India is done waiting at the back of the global supply chain. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Wednesday, 4 November 2026 that the Union Cabinet has approved a landmark scheme to build domestic processing capacity for critical minerals — lithium, nickel, and cobalt — the raw sinew of the country's electric-vehicle, battery, electronics, and defence ambitions.

Why India's import dependence became a national vulnerability

The minerals Modi named are not niche commodities. Lithium powers every EV battery on Indian roads. Cobalt and nickel are embedded in everything from smartphones to guided-missile systems. Yet for all the ore that may lie beneath Indian soil, the country has remained a buyer of refined materials — meaning value addition, strategic leverage, and jobs have all flowed abroad.

That asymmetry is exactly what the Cabinet has moved to close. The approved scheme introduces new critical mineral processing plants, a capital subsidy to draw private investment, and a mandate for greater domestic value addition — aiming to build supply chains that do not snap the moment a foreign supplier or government decides to tighten the tap.

The policy arc: from mining rights to processing muscle

This is not India's first step down this road. The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act of 2023 expanded the official list of critical minerals and cracked open exploration and mining to private players. A year earlier, the Production Linked Incentive scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells, notified in 2021, began pushing domestic battery manufacturing forward. The Cabinet's latest move is the missing link: processing infrastructure that sits between raw ore and finished cell.

Detailed guidelines, plant locations, and subsidy disbursement timelines are still to be formally notified. State-owned efforts to secure overseas mineral assets — an important parallel track — are also expected to continue.

Modi's rhetorical challenge — and what it signals to industry

'Do you feel India should depend on other countries for processing the critical minerals that power our future? I certainly don't!' Modi wrote, framing the announcement not as a bureaucratic approval but as a civilisational posture. The principle, he said, is unambiguous: 'India must have capabilities to build technologies of the future.'

For EV manufacturers, battery producers, and the defence industry — all of whom currently navigate volatile import markets — the signal is direct: the government is backing domestic processing with real capital incentives, not just aspiration. The scheme arrives as global economies from the United States to the European Union race to onshore their own critical-mineral supply chains, and India is now formally in that race.

The measure of success will be in the plants that actually come online, the gigawatt-hours of domestically processed material that reach Indian factories, and the degree to which India's EV and defence sectors stop counting foreign refiners among their single points of failure.