Critical minerals: the quiet contest behind clean energy and modern weapons

Modern security increasingly depends on rocks most people have never heard of. Rare earth elements — seventeen metals used in permanent magnets, electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, electronics and defence equipment — along with lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and titanium, are essential to clean energy, advanced manufacturing, telecommunications and defence. The supply chain is dangerously concentrated: China controls roughly 70 per cent of rare earth mining and about 90 per cent of processing. That concentration is why critical minerals moved, in 2025–26, from a trade topic to a security topic.

India's response is the National Critical Mineral Mission, launched in 2025 with an outlay of about 34,300 crore rupees, spanning exploration, mining, processing, recycling and downstream value addition. The Geological Survey of India accelerated exploration, with over 230 projects active in 2025–26, and the government has auctioned blocks for 24 critical minerals and introduced an exploration licence for 29. A rare earth corridor covering Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha is under development, and the Cabinet approved a 7,280-crore-rupee scheme for sintered rare earth permanent magnet manufacturing, targeting 6,000 tonnes a year. In February 2026, Mines Minister G. Kishan Reddy said India aimed to begin production of rare earth permanent magnets by the end of 2026.

India is also looking abroad. Khanij Bidesh India Limited signed an agreement for five lithium brine blocks covering 15,703 hectares in Catamarca, Argentina, and in October 2026 Reddy said the government was exploring mineral assets in Argentina and engaging other resource-rich countries, encouraging Indian companies to pursue overseas exploration and processing. India is the only developing country in the 14-nation Mineral Security Partnership led by the United States, and is collaborating with South Korea and Japan on joint extraction projects in third countries. The United States, for its part, announced Project Vault on 2 February 2026, a 12-billion-dollar initiative to build a strategic stockpile of critical minerals, funded by a 10-billion-dollar Export-Import Bank loan and private capital.

The hard lesson, noted by analysts in 2026, is that extracting minerals is not the same as securing supply. India holds an estimated 6.9 million tonnes of rare earth reserves, among the world's largest, yet much of the resource base is not yet developed or classified as economically exploitable ore, and the country has historically imported the refined metals, battery materials, magnets and components. If India mines rare earths but keeps importing magnets, it will have changed the location of its dependence, not its existence. The mission's success will therefore be judged not by blocks auctioned but by magnets manufactured, batteries built and processing capacity that survives a supply shock.