India’s critical mineral imports in 2025 and a shift towards supply diversification

Introduction

India’s clean energy transition depends heavily on access to critical minerals. Visualising the scale and distribution of the country’s import dependence highlights not only where supply vulnerabilities exist, but also why securing reliable and diversified trade linkages is becoming a strategic priority.

India has set ambitious targets — installation of 500 gigawatts (GW) of non-fossil fuel electricity capacity and meeting 50% of its energy capacity from renewables by 2030. Achieving them will require massive expansion of solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles (EVs), all reliant on critical minerals, making secure supply essential. As a result, access to critical minerals is no longer just a supply chain concern, but central to energy security, industrial competitiveness, and the pace of the clean energy transition.

In this context, international trade plays a pivotal role. Given the long gestation periods associated with domestic mining, often exceeding a decade, and the time required to develop processing and refining ecosystems, imports will remain an important means of meeting near-to medium-term demand. Securing stable, affordable, and diversified sources of critical minerals through trade partnerships is therefore essential to avoid supply bottlenecks that could delay project deployment or increase costs.

However, the global landscape for critical minerals is becoming increasingly complex. Demand is expected to more than double by 2030, intensifying competition, even as geopolitical dynamics reshape supply chains. Concentration of mineral reserves and processing capacity in a few countries has heightened supply risks. At the same time, recent trends such as export restrictions, resource nationalism, and policies aimed at onshoring or friend-shoring supply chains, are fragmenting global markets. These developments could lead to price volatility, supply disruptions, and reduced availability for import-dependent countries like India.

Chile is India’s largest critical minerals supplier by a wide margin, primarily for copper ore, accounting for 2,800,000 tonnes of imports, from financial year (FY) 2019 to FY2025. China and other countries like Belgium, Germany and Japan also emerge as systemically important suppliers, supplying a wider range of mineral compounds across cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel value chains.

Of the 30 minerals deemed critical by the Government of India due to their economic importance and supply risk, this briefing note focuses on five minerals and their compounds for their relevance in renewable energy applications and technologies. These are cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel. India is currently 100% import dependent for lithium, cobalt and nickel.

The note builds on a 2024 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) ‘India’s hunt for critical minerals’, and expands the timeline to FY2025 to assess the developments and shifts that have taken place over the past year. Data on imports was collected from the United Nations Comtrade Database portal for the period of FY2019 to FY2025. The charts illustrate total import value and volume for each year, while highlighting only the top three contributing source countries for each year.

It also provides a perspective on trade dynamics, price fluctuations and market conditions that influence India’s critical mineral supply chain.