Every tonne of lithium that powers India’s electric vehicles today was imported. Every kilogram of cobalt. Nearly every gram of nickel and manganese. India imports close to 100% of the battery-grade critical minerals that sit at the heart of its clean energy ambition, and right now, there is no domestic mining alternative within reach.
India’s 5.9-million-tonne lithium reserve at Reasi, Jammu & Kashmir, was announced with considerable fanfare. Then the auction closed without a single qualified bid. Even if exploration accelerates from here, mine development takes 8 to 10 years. India’s EV transition cannot wait that long.
There is, however, a mine that already exists. It is not underground. It is in the millions of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries accumulating across India’s cities, industrial corridors, and electronics supply chains right now. This is urban mining and it is the only credible path to domestic critical mineral recovery in this decade.
The Numbers Behind the Urgency
NITI Aayog estimates that by 2030, India will generate approximately 128 GWh of recyclable lithium-ion batteries. EVs alone will account for nearly 46% of that volume. India’s current battery recycling capacity stands at roughly 2 GWh. That is a 60-fold gap between what the country will need to process and what it can handle today.
The cost of doing nothing is not abstract. Every tonne of battery-grade lithium carbonate that goes unrecovered is a tonne India must import. This is adding to a forex outflow that already runs into thousands of crore rupees annually on critical mineral imports alone.
What Urban Mining Actually Means
Urban mining is not waste disposal. It is resource recovery, extracting Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel, Manganese, Copper, Spherical Graphite, and Aluminium from end-of-life batteries and returning them to the supply chain at battery-grade purity.
At MiniMines, we do this using HYBRID-HYDROMETALLURGY™ – a proprietary process that recovers these materials without the toxic emissions of pyrometallurgy and without industrial wastewater discharge. The output is not scrap. It is battery-grade material suitable for direct re-entry into cathode active material manufacturing and Li-ion cell production.
This is the circular supply chain India’s gigafactories will need. As commissioned cell manufacturing capacity scales from the current 1.4 GWh toward the 100+ GWh announced under PLI-ACC, the demand for domestically-sourced, verifiable recycled feedstock will grow in parallel. Urban mining is not a sustainability checkbox,it is a supply chain imperative.
India-First is a Strategy
The argument for India-first critical mineral recovery rests on three pillars.
Supply security. Domestic recycled material reduces dependence on imports from geopolitically sensitive supply chains. Every kilogram of lithium recovered from an Indian battery is a kilogram India does not buy from abroad.
Policy alignment. The Battery Waste Management Rules 2022 mandate EPR recycling targets rising from 70% in FY25 to 100% by FY27. The National Critical Mineral Mission backs recycling infrastructure as a strategic priority. The regulatory framework is in place, it needs operating capacity behind it.
Economic value retention. Black mass exported overseas loses an estimated ₹300 crore per year in embedded cobalt, lithium, and nickel value. Full-cycle domestic refining, from collection through to battery-grade output keeps that value within India and within the supply chain.
India’s clean energy future cannot be built on imported minerals. The batteries are already here. The technology exists. The policy framework is live. What the country needs now is the industrial capacity to close the loop, and that is exactly what we are building at MiniMines.
