India's critical-minerals strategy: the National Critical Mineral Mission, mining reform and coal

State of play (as of 2026-07-06)

India’s critical-minerals policy rests on two pillars, both administered by the Ministry of Mines. The first is a legal opening: the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2023, enacted in August 2023, added a list of 24 critical and strategic minerals to Part D of the MMDR Act’s schedule and reserved their auction to the Central Government, while removing six minerals — including lithium — from the atomic-minerals list that had kept them off-limits to private mining (per the IEA policy database). The second is a spending and coordination vehicle: the National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM), which the Union Cabinet approved on 29 January 2025 with an outlay of ₹34,300 crore over seven years, from 2024-25 to 2030-31 (per the Press Information Bureau). Between them they cover exploration at home, acquisition abroad, recycling, stockpiling and the regulatory and fiscal terms that make each viable.

The underlying policy problem, as the Ministry of Mines has framed it, is import dependence. A 2023 expert committee of the Ministry identified 30 minerals as “critical” for India, among them lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, the rare-earth elements, copper and silicon — inputs to batteries, magnets, solar cells, electronics and defence hardware (per Ministry of Mines and contemporaneous reporting). India imports the bulk of several of these, and processing capacity for many is concentrated in China.

What the National Critical Mineral Mission is

The Cabinet’s approval framed the NCMM’s ₹34,300 crore as roughly ₹16,300 crore of direct budgetary support plus about ₹18,000 crore of investment attributed to public-sector undertakings (per PIB and Ministry briefings summarised by Drishti IAS). Officially described components run across the mineral life-cycle: intensified domestic and offshore exploration, with a stated target of about 1,200 exploration projects by the Geological Survey of India to 2030-31; auction of critical-mineral blocks under the amended MMDR Act; overseas acquisition of assets; a circular-economy leg of processing parks and recycling; strategic stockpiling; a Centre of Excellence on Critical Minerals and support for start-ups and MSMEs; and regulatory fast-tracking with customs relief. The Mission’s stated aim includes securing domestic availability of a set of critical minerals such as graphite, lithium, potash and rare earths (per the Ministry’s own description of the Mission). These are government-stated intentions and targets; this brief records them as such rather than as outcomes.

Opening the ground: the 2023 amendment and the auctions

The 2023 MMDR amendment did two structural things: it moved 24 critical and strategic minerals into a category the Centre auctions directly, and it created an Exploration Licence to draw private and junior explorers into early-stage prospecting (per the IEA). On that basis the Ministry launched successive tranches of critical-mineral block auctions from late 2023, covering minerals including lithium, rare earths, graphite, vanadium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, manganese, glauconite, platinum-group elements, tungsten and phosphorite (per PIB auction notices and reference compilations). The record is uneven: several blocks in successive tranches drew no bids and were annulled, a pattern reported for the flagship Reasi lithium block among others (per reporting compiled from Ministry auction notices).

Reasi and the domestic exploration push

The most-cited domestic discovery is in Jammu and Kashmir. In February 2023 the Geological Survey of India reported inferred (G3-stage) lithium resources of about 5.9 million tonnes in the Salal-Haimana block of Reasi district — the first lithium resource of that scale reported in India (per GSI and contemporaneous reporting, including Greater Kashmir). The figure is an early-stage inference, not a proven reserve, and the block was offered for auction in November 2023 and re-auctioned in 2024, with both attempts annulled for lack of bids — an outcome reporting attributed to the preliminary exploration stage and uncertain grade. The NCMM’s exploration target — around 1,200 GSI projects — is the Ministry’s answer to that gap between a promising map and a bankable deposit.

Going abroad: KABIL and mineral diplomacy

Where domestic supply is thin, the strategy reaches overseas through Khanij Bidesh India Ltd (KABIL), a joint venture of the public miners NALCO, Hindustan Copper and MECL. On 15 January 2024 KABIL signed an agreement with CAMYEN, the state mining company of Argentina’s Catamarca province, for exploration and development of five lithium brine blocks covering about 15,703 hectares, at a project cost of roughly ₹200 crore — described by the government as the first lithium exploration-and-mining project abroad by an Indian government company (per PIB). Under the agreement KABIL holds exploration and exclusivity rights, with a five-year window to begin work and a subsequent exploitation right if lithium is established. India has pursued parallel supplier engagements with other resource-holders, and the NCMM lists overseas acquisition as one of its verticals.

Fiscal levers, recycling and offshore

Two adjacent institutions carry parts of the strategy. The Ministry of Finance used the Union Budget to remove tariffs on inputs India does not produce: the July 2024 Union Budget fully exempted Basic Customs Duty on 25 critical minerals not domestically available, effective 24 July 2024 (per the Union Budget 2024-25, reported by S&P Global), and the 2025-26 Budget added cobalt powder and waste, lithium-ion battery scrap, lead, zinc and 12 further critical minerals (per Budget documents and reporting). On the circular-economy leg, the government notified a ₹1,500 crore Incentive Scheme for Promotion of Critical Mineral Recycling under the NCMM on 2 October 2025; by late April 2026 the Ministry of Mines had approved 58 companies as eligible under it (20 cleared on 30 March 2026 and 38 on 29 April 2026), carrying a pledged recycling capacity of about 850 kilo-tonnes per annum and pledged investment of about ₹5,000 crore (per PIB). Separately, the Offshore Areas Mineral (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2023 enabled the first-ever auction of offshore mineral blocks, and the Ministry launched 13 blocks on 28 November 2024 — construction sand off Kerala, lime mud off Gujarat, and polymetallic nodules off the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; the offshore round drew opposition from fishing communities and delays (per Mongabay India).

The China dependence that frames all of it

The strategy’s context is that China dominates the mining and, more decisively, the refining and magnet-making stages of several critical-mineral chains. On 4 April 2025 China imposed export controls on rare-earth permanent magnets and, in October 2025, expanded the regime to add further rare-earth elements and to require approval for magnets containing even trace China-sourced material or made with Chinese processing technology (per Down To Earth). Indian industry reported disruption: several electric two-wheeler makers — including Bajaj, TVS and Ather — announced production cuts in mid-2025 that reporting attributed to the magnet shortage, with Bajaj citing a reduction of roughly half (per reporting). This is the concrete vulnerability the NCMM, the auctions, the recycling scheme and the KABIL model are each addressed to; the range of expert views runs from those who see the mission as a decisive supply-chain hedge to those who argue that India’s binding constraint is refining and processing capacity rather than access to ore, and that auctions of low-grade blocks will not by themselves close it (positions attributed in policy commentary).

Coal: a separate ministry, a parallel story

The brief thread names coal, and the boundary matters. Coal and lignite are not administered by the Ministry of Mines; they sit with a separate Ministry of Coal under a different statute (the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act and related law), with commercial coal-block auctions opened from 2020. On the numbers, India crossed one billion tonnes of annual coal production for the first time in 2024-25, reaching about 1,047 million tonnes (provisional), up roughly 5% year-on-year, with Coal India Ltd producing about 781 million tonnes of that (per Ministry of Coal statistics and reporting, e.g. Insights on India). Output from captive and commercial (non-Coal-India) blocks reached about 210.46 million tonnes in FY2025-26, a roughly 10% rise on the previous year’s 190.95 million tonnes (per the Ministry of Coal Year-End Review 2025). Coal’s logic is domestic energy security and import substitution for thermal power; critical minerals’ logic is supply-chain strategy for the energy transition and electronics. They are often bundled as “mining”, but they are different portfolios, different laws and different institutions.

Who owns this topic (and why we’re here)

The seat of power over India’s non-fuel, non-atomic minerals is the Ministry of Mines: it administers the MMDR Act, runs the Geological Survey of India and the Indian Bureau of Mines, auctions critical-mineral and offshore blocks, and coordinates the National Critical Mineral Mission through the public miners NALCO, Hindustan Copper, MECL and KABIL. Coal belongs to the Ministry of Coal, atomic minerals to the Department of Atomic Energy, and the fiscal terms — customs exemptions in particular — to the Ministry of Finance. This desk maintains the topic because critical minerals now sit at the intersection of industrial policy, the energy transition, electronics and semiconductors, and India-China supply-chain exposure — and because the policy record is a mix of large stated targets and uneven early results that is best tracked over time rather than judged from a single announcement.

Maintained topic brief. Analysis by IndiaStand — it characterises the state of play and the range of positions actually held, attributes each claim, and makes no forecast and no recommendation.