Critical minerals and rare earths

Prelims and Mains

A mineral is called critical when an economy and its armed forces cannot do without it and the supply can be cut, which is a judgement about politics as much as about geology. For almost all of them the cut would come at the refinery rather than at the mine.

• Across copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and the rare earths, the top three refining countries held 86 per cent of the market in 2024.
• China leads the refining of 19 of 20 strategic minerals, and its 2025 export controls on rare earths reached industries from electric vehicles to defence.
• Processed material, not raw ore, is what serves a country in a supply shock, so it is midstream processing rather than reserves that decides resource security.
• The European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act answers with 2030 benchmarks of 10 per cent domestic extraction, 40 per cent processing and 25 per cent recycling.
• The United States is racing to build magnets without Chinese inputs.

Prelims and Mains

The mission is India's umbrella programme for critical mineral security, covering exploration, processing, recovery and acquisition abroad. Its first instrument is the least glamorous one, holding stock against an interruption rather than producing more.

• ₹500 crore has been seeded under it for stockpiling.

Prelims and Mains

A rare earth magnet is what shrinks an electric motor enough to fit inside a car, and it is the finished material India is least able to make for itself. The scheme meant to change that has now reached bidding.

• Neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) is the strongest permanent magnet in wide use.
• Samarium cobalt is weaker but holds its magnetism at high temperature, so defence and aerospace use it.
• Electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, electronics and defence all run on these magnets.
• Twenty bids came in under the scheme, and the technical bids were opened.

Prelims and Mains

The surest way to be certain of lithium is to hold the ground it lies in, which is why India is buying into blocks in other countries. KABIL is the vehicle that does the buying.

• KABIL (Khanij Bidesh India Ltd), a joint venture of National Aluminium Company, Hindustan Copper and Mineral Exploration and Consultancy, acquires mineral assets abroad.
• India said it was in talks to acquire lithium blocks in Australia and Chile, and was seeking five more in Argentina, where it already holds five.
• Argentina, Bolivia and Chile form the lithium triangle.

Prelims and Mains

Waste that is already dug up, ground and stacked has had the expensive part of mining done to it. Recovering critical materials from it supplements primary mining and cuts the waste burden at the same time.

• Two indigenous pilot plants in Odisha, built by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research's Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology (CSIR-IMMT) with National Aluminium Company support, were set to recover rare earths from industrial waste.
• The first of its kind plant at Bhubaneswar takes coal fly ash, yielding alumina, calcium silicate, quartz and a residue rich in rare earths including scandium.
• The second works on red mud, for ferro-titanium and iron alongside rare earths.

See also: Urban mining

Prelims

The sands of India's southern coast carry monazite, the mineral that holds both thorium and rare earths. That double content is why it is handled as a strategic mineral and not a commercial one.

• Exports of monazite go only through IREL (India) Limited.
• The monazite threshold has been 0.00 per cent of total heavy minerals since 2019, so every beach sand mineral deposit sits with government companies.

Background reading: PIB, 12 Aug 2026: Non-power uses of atomic energy: isotopes, crops, rare earths (opens in a new tab)

Prelims and Mains

The Centre auctions blocks of critical minerals in tranches under the mining law amended in 2023, offering rare earths, lithium, graphite, vanadium, tungsten and potash among others.

See also: Critical minerals

Prelims and Mains

An electromagnet is copper coil on an iron core, and replacing rare earth permanent magnets with it in electric vehicle motors trades dependence on imported rare earths for losses in efficiency, starting torque and top speed.