India should prioritise recycling e-waste, battery waste and mine tailings to quickly secure critical minerals, said NITI Aayog’s Anupam Lahiri.
He argued mining alone cannot meet near-term needs, urging a viable recycling ecosystem, incentives and technology scale-up.
A new technical committee is studying recovery from tailings and industrial waste across major public and private firms.
India should prioritise recycling of e-waste, battery waste and mine tailings to strengthen its critical minerals supply chain while domestic mining capacity develops, a representative of the central government think tank NITI Aayog said at the 15th India Minerals & Metals Forum organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in New Delhi on July 2, 2026.
Speaking at the forum, Anupam Lahiri, programme director, NITI Aayog, said recovering critical minerals from existing waste streams offered the quickest route to reducing India's dependence on imports, as domestic exploration would take years to yield mineable reserves.
"India's critical minerals journey cannot depend on mining alone. Domestic exploration will take time, so we also need to focus on the resources that are already around us. E-waste, battery waste, mine overburden and tailings have the potential to become important sources of critical minerals if we can build the right ecosystem around them," he said.
Making recycling commercially viable, creating industry incentives and scaling up new technologies beyond pilot stage would be crucial, he added. Overseas partnerships would remain important, but "in the near term, recycling offers India the fastest and most practical path to strengthening its critical minerals supply", the expert observed.
NITI Aayog, he added, has constituted a technical committee to assess the recovery potential of critical minerals from mine tailings and overburden dumps, with presentations from Coal India, Singareni Collieries, Jindal Steel and Adani. Lahiri cited Neyveli Lignite Corporation's recovery of rare earth elements from fly ash as an early proof of concept.
ICC National Expert Committee on Minerals & Metals chairperson Dr Pankaj Satija said the government was pursuing a three-pronged strategy of accelerating domestic exploration, promoting e-waste recycling and recovering critical minerals from industrial waste such as steel slag and fly ash. He noted that India has identified 31 critical minerals and that more than 500 exploration blocks are currently under exploration, alongside international partnerships to strengthen supply chains.