On 23 June 2026, the Ministry of Mines announced that the total number of critical and strategic mineral blocks successfully auctioned by the Central Government has reached 56, following the Seventh Tranche in which 10 more blocks were sold. Alongside, the Second Tranche of Exploration Licence (EL) auctions was completed, taking the cumulative count of EL blocks to 11. The Seventh Tranche put up 19 blocks and, for the first time, took central critical-mineral auctions into Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Telangana, while the EL framework reached Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha for the first time. The minerals on offer included graphite, rare earth elements (REE), vanadium, titanium, glauconite and rock phosphate. For a CDS/OTA aspirant, this single release opens up one of the most heavily-tested economy-and-strategy clusters of the decade: what critical minerals are, why they matter for clean energy and defence, and the policy architecture — the National Critical Mineral Mission and the MMDR Amendment of 2023 — that India has built to secure them.
What exactly is a "critical mineral"?
A mineral is called critical when two conditions are met together: it is economically essential to high-technology, clean-energy or strategic industries, and its supply is vulnerable — because reserves are geographically concentrated, processing is dominated by one or two countries, or there is no easy substitute. So criticality is not about how rare the element is in the earth's crust; it is about the risk of supply disruption to industries a nation cannot do without.
In 2023, the Ministry of Mines released India's first formal list of 30 critical minerals. The set you should be able to recognise includes lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, the Rare Earth Elements (REE), titanium, vanadium, tungsten, gallium, germanium, niobium, tantalum, zirconium, beryllium, silicon, tin, molybdenum, indium, tellurium, selenium, antimony, bismuth and the Platinum Group Elements (PGE), along with fertiliser minerals such as potash and phosphorus. Examiners rarely ask you to recite all thirty — they ask you to identify which mineral powers which technology, so anchor the famous half-dozen firmly.
Why critical minerals matter: batteries, chips, clean energy and defence
The reason this topic dominates current affairs is that critical minerals are the physical bottleneck of the 21st-century economy. Fix these end-uses:
- Lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite — the heart of lithium-ion batteries that run electric vehicles (EVs) and grid storage. Graphite forms the anode; lithium, cobalt and nickel sit in the cathode chemistry.
- Rare Earth Elements (REEs) — neodymium and dysprosium make the permanent magnets inside EV motors, wind turbines, hard drives, and precision-guided munitions, missile fins, fighter-jet actuators and submarine sonar. This is the sharpest defence crossover in the syllabus.
- Silicon, gallium, germanium — semiconductors and chips; gallium and germanium are also used in radar, night-vision and fibre-optics.
- Titanium, tungsten, vanadium — high-strength, heat-resistant aerospace and armour alloys; vanadium also goes into grid-scale flow batteries.
- Copper — the universal conductor for every electrified and renewable system.
So the same shopping list underwrites electric mobility, renewable energy, electronics and advanced manufacturing on the civil side, and avionics, munitions, sensors and platforms on the defence side. That dual-use character is why mineral security is now treated as national security, and why this sits at the intersection of the CDS/OTA economy syllabus and strategic studies rather than in either alone.
The National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM)
The flagship policy is the National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM), approved by the Union Cabinet on 29 January 2025 with an outlay of Rs 34,300 crore over seven years (2024-25 to 2030-31). Of this, roughly Rs 16,300 crore is direct government expenditure and about Rs 18,000 crore is expected investment by public-sector undertakings. Its objective is to build a resilient, end-to-end critical-mineral value chain so that India is not caught short as it electrifies transport and decarbonises power.
The Mission works across the whole chain rather than at a single point:
- Exploration at home — the Geological Survey of India (GSI) is tasked with about 1,200 exploration projects between 2024-25 and 2030-31 to find new domestic deposits.
- Acquiring assets abroad — securing mines and offtake in mineral-rich countries (more on KABIL below).
- Recovery and recycling — extracting critical minerals from overburden, tailings and end-of-life products so that supply is not purely mine-dependent.
- Building the value chain — incentivising processing, refining and beneficiation at home, because the binding constraint for India is often not the ore but the ability to refine it.
- R&D, a Centre of Excellence, stockpiling and skilling — the softer enablers that keep the chain resilient.
A clean one-line takeaway for the exam: the NCMM is a 2025 mission with a ~Rs 34,300-crore, seven-year outlay to secure India's critical-mineral supply chain from exploration to recycling.
The legal engine: the MMDR Amendment Act, 2023
None of these auctions would be possible without the legal change that came first. The parent law is the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 (MMDR Act) — the statute that governs mining in India. It was overhauled by the MMDR Amendment Act, 2023 (in force from 17 August 2023), which did three exam-worthy things:
- Created a separate list of critical and strategic minerals in a new Part D of the First Schedule, and gave the Central Government the exclusive power to auction mining leases and composite licences for these minerals. Earlier, auctions were run by State Governments; for this high-stakes category, the Centre now conducts the auction — though the revenue still accrues to the State where the mineral lies. The 56 blocks in the news are exactly these centrally-auctioned blocks.
- De-listed six minerals from the "atomic minerals" category — lithium, beryllium, niobium, titanium, tantalum and zirconium — so that private companies could explore and mine them. Previously these were reserved for government entities, which had frozen private investment in precisely the minerals India most needs for batteries and electronics.
- Introduced a new mineral concession — the Exploration Licence (EL) — granted by auction, allowing the holder to carry out reconnaissance and prospecting for deep-seated and critical minerals. This is meant to draw in private and junior exploration companies (and foreign investment) to take on the high-risk early-stage search that the government alone cannot fund. The 11 EL blocks in the release are the first fruits of this regime.
The single most testable chain of logic: MMDR Amendment 2023 → separate critical-minerals list + Centre-led auctions + new Exploration Licences → NCMM (2025) funds the push → tranche-by-tranche auctions (56 blocks, 11 EL blocks by June 2026). The actual auctions, incidentally, run under the Mineral (Auction) Rules, 2015, as amended.
The institutions: who does what
CDS papers reward candidates who can match the agency to its role:
- Ministry of Mines — the nodal ministry that frames policy and runs the central auctions.
- Geological Survey of India (GSI) — established 1851, headquartered at Kolkata; the premier body for geological mapping and mineral exploration. It does the on-ground hunting for new deposits.
- KABIL (Khanij Bidesh India Ltd) — a joint venture of three PSUs (NALCO, HCL and MECL) set up in 2019 to acquire critical-mineral assets abroad — for example, lithium blocks in Argentina. KABIL is India's overseas-sourcing arm.
- Mineral Exploration and Consultancy Ltd (MECL) — a PSU that carries out detailed exploration.
- IBM (Indian Bureau of Mines) — regulates mining and conserves mineral resources.
The pairing to memorise: GSI explores at home; KABIL acquires abroad. Both feed the same goal of supply security, and both recur in the daily CDS/OTA current affairs economy set.
The strategic angle: China, REEs and the Minerals Security Partnership
The reason mineral security has become urgent is concentration of supply in China. China dominates not just the mining but, more decisively, the processing and refining of critical minerals — it controls roughly 60% of global rare-earth mining and around 85-90% of REE processing, and similarly outsized shares of graphite and gallium processing. When China imposes export controls on rare earths, gallium or germanium, it can squeeze the global supply of EV magnets, chips and defence components almost overnight. India, with limited domestic processing, is heavily import-dependent for many of these minerals and their magnets.
India's response runs on three tracks: build domestic supply (NCMM auctions, GSI exploration), secure overseas assets (KABIL), and join plurilateral coalitions. The key grouping to know is the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) — a US-led initiative of like-minded countries (the EU, Japan, Australia, Canada, the UK, South Korea and others) to diversify critical-mineral supply chains away from a single dominant supplier; India is a member. The strategic logic is identical to the energy-security logic candidates already know: a nation that cannot source the inputs of its key industries cannot guarantee either its economy or its defence. This dependence-and-diversification theme is the heart of the geography and resources crossover the examiner loves.
Where the blocks are: the geography to remember
The Seventh Tranche widened the map of exploration — a detail CDS geography questions exploit. Central critical-mineral auctions reached Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Telangana for the first time, and the EL framework opened in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha. Add the headline finds you should already know: the large lithium reserves at Reasi in Jammu & Kashmir, REE and monazite associations along the eastern and western coastal sands, and graphite in Odisha, Jharkhand and Arunachal Pradesh. The spread shows mineral exploration is no longer confined to the traditional mining belts of the east-central plateau but is fanning out across the country — exactly the kind of "which state, which mineral" association that turns up in the CDS/OTA geography material.
🎯 Practice MCQs
Q1. A mineral is classified as "critical" primarily because it is: (a) the rarest element in the earth's crust (b) economically essential and at risk of supply disruption (c) radioactive (d) found only in India → (b) — criticality combines economic importance with supply vulnerability, not absolute scarcity.
Q2. The National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM) was approved in 2025 with an outlay of approximately: (a) Rs 4,300 crore (b) Rs 34,300 crore over seven years (c) Rs 1,00,000 crore (d) Rs 10,000 crore → (b) — about Rs 34,300 crore over 2024-25 to 2030-31.
Q3. Which set of minerals is central to lithium-ion EV batteries? (a) gold, silver, platinum (b) lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite (c) iron, manganese, chromium (d) bauxite, gypsum, mica → (b) — graphite anode with lithium/cobalt/nickel cathode chemistry.
Q4. Rare Earth Elements are strategically vital chiefly because they are used to make: (a) nuclear fuel (b) permanent magnets for motors, wind turbines and precision munitions (c) cement (d) heavy water → (b) — neodymium-dysprosium magnets underpin EV motors and defence systems.
Q5. The MMDR Amendment Act, 2023 empowered which authority to auction critical and strategic mineral blocks? (a) State Governments only (b) the Central Government (c) the Geological Survey of India (d) private firms directly → (b) — the Centre conducts the auction, though revenue accrues to the State.
Q6. Which of these minerals was removed from the "atomic minerals" list by the 2023 amendment to allow private mining? (a) uranium (b) thorium (c) lithium (d) plutonium → (c) — lithium (with beryllium, niobium, titanium, tantalum, zirconium) was de-listed.
Q7. KABIL (Khanij Bidesh India Ltd) was set up mainly to: (a) regulate domestic coal (b) acquire critical-mineral assets abroad (c) refine petroleum (d) build dams → (b) — KABIL is the overseas-sourcing arm, a JV of NALCO, HCL and MECL.
Q8. The Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), of which India is a member, aims to: (a) increase reliance on a single supplier (b) diversify critical-mineral supply chains away from one dominant supplier (c) ban all mineral exports (d) fix global mineral prices → (b) — a US-led coalition to build resilient, diversified supply chains.
📋 How this gets asked (PYQ pattern)
CDS/OTA general-awareness sets reliably test critical minerals as an economy-and-strategy cluster. The standard moves are: match the mineral to its use (lithium/cobalt/nickel/graphite → batteries; REE → magnets and defence; silicon/gallium → semiconductors); name the policy (NCMM, 2025, ~Rs 34,300-crore, seven-year outlay); and identify the legal change (MMDR Amendment 2023 → Centre-led auctions, separate critical-minerals list, Exploration Licences, six minerals freed from the atomic list). Institutional one-liners on GSI (explore at home) and KABIL (acquire abroad) are easy points, as is the China-dependence / Minerals Security Partnership strategic angle that overlaps with international-relations questions. The fresh 2026 hook is the running tally — 56 critical-mineral blocks and 11 Exploration Licence blocks auctioned, with new states (Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Telangana; Arunachal, UP, Odisha) entering the map — perfect for "how many / which state / which mineral" framings and for a strong interview and SSB lecturette on India's resource security.
Preparing for CDS or OTA? Critical minerals are guaranteed economy-plus-strategy GK and a sharp current-affairs interview topic — secure marks once the mineral-to-use map, the NCMM and the MMDR 2023 reforms are clear. Track our daily CDS/OTA current affairs and train with serving-officer faculty in the upcoming Cavalier courses in Delhi.
✍️ Written by Aditya Tiwari — Economy & current-affairs faculty at The Cavalier. Reviewed by the Cavalier Faculty Desk. The Cavalier, founded by ex-Army officers, has trained NDA/CDS/SSB aspirants since 2001 (Facebook · YouTube).
Source: PIB release, 23 June 2026 (Ministry of Mines, Release ID 2277041). Facts cross-verified.