The Pulse | Economy | South Asia

India’s Critical Mineral Challenge in a New Global Resource Order

Mineral security is not just about access to resources but about control over value chains. India’s response must be strategic, not reactive.

Coal fueled the first Industrial Revolution, and oil defined the industrial and geopolitical order of the 20th century. Wars were fought over it, alliances were built around it, and economies rose and fell with its price. Critical minerals are now rewriting that playbook, owing to two major forces.

First, climate change has made the continued dependence on fossil fuels untenable. Second, geopolitics has exposed oil itself as a strategic vulnerability, weaponized in conflicts, disrupted by wars, and concentrated in unstable regions. Together, these forces are accelerating a historic shift from hydrocarbons to critical minerals.

Critical minerals are set to underpin the next phase of technological and energy transformation. Yet, instead of open and competitive markets, the world is witnessing the rise of controlled supply chains, strategic alliances, industrial policy, and economic nationalism. This is the new age of critical mineral mercantilism.

Unlike oil, critical minerals such as copper, graphite, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements are not just fuels. They are inputs embedded across technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electrolyzers, electric vehicles, semiconductors, and advanced defense systems, emphasizing their unique strategic value. As a result, countries are not just competing for access to energy, but for control over entire supply chains, from mining and processing to manufacturing.

The urgency is immediate, but the supply response is slow. Developing upstream and midstream capacity can take over 15 years, while building a circular economy can be achieved in a comparatively shorter timeframe.

Demand, however, is accelerating rapidly in the present decade, driven by the global transition to clean energy technologies, decarbonization commitments, climate mitigation imperatives, and international pledges made across forums such as the G20 and COP. This mismatch is forcing countries, especially large economies like India, into a difficult position: deep import dependence in an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment.

A recent study by the authors on Optimizing India’s Critical Mineral Import Portfolio highlighted how complex this dependency really is. We examined how India can optimize its economy-wide import portfolio for critical minerals using a model-based assessment approach of potential sourcing partners.

Our findings indicate that India’s future import portfolio for critical minerals is not uniform but sharply divided across three segments. Ores and concentrates are tied to geography, dominated by resource-rich countries such as Australia, Chile, Canada, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Intermediate and finished products, utilized across economy-wide sectors, are controlled by industrial and processing hubs, with China at the center, alongside Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, scrap and recycled materials follow entirely different trade networks, dominated by China, Russia, and regional trade hubs.

This segmentation reveals a crucial truth: that mineral security is not just about access to resources. It is about control over value chains.

China, more than any other country, has systematically positioned itself at the center of global critical mineral value chains and transformed them into instruments of industrial and geopolitical power. Over the past two decades, China has systematically secured overseas mining assets while simultaneously building dominant processing and refining capacity. Today, it controls roughly 90 percent of rare earth processing, along with significant shares in lithium, cobalt, and graphite value chains.

This is strategic. China has effectively operationalized a modern form of mercantilism by securing upstream resources globally, building domestic industrial capacity, using scale to undercut global competition, and controlling technology and exports when needed.

The result is a structural dependency that even advanced economies have........

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