India, Australia, and the Critical Minerals Opportunity

The conversation opens with a useful baseline on both countries. Australia has world-class mining equipment, technology, and services capabilities, and its mining sector contributes roughly 10 to 15 percent of GDP, yet it remains predominantly a raw material exporter with limited domestic demand. India has a large and growing demand for minerals to fuel its manufacturing ambitions, a vast talent pool, and competitive labour and energy costs, but has historically underinvested in systematic exploration, reserve creation, and processing relative to its long-term needs. The complementarity is clear, but Professor Yellishetty is equally clear about what is missing: while government-to-government and university-to-university engagement is working well through mechanisms such as the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the Ministry of Mines MoU, and KABIL's engagement with Australia's Critical Minerals Facilitation Office, the business-to-business piece

On the Australia-India Critical Minerals Research Hub (AICMRH), the conversation traces its origins to a community of practice that came together during the COVID-19 lockdown, eventually growing to around 150 researchers. The Hub has since hosted national symposiums, submitted recommendations to ministries on both sides, and facilitated student exchanges, with institutional partnerships including Monash University's collaborations with IIT Bombay and IIT Hyderabad. Professor Yellishetty notes that the Hub's policy recommendations fed into discussions around India's first critical minerals list and the announcement of Centres of Excellence (CoE) under the National Critical Minerals Mission, launched in 2025. The next step, he argues, is institutionalising this through a Joint Centre of Excellence that can anchor commercial outcomes alongside research, including moving promising technologies such as environmentally benign processing methods like deep eutectic solvents from laboratory to pilot scale and eventually to commercial deployment.

Looking ahead, Professor Yellishetty organises the India-Australia opportunity into five buckets: policy and trade, technology research and development, investment and financing, skills and capacity building, and ESG learning. He sees particular promise in co-developing processing technologies rather than simply transferring them, spanning rare earth extraction, lithium value chains, and environmentally safer processing, as well as co-investing in third countries like Indonesia and Vietnam that hold significant mineral reserves. He also situates the bilateral relationship within the wider Quad framework, where Australia contributes mining and ESG expertise, Japan brings capital and downstream processing experience, and the United States offers technology and intellectual property, alongside India's scale and human capital. The ambition, ultimately, is to build India into not just a consumer of critical minerals but a processing hub capable of serving western markets.

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