Should India Mine the Ocean Floor Just Because It Can?

Should India Mine the Ocean Floor Just Because It Can?

India now holds three exploration contracts with the International Seabed Authority (ISA), covering close to 95,000 square kilometres of the Central Indian Ocean Basin, the Central Indian Ridge and the Carlsberg Ridge. Its surveys have identified an estimated 380 million tonnes of polymetallic nodules - rich in nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese - sitting on the seabed.

Under the Deep Ocean Mission, India has built the MATSYA-6000 manned submersible and tested a mining crawler at a depth of 5,270 metres. On paper, this reads as a straightforward success story: India developing frontier technology to secure minerals critical to its electric-mobility and renewable-energy ambitions.

My position: technological capability to mine the deep ocean is not, by itself, a reason to mine it. The right question is not "how do we extract these minerals with minimum damage" but "do we need to extract them at all."

Why capability isn't permission The deep ocean remains one of the least understood ecosystems on the planet.

India's own biodiversity surveys, spanning 19 seamounts, have catalogued around 1,300 deep-sea organisms - nearly 23 of them new to science, discovered during exploration that has barely scratched the surface. If routine survey work keeps turning up unknown life, there is no honest basis for confidently predicting what large-scale seabed disturbance would do to it.

Unlike a factory that can be shut down or a river that can, over decades, recover, a disturbed benthic ecosystem may simply not come back within any planning horizon that matters.

The strongest case for going ahead - and its limit The case for extraction is real, not manufactured: these minerals matter for batteries, for grid storage, for the entire electric-mobility supply chain India is trying to build domestically rather than import. Strategic self-reliance in critical minerals is a legitimate national interest. But strategic importance answers the question "would this help us"

• it does not answer "is this the only way to help ourselves." Before extraction is treated as necessary, India would need to show that recycling, material substitution, efficiency gains and circular-economy measures - the very principles Mission LiFE already commits the country to - cannot meet the same demand. That case has not been made. Necessity is being assumed, not demonstrated.

Where this leaves the debate Because India's ISA activity is still at the exploration stage, nothing about this argument asks India to abandon deep-sea science.

Exploration, biodiversity mapping and technology development can all continue and are valuable in their own right. What should not follow automatically is commercial mining. India is in the rare position of setting its own ecological threshold before, rather than after, the first tonne of nodules is extracted - a position most resource booms never afford a country.

That is worth protecting rather than spending quickly.