The Ore and the Order, India, the EU, and the Quest for Critical Minerals Autonomy in China’s Shadow
The green transition is, at its core, a minerals transition. The solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery storage systems that constitute the technological infrastructure of a decarbonised economy are not ethereal constructs of software and services. They are dense, physical assemblages of copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements, and graphite. A single electric vehicle requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional internal combustion engine car. An offshore wind turbine requires nine times the mineral inputs of a gas-fired power plant of equivalent capacity. The International Energy Agency projects that the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050 will require a sixfold increase in the supply of critical minerals.
This is not merely an industrial challenge; it is a geopolitical reckoning. The production and processing of these minerals are concentrated to a degree that has no parallel in the history of fossil fuels. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt; Indonesia accounts for more than 50 per cent of global nickel refining; Chile and Australia dominate lithium extraction. But it is China that has transformed this geological endowment into strategic leverage. Chinese companies have invested billions in mines across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Chinese state-owned enterprises control more than 80 per cent of the world’s rare earth processing capacity. Chinese refiners process more than half of the world’s lithium and two-thirds of its cobalt. The country that dominates the processing stage of the critical minerals value chain does not merely participate in the green transition; it holds the keys to it.
This concentration of supply chain power has not gone unnoticed. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of just-in-time manufacturing networks; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the weaponisation of energy dependencies; China’s export restrictions on gallium and germanium in 2023 signalled that critical minerals would be the next domain of economic coercion. The response, from Washington to Brussels to New Delhi, has been a frenzy of policy initiatives: the US Inflation Reduction Act, the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, India’s critical mineral auctions and production-linked incentives. Each is an attempt to reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains, to build domestic processing capacity, and to secure access to overseas resources.
Yet no single country, however large its market or ambitious its industrial policy, can replicate the scale and integration of China’s critical minerals ecosystem. The capital requirements are too immense; the technological expertise too concentrated; the timelines too extended. This is the strategic logic underlying the India-EU critical minerals partnership, embedded within the Joint Comprehensive Strategic Agenda released following the conclusion of free trade agreement negotiations. Neither India nor the EU can match China’s dominance individually; together, they may be able to construct an alternative.
The Upstream Deficit: Why India and the EU Cannot Mine Their Way to Security
The most striking feature of the India-EU critical minerals partnership, as outlined in the accompanying analysis by Shobhankita Reddy, is what it does not include. Exploration, mapping, and investment in Indian mines—the foundational activities of the upstream segment—are conspicuously absent. This is not an oversight; it is a sober acknowledgment of shared weakness.
Both India and the EU struggle with the same fundamental constraints in mineral development. Mining projects require a decade or more to progress from discovery to first production. They face formidable regulatory hurdles, protracted environmental clearance processes, determined local opposition, and uncertain social license. India’s Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation Amendment Act, 2023, attempts to streamline these processes, but its impact on actual project timelines remains unproven. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, 2024, sets ambitious benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, and recycling capacity, but these targets are aspirational rather than operational.
The upstream deficit is not merely a matter of domestic constraints; it is also a function of geological endowment. Neither India nor the EU possesses the rich deposits of lithium, cobalt, or rare earths that are concentrated in a handful of countries. Even with streamlined permitting and increased investment, they cannot become self-sufficient in critical minerals. The strategic question, therefore, is not how to eliminate dependence but how to diversify it.
This is where the India-EU partnership can create genuine value. Both parties have signed memoranda of understanding with several mineral-rich nations—Congo, Argentina, Chile, Namibia—with substantial overlap in their partner countries. Rather than competing against each other for access to these resources, India and the EU can coordinate their diplomatic and commercial engagement. They can pool information, align investment strategies, and negotiate collectively with host governments. They can offer long-term procurement guarantees that provide mineral-rich countries with the revenue certainty they need to develop new mines, while securing for themselves a stable, diversified supply.
This is not altruism; it is enlightened self-interest. China’s dominance of the critical minerals supply chain is sustained not only by its processing capacity but by its willingness to offer long-term purchase commitments at prices that commercial entities cannot match. India and the EU, individually, cannot compete with this model. Collectively, their combined market size and purchasing power create a credible alternative. The 70 per cent overlap between India’s and the EU’s critical minerals lists is not a coincidence; it reflects a shared assessment of which materials are essential for the green transition. This convergence creates a natural basis for coordinated action.
The Processing Chokepoint: Confronting China’s Industrial Fortress
If the upstream segment is characterised by shared weakness, the midstream processing segment is defined by Chinese dominance of an entirely different order. China is not merely the largest processor of critical minerals; it is the only significant processor for many materials. Its share of global lithium refining exceeds 60 per cent; its share of cobalt refining exceeds 70 per cent; its share of rare earth processing exceeds 80 per cent. This concentration is not accidental; it is the product of decades of strategic industrial policy, massive state investment, and the systematic acquisition of overseas mining assets.
The current scope of the India-EU partnership recognises the centrality of this challenge. Battery manufacturing and downstream processing are identified as priority areas for collaboration. Yet the analysis notes that this engagement remains “relatively nascent, with no project-level outcomes as yet.” This is not a criticism; it is a realistic assessment of the gap between ambition and capability.
Bridging this gap will require sustained, high-level commitment from both sides. The EU possesses significant technical competence in mineral processing, developed through initiatives such as the European Battery Alliance, a public-private partnership designed to build an integrated domestic battery value chain. India, through IREL (Indian Rare Earths Limited), has been exploring partnerships with South Korea and Japan for rare earth magnet production. There are reports that India is preparing incentives for companies to establish nickel and lithium processing plants. These are promising developments, but they are fragmented and uncoordinated.
The India-EU partnership offers a framework for integration. Rather than pursuing parallel, uncoordinated efforts to build processing capacity, India and the EU can align their investment priorities, harmonise technical standards, and create integrated supply chains that span both jurisdictions. Indian-processed minerals can feed European battery gigafactories; European technology and capital can accelerate the development of Indian processing infrastructure. This is not a quick fix; building world-class processing capacity requires years of investment and learning. But the alternative—continued dependence on Chinese processing—is strategically untenable.
The Circular Economy: Recycling as Geopolitical Strategy
The analysis identifies recycling as a particularly promising avenue for India-EU collaboration, and for good reason. Recycling offers a pathway to bypass China’s processing dominance without replicating its massive investments in primary extraction and refining.
Europe has established itself as a global leader in the circular economy. The European Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan have created a comprehensive regulatory framework for waste reduction, material recovery, and secondary raw materials. European industry has developed advanced technologies for recovering critical minerals from end-of-life products, including lithium-ion batteries, electronics, and industrial equipment.
India, while a late entrant to the recycling economy, possesses significant structural advantages. It is already one of the world’s largest generators of electronic waste, with an informal recycling sector that, while environmentally problematic, demonstrates the potential for large-scale material recovery. The transition from informal to formal, from hazardous to sustainable, from low-efficiency to high-technology recycling is a massive undertaking—but it is also a generational opportunity.
Collaboration between India and the EU in this domain can take multiple forms. European recycling technology and process expertise can accelerate the modernisation of India’s e-waste management sector. Indian companies can supply recovered critical minerals to European battery manufacturers, creating a circular supply chain that reduces dependence on primary extraction in geopolitically risky regions. Joint research and development programmes can advance the science of urban mining, improving recovery rates and reducing the environmental footprint of recycling operations.
The strategic significance of recycling extends beyond its economic and environmental benefits. By prioritising the recovery of critical minerals from end-of-life products over the development of new mines, India and the EU can decouple their green transitions from the geopolitics of resource extraction. They cannot eliminate their dependence on imported minerals, but they can significantly reduce its strategic vulnerability.
The Institutional Architecture: From Declaration to Implementation
The Joint India-EU Comprehensive Strategic Agenda provides the declaratory framework for critical minerals cooperation. The Trade and Technology Council (TTC), established in 2022, offers an institutional mechanism for implementation. The analysis proposes expanding the TTC’s scope and ambition to include critical minerals as a dedicated focus area, potentially through a separate task force reporting to the existing working groups on clean energy and trade.
This proposal is sound, but it is not sufficient. Institutional structures are necessary but not sufficient for effective cooperation. What is required, in addition, is political commitment at the highest level, sustained over years and across electoral cycles. Critical minerals partnerships are not built through occasional summit meetings and joint declarations; they are built through the patient, unglamorous work of negotiating technical standards, harmonising regulations, and aligning investment incentives.
The India-EU partnership must also extend beyond government-to-government engagement to include cross-border private sector cooperation. The critical minerals value chain is dominated by private companies; governments can create enabling conditions, but they cannot directly control investment decisions or technology transfers. The TTC’s working groups should actively facilitate business-to-business connections, matching Indian mineral processors with European battery manufacturers, Indian e-waste recyclers with European technology providers, and Indian mining companies with European equipment suppliers.
The China Conundrum: Pragmatism, Transactionalism, and Strategic Autonomy
The analysis’s final section addresses the most sensitive and complex dimension of the India-EU critical minerals partnership: how to engage with China. Both parties are, in the author’s phrase, “concerned and overwhelmed” by China’s subsidy-linked overcapacity and domineering capabilities in solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Both are attempting to advance their interests through a “pragmatic and transactional approach” to Beijing.
The EU is considering mandating technology transfers and know-how from Chinese companies looking to invest within its jurisdiction. India is cautiously opening up to Chinese investments, including in government contracts. These are significant policy shifts that reflect a sober recognition of interdependence. Neither India nor the EU can fully decouple from Chinese supply chains in the short to medium term. The question is not whether to engage with China but on what terms.
The India-EU partnership can play a valuable role in shaping these terms. By coordinating their approaches to Chinese investment and technology transfer, India and the EU can avoid a race to the bottom in which each competes to offer more favourable terms to Chinese companies. By sharing information and best practices, they can develop common standards for evaluating and regulating Chinese investment. By presenting a unified front in multilateral forums, they can resist Chinese efforts to divide and conquer.
This is not an argument for containment or confrontation; it is an argument for strategic coherence. The India-EU partnership is not a military alliance or an anti-China bloc. It is a practical mechanism for advancing shared interests in supply chain resilience, technological innovation, and climate action. Its success will be measured not by the volume of anti-China rhetoric but by the tangible outcomes it produces in diversified supply chains, expanded processing capacity, and circular economy infrastructure.
Conclusion: The Ore and the Order
The green transition is often framed as a story of technological optimism—of falling battery costs, ever-more-efficient solar panels, and the inexorable expansion of renewable energy. This framing is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. The transition is also a story of geological constraint, industrial concentration, and strategic vulnerability. The minerals that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy are not distributed evenly across the globe; they are concentrated in a handful of countries, processed by a single dominant actor, and subject to the same geopolitical rivalries that have always shaped access to natural resources.
India and the EU have both recognised this reality. Their individual responses—the Critical Raw Materials Act, the Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation Amendment Act, the pursuit of bilateral resource partnerships—are necessary but insufficient. Neither party can match China’s scale, integration, and strategic patience alone. Together, however, they can begin to construct an alternative.
This alternative will not be built quickly. It will require sustained investment in domestic processing capacity, coordinated engagement with mineral-rich countries, and a strategic commitment to the circular economy. It will require difficult trade-offs between environmental protection and resource development, between domestic industry promotion and international partnership. It will require patience, persistence, and a clear-eyed assessment of what is achievable and what is not.
The India-EU critical minerals partnership, embedded within the broader framework of the trade agreement and the Trade and Technology Council, is not a solution to the challenge of Chinese dominance. It is, at best, the beginning of a solution—a recognition that the status quo is unsustainable and that collective action is the only viable alternative. Whether this beginning can be translated into operational cooperation, tangible projects, and measurable outcomes depends on the political will and strategic foresight of both parties.
The ore is in the ground; the order is yet to be built.
Q&A Section
Q1: What is the nature and extent of China’s dominance in the critical minerals supply chain, and why is this dominance considered a strategic vulnerability for India and the EU?
A1: China’s dominance is overwhelming and strategically constructed. It is not primarily a function of geological endowment—China is a net importer of rare earths and many other critical minerals. Rather, it is a product of decades of strategic industrial policy, massive state investment, and systematic overseas mine acquisitions. China controls more than 80 per cent of global rare earth processing capacity, more than 60 per cent of lithium refining, and more than 70 per cent of cobalt refining. This concentration is unmatched in any other industrial sector.
This dominance is considered a strategic vulnerability because it creates a single point of failure in the supply chains essential for the green transition and advanced manufacturing. An electric vehicle battery cannot be manufactured without processed lithium, cobalt, and nickel; a wind turbine cannot be built without rare earth magnets; a solar panel cannot be produced without polysilicon. If China were to restrict exports of processed critical minerals—as it has already done with gallium and germanium—the impact on Indian and European industries would be immediate and severe. The vulnerability is not hypothetical; it has been demonstrated and weaponised. Diversifying away from Chinese processing capacity is therefore not an economic preference but a strategic imperative.
Q2: What are the shared constraints that limit India and the EU’s ability to develop domestic upstream mining capacity, and how does the proposed partnership address these constraints?
A2: Both India and the EU face structural, geological, and regulatory constraints in upstream mining. Geologically, neither possesses the rich deposits of lithium, cobalt, or rare earths concentrated in a handful of countries. Even with aggressive domestic exploration, they cannot achieve self-sufficiency. Regulatorily, both jurisdictions have lengthy, complex, and uncertain permitting processes. Mining projects require a decade or more from discovery to first production, with multiple clearance stages, environmental assessments, and legal challenges. India’s 2023 amendment to the Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation Act and the EU’s 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act attempt to streamline these processes, but their impact on actual project timelines remains unproven. Socially, mining projects face determined local opposition and struggle to secure social license.
The proposed partnership does not attempt to overcome these constraints through domestic extraction. Instead, it addresses them through coordinated engagement with mineral-rich third countries. India and the EU have signed overlapping MoUs with several countries—Congo, Argentina, Chile, Namibia—and can leverage their combined market power to negotiate more favourable terms, pool information, align investment strategies, and offer long-term procurement guarantees. This approach acknowledges that security of supply cannot be achieved through autarky; it must be achieved through diversified, reliable, and mutually beneficial international partnerships. The 70 per cent overlap in critical minerals lists provides a natural basis for such coordinated action.
Q3: Why is the processing stage of the critical minerals value chain described as a “chokepoint,” and what specific forms of India-EU collaboration are proposed to address this vulnerability?
A3: The processing stage is a “chokepoint” because Chinese dominance at this stage is even more concentrated than at any other point in the value chain. China controls more than 80 per cent of rare earth processing, more than 60 per cent of lithium refining, and more than 70 per cent of cobalt refining. This concentration creates a single point of failure that cannot be bypassed through mine diversification alone; even if India and the EU secure access to diverse raw mineral sources, those minerals must still be processed, and China currently dominates processing capacity.
The proposed India-EU collaboration addresses this vulnerability through multiple, complementary approaches. First, technology transfer and co-development: The EU possesses advanced processing technologies developed through initiatives like the European Battery Alliance; India has ambitious plans to develop domestic nickel and lithium processing capacity. Collaborative technology partnerships can accelerate India’s learning curve while creating markets for European equipment and expertise. Second, integrated supply chains: Rather than developing parallel, uncoordinated processing capacity, India and the EU can align their investments to create integrated, cross-border value chains. Indian-processed minerals can feed European battery manufacturing; European capital and technology can support Indian processing infrastructure. Third, joint strategic projects: The partnership can identify and jointly fund specific processing facilities—rare earth magnet plants, lithium refineries, nickel smelters—that serve both markets. The analysis notes that current engagement remains “relatively nascent, with no project-level outcomes as yet,” underscoring the urgency of moving from declaration to implementation.
Q4: Why is recycling described as both an “environmental imperative” and a “geopolitical strategy,” and what specific advantages do India and the EU bring to collaboration in this domain?
A4: Recycling is an environmental imperative because the extraction and processing of primary minerals have significant ecological and social impacts—habitat destruction, water contamination, carbon emissions, and human rights abuses in artisanal mining operations. Maximising the recovery of critical minerals from end-of-life products reduces the need for new mines and mitigates these impacts. It is a geopolitical strategy because recycling creates a domestic, circular supply chain that bypasses China’s processing dominance. Minerals recovered from Indian and European e-waste do not need to be processed in China; they can be fed directly into Indian and European manufacturing.
India and the EU bring complementary advantages to this collaboration. Europe possesses advanced recycling technologies, comprehensive regulatory frameworks (the European Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan), and integrated industrial ecosystems for material recovery. India possesses massive e-waste stockpiles—it is already one of the world’s largest generators of electronic waste—and an existing, if informal, recycling sector. The transition from informal to formal, from low-efficiency to high-technology, from environmentally hazardous to sustainable recycling is a massive undertaking, but it is also a generational opportunity.
Collaboration can take multiple forms. European technology and process expertise can accelerate the modernisation of India’s e-waste management sector. Indian companies can supply recovered critical minerals to European battery manufacturers, creating circular supply chains. Joint R&D programmes can advance the science of urban mining, improving recovery rates and reducing environmental footprints. By prioritising recycling over mining, India and the EU can decouple their green transitions from the geopolitics of resource extraction. They cannot eliminate dependence on imported minerals, but they can significantly reduce its strategic vulnerability.
Q5: What is the “China conundrum” facing India and the EU, and how can their partnership help them navigate a “pragmatic and transactional” approach to Beijing?
A5: The “China conundrum” is the fundamental tension between strategic autonomy and economic interdependence. India and the EU are both determined to reduce their dependence on Chinese supply chains for critical minerals, batteries, solar panels, and electric vehicles. Yet both are also deeply integrated into those same supply chains and cannot fully decouple in the short to medium term. Chinese companies possess essential technologies, manufacturing capacity, and investment capital that neither India nor the EU can readily replace.
Both parties are responding to this conundrum by adopting a “pragmatic and transactional” approach. The EU is considering mandating technology transfers and know-how from Chinese companies seeking to invest within its jurisdiction. India is cautiously opening up to Chinese investments, including in government contracts. These are significant policy shifts that reflect a sober recognition of interdependence.
The India-EU partnership can play a valuable role in shaping the terms of this engagement. First, by coordinating their approaches to Chinese investment and technology transfer, India and the EU can avoid a race to the bottom in which each competes to offer more favourable terms. Second, by sharing information and best practices, they can develop common standards for evaluating and regulating Chinese investment. Third, by presenting a unified front in multilateral forums such as the Mineral Security Partnership, they can resist Chinese efforts to divide and conquer.
This is not an argument for containment or confrontation; it is an argument for strategic coherence. The India-EU partnership is not a military alliance or an anti-China bloc. It is a practical mechanism for advancing shared interests in supply chain resilience, technological innovation, and climate action. Its success will be measured not by the volume of anti-China rhetoric but by the tangible outcomes it produces in diversified supply chains, expanded processing capacity, and circular economy infrastructure. The partnership’s approach to China should be neither naive nor hostile, but clear-eyed, coordinated, and calibrated.
