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India’s prime minister Narendra Modi this month hailed a “new energy” in New Delhi’s relationship with the “entire” Latin America, because the world’s fastest-growing main economic system tries to deepen ties with the continent to safe the minerals it wants to fulfill its formidable inexperienced power targets.
Latin America has the world’s largest lithium reserves and India is pushing mining teams to pursue reserves within the “lithium triangle” — between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile — the place many of the area’s confirmed assets are situated.
In current weeks, Modi met Chilean President Gabriel Boric in New Delhi to focus on the “long-term supply of minerals” — notably these essential for the power transition, corresponding to copper and lithium. “Naturally, critical minerals are a key piece in the matrix,” mentioned Periasamy Kumaran, a high Indian overseas ministry official, referring to Chile.
The newfound quest for minerals displays Modi’s formidable dedication of reaching web zero carbon emissions by 2070 in a rustic that’s the third-biggest carbon polluter globally.
“India’s outreach to Latin America reflects a growing awareness in Delhi that securing access to critical minerals is now a strategic imperative,” mentioned Oliver Stuenkel, a BRICS skilled at Brazil’s Fundação Getulio Vargas. “This is about boosting India’s role in the global supply chain of the energy transition.”
New Delhi final month additionally hosted an India-Latin America enterprise gathering, targeted on entry to the minerals wanted to fulfill its formidable purpose of getting 30 per cent of its automobiles powered by electrical energy by 2030.
“They made it clear, almost obsessively, that they want to source critical minerals — it’s a raison d’être now,” mentioned a South American diplomat in India.
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Throughout Boric’s go to, Chile’s Codelco, the world’s greatest copper miner, agreed a take care of India’s state-run Hindustan Copper. It additionally mentioned it could provide copper concentrates to the Adani Group, owned by one in all India’s strongest tycoons and a Modi ally.
“India has huge appetite for copper, there’s a sense of urgency — we are a perfect match,” Máximo Pacheco, Codelco’s chair advised the Monetary Occasions in New Delhi.
He added that “India will absolutely soon become a big buyer of Chilean lithium”, a key element for electrical car batteries. The state-owned miner is taking a majority stake in Chile’s SQM, the world’s second-largest producer, as a part of Boric’s technique of bringing lithium below state management.
New Delhi has opened a number of new embassies in Latin America since Modi took workplace a decade in the past, the most recent in lithium-rich Bolivia. “Our idea is to open as many embassies as possible,” mentioned a senior Indian diplomat. “We were not focused on Latin America forcefully — now we are.”
Final 12 months, India signed an settlement with Argentina to lease 5 lithium blocks for exploration, and eventual extraction, in a “historic” deal between India’s state-owned Khanij Bidesh India and Catamarca Minera y Energetica Sociedad del Estado, which is owned by the provincial authorities.
“When it comes to India and Latin America, India cannot compete with China,” mentioned Manjeet Kripalani, government director at Gateway Home Indian Council on World Relations in Mumbai.
“But critical minerals are very important to us, we have great needs. If we want to sustain more than 1.4bn people, we need to go out to get the minerals we need and we will do that within our capacity.”
International minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met his Bolivian counterpart Celinda Sosa in March as corporations from India and Bolivia are “exploring the lithium ion battery sector in Bolivia”, in accordance to the Indian authorities.
Whereas lithium was solely lately present in India’s disputed northern territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the central state Chhattisgarh, India has modest reserves of copper in Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.
