MMDR Amendment Act, 2023

Imagine a rulebook written in 1957 that classified certain minerals as so strategically sensitive they could only ever be explored by government agencies, a rule that made complete sense at the time but became a genuine bottleneck decades later, when the world suddenly needed vastly more lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements than any single government mining agency could realistically explore for and develop.

The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2023, updated exactly that 1957-era rulebook, removing six minerals, lithium, beryllium, niobium, titanium, tantalum and zirconium, from the list previously restricted to state exploration only, and opening them up to private and foreign mining companies for the first time.

The amendment also gave the central government the power to exclusively auction mineral concessions for a defined list of critical minerals, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, rare earth elements, phosphate, potash and tin, with the resulting auction revenue flowing to state governments, a structure designed to accelerate exploration while still keeping the financial benefit with the states where the minerals actually sit.

Every time you read about a new lithium or rare earth exploration block being auctioned in India, a process that simply couldn't have happened before 2023 for several of these specific minerals, that auction exists because this amendment rewrote a nearly 70-year-old restriction that had quietly become one of India's biggest obstacles to building a domestic critical minerals supply chain.