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 geology. India's list of 2023 names 30, among them lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, the rare earths and the platinum group. For almost all of them the cut would come at the refinery rather than the mine: processed material, not raw ore, is what serves a country in a supply shock, so midstream processing rather than reserves decides resource security. The rare earths are the seventeen metals, the fifteen lanthanides with scandium and yttrium, used in magnets, electronics and defence.

Prelims and Mains

The National Critical Mineral Mission, approved in January 2025, is India's umbrella programme for critical mineral security.

• It covers exploration at home, processing, recovery from waste, acquisition of assets abroad through KABIL, and stockpiling.
• Stockpiling agreements with partners such as Japan, and access to processing chains abroad, are how it works outside India.

Background reading: PIB, 11 Sep 2026: Critical Minerals Key to India's Energy Security, Industrial Competitiveness and National Security: Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh (opens in a new tab) · The Indian Express, 6 Jul 2026: India works on nickel access in Indonesia and on stockpiling with Japan (opens in a new tab)

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. A sintered magnet is made by aligning rare earth alloy powder in a magnetic field, pressing it and heating it below melting until the grains fuse. Neodymium iron boron 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 them, and the scheme approved on 26 November 2025 funds Indian manufacture. The alternative is an electromagnet, copper coil on an iron core, which large generators have used for a century; in an electric vehicle motor it trades dependence on imported rare earths for losses in efficiency, starting torque and top speed, which is why the cars still need rare earths.

Background reading: The Hindu, 23 Jul 2026: 'Virtual magnet' claims reveal why EVs need their rare-earths (opens in a new tab)

Prelims and Mains

Waste that is already dug up, ground and stacked has had the expensive part of mining done to it. Fly ash, the fine residue of burning coal, and red mud, the alkaline residue of extracting alumina from bauxite, both carry rare earths and other metals, and recovering them supplements mining and cuts the waste burden at once.

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.