By Animesh Singh

Nov 13, New Delhi (IANS): The Centre is working on a strategy to acquire critical minerals, which are either rare or not available in the country. lithium, nickel and cobalt among others are some of the known critical minerals available across the world.

According to highly placed sources, the options which the Government is looking at are exploring for these strategic minerals within the country and acquiring mines abroad to source them.

Sources further informed that the main driving point behind sourcing strategic minerals is because of the supply chain disruptions across the world due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

They added that while such strategic minerals are already hard to find, due to the prevailing geo-political situation, their availability may become all the more difficult, therefore the Government plans to source them on priority.

Critical minerals are extremely significant for modern technological equipment like computers, mobile phones, electric vehicles and their batteries, semiconductors and solar panels as well as for defence equipment.

What further enhances the significance of these critical minerals is the fact that with several nations making a transition towards clean energy, any disruption in supply chain can seriously harm the economy of a nation which is overtly dependent on other countries for supply of such resources.

Thus. the government is working out a strategy to source such critical minerals as soon as possible and avoid a crisis-like situation.