Policy for Exploration of Critical Minerals in New Projects and Recovery of Critical Minerals from Overburden, Dumps and Tailings of Existing Mines, 2025

Building on the goals of India’s National Critical Mineral Mission, the Ministry of Mines released a policy document that aims to promote domestic mineral production and recovery of critical minerals from the entire value chain, including new exploration, overburden, existing mines and processing operations, and tailings. 

The policy creates a coordinated approach among various government agencies that have administrative control over coal, non-coal minerals, atomic minerals, and petroleum, with the aim of identifying the location, quantity, and likely availability of critical minerals in all waste dumps, overburden, subgrade dump and tailing ponds in the country and evaluating the recoverability and economic viability of recovering critical minerals from there.

For this purpose, the policy sets out Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) consisting of standardised methodologies of sampling, analysis, and data reporting for identifying associated minerals:

1. During exploration of all non-coal minerals (Appendix I), coal and associated rocks (Appendix II), minor minerals like chalk, clay, sand (Appendix III), and atomic minerals like uranium, thorium, niobium (Appendix IV);
2. From existing mines and mine dumps/tailings of non-coal minerals (Appendix V), coal and lignite (Appendix VI), minor minerals (Appendix III), and atomic minerals (Appendix IV).

The policy also envisages the creation of a centralised database of all tailings dumps and ponds (including those that are abandoned or operated by a person other than the mineral concession holder) on a platform linked to the Geological Survey of India that may be made public. The database is proposed to catalogue the location, nature (dry/wet), status (operating/ abandoned), commodity, quantity, and quality of tailings. This may be expanded to include information on grade, tonnage, chemistry and hazard rating. 

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