Dragon-wary India fishes for metal

In a move to keep pace with Beijing's expanding footprint in the Indian Ocean, India's earth sciences ministry has been ordered to conduct surveys for strategic metals on the southern Indian Ocean seabed.

Updated on: Aug 20, 2012, 01:26:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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In a move to keep pace with Beijing's expanding footprint in the Indian Ocean, India's earth sciences ministry has been ordered to conduct surveys for strategic metals on the southern Indian Ocean seabed.

The field surveys will be the first step towards approaching the International Seabed Authority (ISBA) for a mandate to explore for metals ranging from gold to nickel in the South West Indian Ridge.

Strategic metals such as polymetallic sulphide are used in electronic gadgets.

"We have been sanctioned R95 crore to carry out on-field survey at the site and collect preliminary data before we approach the ISBA for deep sea exploration permit in the Indian Ocean this year," said Dr Shailesh Nayak, secretary, earth sciences ministry. "We need to make at least two trips to the area to have sufficient collated data on polymetallic sulphide nodule content in the proposed exploration area," he added.

A Norwegian vessel is in the process of being chartered by the shipping ministry. The deep sea exploration vehicle will reach Cape Town by September so that survey work begins without delay.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation and cabinet secretariat are also part of the inter-ministerial group set up to check Chinese influence in the area and prepare for deep sea exploration for metals in polysulphide nodules.

The initial cost of the project for harvesting polymetallic sulphides — known to exists at 3,500 metres in the tri-junction of South West, South East and Rodrigues ridge of the Indian Ocean — is around R400 crore.

While Chinese have a capacity for manned exploration at 7,000 metres, India had used ROSUB-6000 remote vehicle on board ship Sagar Nidhi to reach around 5,200 metres. The nearest land mass to the Indian Ocean mineral exploration area is Madagascar, located 2,000 km from the southern tip of India.

Official sources said China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association had already begun exploration work in the South West Indian Ridge to tap scarce natural resources.

Indian and Chinese naval presence in this remote area would take the competitive play between two Asian giants to a new dimension.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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