprint) and Battery Dynamic Data updated through the battery's life; a battery that is recycled or repurposed gets issued a new BPAN rather than retaining the old one. Scope, per the draft, covers EV batteries for L-category (two- and three-wheeler), M- and N-category (passenger and commercial) vehicles, and industrial batteries above 2 kWh — explicitly matching the EU's own 2 kWh threshold — while excluding starting/lighting/ignition batteries and small portable batteries; EV batteries are prioritised first given they account for 80-90% of India's total lithium-ion battery demand. The draft recommends the same failure mode this piece's first pass flagged — packs built from cells of mismatched manufacturing years — become checkable via this record, though "same-year cells" is this piece's own restatement of the draft's traceability goal rather than a line quoted directly from the guideline.
The institutional detail that matters most for this piece's argument is where MoRTH proposes to route BPAN for finalisation: through the Automotive Industry Standard (AIS) process, under the Automotive Industry Standards Committee (AISC) — the exact same standardisation body that produced AIS-156's thermal-runaway rules after the 2022 fire crisis. If that routing holds, BPAN would not be a sixth registry sitting apart from AIS-156; it would go through the same committee, with battery manufacturers, EV makers, recyclers, testing agencies, and regulators all named as expected AISC participants. That is a real, structural point of convergence this piece's first pass did not have, sitting alongside the design-level convergence (same underlying data serving both circularity and safety) argued throughout this piece.
The 2022 crisis this responds to was serious enough to force a mid-cycle regulatory rewrite. Over two dozen electric two-wheelers caught fire in March-April 2022 alone — Ola Electric, Okinawa, and Pure EV among the named manufacturers — including a fire in Vellore that killed two people, and roughly 7,000 units were voluntarily recalled. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways convened an expert committee (drawing on ARCI and IISc) that produced Amendment 3 to AIS-156, India's battery-safety type-approval standard, rolled out in two phases from December 2022 and March 2023, mandating thermal-runaway propagation testing — verifying that a single cell's failure cannot cascade through the rest of the pack — plus randomised post-production quality checks.
The registration layer already built for a different purpose: battery waste
Separately from any passport, India already operates a mandatory battery registration system, under the Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022 (BWMR), amended in 2025. Every producer, importer, refurbisher, and recycler dealing in batteries must register on a centralised CPCB portal; recyclers and refurbishers additionally register with their state pollution control board through the same portal. The stated purpose is Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — producers carry perpetual responsibility for their batteries' end-of-life collection and recycling, and the registry exists to match EPR credits against batteries actually collected and processed. As part of this, every battery pack placed on the Indian market is required to carry a unique barcode or QR code linked to this national registry, enabling lifecycle tracking from manufacture or import through to collection and recycling.
That is, functionally, a large fraction of a battery passport already running in production — just built for waste accountability rather than for safety or carbon reporting, and not (on the evidence this piece found) integrated with the DST/MoRTH Battery Aadhaar initiative, BIS's product-safety certification, or PESO's transport-and-storage licensing.
Why "safe transport" is the other half of this story
The transport-safety case for the same kind of verifiable record is not theoretical, and not limited to two-wheelers. On 19 October 2025, a power bank caused a fire incident on IndiGo flight 6E 2107; the DGCA responded with a binding safety advisory on 11 November 2025 requiring power banks to travel in cabin baggage only, capping freely carried units at 100 Wh, and limiting passengers to two spare power banks. That is a narrow, aviation-specific rule, but it is a direct response to the same underlying problem the battery passport is meant to solve: nobody at the point of carriage can verify a power bank's actual capacity, cell quality, or whether it has been tested at all.
The same problem exists at much larger scale in freight. Globally, lithium-ion battery shipment volumes were roughly six times higher in 2025 than five years earlier, according to Allianz's marine-risk reporting, with demand expected to double again by 2030. Misdeclared cargo — batteries and chemicals shipped without accurate hazard classification — is estimated to account for around a quarter of cargo-related incidents, and Allianz recorded more than 200 vessel fire incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total of the past decade; industry trackers describe a containership fire occurring somewhere in the world roughly every 17 days. The World Shipping Council has responded with an AI-driven cargo-screening programme that has already blocked thousands of bookings it flagged as dangerous-goods misdeclarations, and is pushing the International Maritime Organization for stricter fire-safety rules, including for car carriers hauling electric vehicles. On the air-cargo side, IATA's 2026 Dangerous Goods Regulations edition made a 30%-state-of-charge shipping limit mandatory (from 1 January 2026) for lithium-ion cells and batteries above 2.7 Wh packed with equipment, extending a rule that previously applied only to standalone cells.
Five registries, none of them talking to each other
What India has today is not one system but several, each built for a different regulator's mandate, with no evidence this piece could find of them sharing a common record:
Lithium-ion cells and battery-operated devices need BIS Compulsory Registration Scheme certification under IS 16046; a MeitY order dated 3 February 2026 made rated-capacity verification mandatory under IS 16046 (Part 2), with existing registrations required to comply by 30 April 2027. Facilities manufacturing cells with NMP-solvent electrode coating, or storing lithium at scale, need a separate licence from the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation (PESO) under the Petroleum Rules, 2002 — a hazardous-substances regulator, not a battery-specific one. Pack-level design has to clear AIS-156's thermal-runaway propagation testing. Every producer separately registers with CPCB for EPR purposes. And the proposed Battery Pack Aadhaar would be a sixth, lifecycle-spanning record layered on top of all of it — potentially routed through the very same AISC process that produced AIS-156, but not, on current evidence, a replacement for any of the other five registries or certifications.
Sources and caveats
The EU Battery Passport's requirements (mandatory from 18 February 2027 for EV/industrial-2kWh+/LMT batteries; ~80 EV-battery data points across seven clusters; four-stage carbon-footprint declaration with third-party verification; tiered data-access permissions) are drawn from multiple industry-compliance summaries of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 (Circularise, Automotive IQ, Asuene, Engineer Live), cross-consistent across sources describing the same underlying regulation — graded strong, though this piece read secondary compliance summaries rather than the regulation's full legal text directly. India's Battery Aadhaar/Battery Pack Aadhaar initiative is now sourced directly rather than via secondary aggregation: the DST launch (28 May 2025, Battery Summit 2025, Dr Jitendra Singh's remarks on unique digital IDs, counterfeit-prevention, and recycling) is drawn from PIB Release ID 2132105, read directly — graded strong as a primary source. The MoRTH draft Guidelines for Implementation of a Battery Pack Aadhaar System (published on or around 3-4 January 2026; the 21-character BPAN; static and dynamic data fields; visible/tamper-resistant marking requirement; new-BPAN-on-recycling rule; L/M/N-category and 2 kWh+ industrial-battery scope with SLI/portable exclusions; the 80-90% EV share of India's lithium-ion demand; the recommended AIS/AISC standardisation route) are drawn from the guideline document itself as hosted on the Principal Scientific Adviser's office website (psa.gov.in), cross-checked against PTI's wire report (via Outlook Business) and independent secondary summaries (InsightsOnIndia, Angel One, PV Magazine India, ForumIAS) that describe the same draft consistently — graded strong, being anchored in the primary document itself rather than aggregator paraphrase. This corrects this piece's earlier attribution of the initiative to NITI Aayog, which traced to secondary aggregators rather than to PIB or the guideline document, and is explicitly noted as a correction rather than silently fixed. The 2022 EV two-wheeler fire crisis and AIS-156 Amendment 3 (over two dozen fires March-April 2022, the Vellore fatalities, ~7,000 unit recalls, the ARCI/IISc-informed expert committee, the December 2022/March 2023 phased rollout, thermal-runaway propagation testing) are drawn from The Core, EVreporter, and contemporaneous trade-press coverage of the MoRTH-driven standard revision — graded strong, being consistent across independent outlets covering a well-documented regulatory episode. India's Battery Waste Management Rules 2022/2025 (CPCB centralised registration portal for producers/importers/refurbishers/recyclers, state-board co-registration for recyclers/refurbishers, EPR credit-matching purpose, mandatory QR/barcode linkage to the national registry) are drawn from IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute's policy summary and Gravita India's compliance guide, cross-checked against the rules' EPR framing as also described by the IEA's policy database — graded strong. The IndiGo flight 6E 2107 power-bank incident (19 October 2025) and the DGCA's 11 November 2025 binding advisory (cabin-baggage-only, 100 Wh free-carriage cap, two-spare-power-bank limit) are drawn from FlightGPT's 2026 flight-rules summary, which cites the DGCA advisory directly — graded strong for the advisory's existence and content, moderate for this piece's characterisation of the underlying incident, which it did not independently verify against a primary DGCA or airline statement. The maritime lithium-battery cargo-fire figures (six-fold volume increase since 2020, doubling forecast by 2030, misdeclared cargo as roughly a quarter of cargo-related incidents, 200+ vessel fires in 2025, a containership fire roughly every 17 days, WSC's AI cargo-screening programme) are drawn from Allianz's marine-risk reporting as covered by gCaptain and gCaptain's own reporting directly — graded strong for figures attributed to Allianz's own published data, moderate for the "every 17 days" framing, which is a trade-press characterisation rather than a directly quoted Allianz figure. The IATA 2026 Dangerous Goods Regulations state-of-charge mandate (30% SoC limit from 1 January 2026 for lithium-ion cells/batteries above 2.7 Wh packed with equipment) is drawn from Lion Technology's and other compliance-training providers' summaries of the 67th DGR edition, cross-consistent across sources — graded strong. India's BIS/PESO/AIS-156/CPCB registration landscape (IS 16046 CRS certification, the 3 February 2026 MeitY rated-capacity-verification order with its 30 April 2027 compliance deadline, PESO licensing under the Petroleum Rules 2002 for NMP-solvent electrode-coating lines and lithium storage) is drawn from AgileRegulatory, SunlithEnergy, and GreenPermits compliance-guide sources — graded moderate, since these are compliance-advisory publishers rather than the primary BIS/PESO notifications themselves, though the specific dates and rule numbers were consistent across the sources checked. This article does not recommend any investment, business, or policy decision; nothing here is investment, safety, or shipping-compliance advice.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
