BT Explainer: After oil & gas, India needs to diversify critical mineral imports. Why?

The Gulf conflict, straining the oil and gas supplies to India, has made the government go for diversifying the supplies. A recent analysis shows that India’s critical mineral supplies is also heavily dependent on single-supplier, bringing to fore the need to diversify to hedge industry from future   geopolitical shocks.  ‘India’s critical mineral imports in 2025 and a shift towards supply diversification’ by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) looked at the import data for these five minerals — cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel and their compounds assessing key developments and shifts over the past year.

India is currently 100% import-dependent for lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

What is India’s mineral dependence?

Chile is India’s largest supplier of critical minerals by a wide margin, accounting for 2,800,000 tonnes of imports between financial year FY19 and FY25, driven primarily by copper ore. China is also a systemically important supplier.

For cobalt, used in lithium-ion battery cathodes for electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy storage systems, Finland is India's dominant supplier, accounting for nearly 60% of cobalt oxide and hydroxide imports in FY25.
In copper, critical for power generation, transmission, and electrification, Tanzania provides over 50% of India’s copper ore and concentrate imports, signalling its emergence as a key trade partner.

Australia is a new entrant for Nickel, used in rechargeable battery cathodes, making up 65% of nickel oxides and hydroxides imports. Belgium dominates in imports for nickel sulphate at over 65%.

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Why need to diversify?

Protectionist and industrial policies adopted by major producing and processing countries, such as China, Indonesia, the US, the European Union and Japan are increasingly impacting India’s imports. Export controls, domestic value-addition requirements, and strategic supply management are reshaping trade flows and revealing India’s vulnerability to concentration risks and supply disruptions.

Taken together, these trends show that single-supplier concentration remains high.

“Reserves and processing capacity for these minerals remain highly concentrated, while recent trends of export restrictions, resource nationalism, and onshoring or friend-shoring policies are fragmenting global markets that India relied upon. The consequences are price volatility, supply disruptions, and reduced availability, affecting import-dependent economies like India the most,” says Saloni Sachdeva Michael, Lead Energy Specialist, India Clean Energy Transition, South Asia, at IEEFA.

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What is India doing?

India’s import data reflects a clear intent to diversify supply sources and build more resilient supply chains through international cooperation. At the same time, there is also a need to strengthen collaboration in skills development, joint exploration and mining, technology transfer and scaled research and development. India has made some efforts to achieve diversification through diplomacy, trade and international cooperation to reduce supply risks.