Reliant means you need something or somebody else in order to manage. A village reliant on one bus a day.
It nearly always comes with on: reliant on her parents, reliant on imported grain, heavily reliant on a single customer. That last pattern is the commonest in business writing, where being reliant on one buyer is a risk somebody is about to point out. Self-reliant is the useful opposite, and it is a compliment — it means you can manage alone. Reliant sits close to dependent, but dependent carries a faint sting of weakness that reliant does not.
1adjectivereliantNeeding someone or something in order to manage or survive.
“The town is reliant on tourism for most of its income.”
synonyms: dependent
Middle English
ampte
English
ant
English, today
reliant
Built from
From rely + -ant. ant comes from Middle English ampte. From Middle English ampte, amte, amete, amote, ante, emete, emot, emotte, empt, empte, from Old English ǣmete, ǣmette, ǣmytte, ǣmætte (“ant”), from Proto-West Germanic āmaitijā (“ant”), of unknown, but probably from Proto-Germanic ē- (“off, away”) + maitaną (“to cut”), from Proto-Indo-European meh₂y- (“to cut”). See also emmet. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA