Securing India's energy transition

One of the outgoing government's initiatives that has garnered less attention than it deserves has been its effort to secure critical minerals that are needed for India's energy transition targets.

- PROSENJIT DATTA

A report in this newspaper last week highlighted India's efforts to sign new agreements or update older ones with a dozen African countries.

Earlier this year, the Indian government signed an agreement with Argentina to acquire five lithium brine blocks for exploration and development in that country. The lithium exploration deal with Argentina is a step towards securing lithium supplies needed for electric vehicle (EV) batteries.

A few months ago, the government made efforts to attract private miners both domestic as well as global to take up critical mineral exploration blocks within India. Though the auction for the 20 critical mineral blocks on offer finally needed to be scrapped last month, possibly because of lukewarm interest from bidders, it showed that the government recognised the criticality of securing the critical minerals.

The new government that will take charge shortly will need to continue and accelerate these initiatives. It will also need to make policy tweaks to ensure that we are more successful in our efforts than we have been in the past. In the past half-decade, though the outgoing government recognised the problem of India being too dependent on imports, primarily from China, for critical minerals, the solutions it has tried out have been less successful.