On the morning of August 6, 2025, a retired Indian Navy officer named J.P. Singh climbed into a French submersible off the volcanic coast of the Azores and began a two and a half hour plunge into total darkness. By the time he reached bottom, Singh had spent about four hours there, becoming the first Indian to touch five thousand metres, while a colleague, Ramesh, spent five hours nearby practising navigation and tracking objects. No sunlight has ever reached those depths. The pressure there would crush an unprotected human before they understood what was happening.
Singh wasn’t there to make history for its own sake. He and his team from India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology were training in the borrowed French vessel Nautile specifically to prepare for the day, expected around December 2027, when they descend to six thousand metres inside a submersible built entirely in India. “What ISRO is for space,” the project’s director, Dr. Vedachalam N, likes to say, “NIOT is for the oceans.”
That comparison is more apt than it sounds. Both missions are heading somewhere nobody from the country has been. But the ocean floor has an image problem the moon doesn’t as it looks empty from up here, a flat, featureless dark. It isn’t, rather it is similar to a library whose books have not yet been catalogued, let alone opened, some of them worth a great deal of money, and most of them alive.
The seabed India is exploring contains three different kinds of mineral wealth. That distinction is important, because much of the coverage tends to lump them all together.
The first are polymetallic nodules, potato sized lumps of manganese, iron, nickel, copper and cobalt. They take an extraordinarily long time to form on the abyssal plain, often growing around something as small as a shark’s tooth or a piece of shell. India has had the right to explore for these nodules across 75,000 square kilometres of the Central Indian Ocean Basin since signing a contract with the International Seabed Authority, on March 25, 2002. The agreement was extended in 2017 and again in 2022, but it is due to expire on March 24, 2027. That date is important, and it has received surprisingly little attention.
As of this writing, it is less than six months away. A preliminary government estimate suggested that the basin could contain 380 million tonnes of nodules, potentially worth around $110 billion at 2021 metal prices. But those figures should not be mistaken for a guaranteed windfall. They represent an estimate of what may be present, not what can actually be recovered and sold at a profit, and the estimate is already five years old.
Polymetallic sulphides are a different story altogether. These deposits contain copper, zinc, silver, gold and platinum, and form around hydrothermal vents on parts of the seabed where the ocean floor is pulling apart. Superheated fluids rise through cracks in the Earth’s crust and, as they cool, leave these minerals behind. India has held a separate exploration contract for sulphides along the Central and Southwest Indian Ridge since 2016. That contract runs until September 2031.
In 2025, India signed another agreement, the first of its kind granted anywhere in the world, to explore for sulphides across 10,000 square kilometres of the Carlsberg Ridge. This is the underwater zone where the Indian and Arabian tectonic plates are slowly moving away from each other. The new contract means India is now the only country with two separate licences to explore polymetallic sulphides.
Together, those licences give India the largest total area on Earth set aside for polymetallic sulphide exploration.
India is also interested in a third kind of deposit, although it does not have the rights to explore it yet, cobalt rich ferromanganese crusts. These deposits spread across the sides of seamounts, forming a thin mineral layer that is almost like paint on an underwater mountain. In January 2024, India applied for exploration rights in the Afanasy Nikitin Seamount in the central Indian Ocean, at the same time as it submitted its application for the Carlsberg Ridge.
The application remains pending because Sri Lanka has made a competing claim over the continental shelf under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS. That delay points to an aspect of India’s deep sea plans that is easy to overlook, the obstacles do not come only from major powers such as China and the United States. They can also arise from unresolved maritime claims involving a neighbouring country.
Two points in these figures also need to be kept in mind. An exploration contract allows a country to study an area, map its geology and collect samples. It does not give permission to start mining. At present, no country has an approved commercial exploitation contract for minerals in the international seabed, including India.
It is also misleading to treat the ‘deep sea’ as one uniform place. Abyssal plains, hydrothermal vents and seamounts are separate environments, each with its own ecosystems, vulnerabilities and recovery timelines. Damage or disruption in one may not have the same consequences, or take the same amount of time to heal, as it would in another.
The argument in favour of these minerals is easy to understand. Nickel, cobalt and manganese are used in batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage, while copper is essential to almost every part of the shift towards renewable energy. Some of the same metals are also needed for defence electronics and aerospace manufacturing, industries in which countries are increasingly reluctant to depend on potential rivals.
But saying that these minerals are valuable is not the same as proving that mining them from three kilometres below the ocean surface makes sense. That distinction is often lost in the way the issue is discussed.
For the foreseeable future, land-based mines will continue to supply most of these metals. Battery technology is also changing quickly, which means a mineral considered ‘critical’ today may not be as important tomorrow. Lithium-iron phosphate batteries, for instance, do not require cobalt at all. At the same time, recycling is improving and manufacturers are looking for substitutes.
Then there is the practical challenge. Extracting minerals from four kilometres below the surface means operating through a column of water exerting pressure strong enough to crush a car. The equipment, energy, transport and processing involved would make the operation technically punishing and extremely expensive. That is why a headline claiming a ‘$110 billion resource’ does not tell us what the resource would actually be worth in the real world.
The need to secure strategic minerals is a legitimate argument. But by itself, it does not prove that deep sea mining is the right way to secure them.
The Deep Ocean Mission was approved by the Union Cabinet on June 16, 2021, with a budget of ₹4,077 crore over five years. Its first three-year phase cost ₹2,823.4 crore. The 2025-26 Union Budget carved out ₹600 crore specifically for its manned submersible arm, Samudrayaan. It is easy to describe this as a mining programme. However, it is more accurately a capability-building programme that happens to include mining as one of several goals, alongside biodiversity research, ocean climate services and underwater robotics.
Its most visible product is Matsya 6000, a 2.1 metre titanium alloy sphere with an 80 millimetre wall built to survive pressures beyond 720 bars, carrying three people, eight electric thrusters good for about three knots, a 125 kilowatt/hour battery, and life support rated for twelve to sixteen hours with a 96 hour emergency reserve. It completed harbour wet trials at Kattupalli Port near Chennai between January 27 and February 12, 2025, eight dives in total, a mix of unmanned and crewed runs. The honest timeline since then has slipped.
A senior official from the Ministry of Earth Sciences told reporters in August 2025 that the vehicle’s 500 metre demonstration dive, delayed roughly six months by a hold up in syntactic foam supplies from France, is now expected around mid 2026, and that the full six kilometre dive, once hoped for 2026 alongside India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight, has moved to December 2027. If it succeeds, India will become only the sixth nation, after the United States, Russia, Japan, France and China, to have sent a crewed submersible that deep.
Matsya 6000 is a scientific and engineering achievement in progress. It is not evidence that commercial mining is close.
The mining hardware has its own, less publicised lineage. NIOT’s crawler system, Varaha, uses involute tracks designed to compact rather than sink into the seabed’s extremely soft sediment, paired with a crusher and a flexible riser that pumps crushed nodules up to a surface ship. An in-situ soil testing instrument built for the same programme has already been demonstrated at 5,462 metres at India’s designated test mining site in the Central Indian Ocean Basin.
An earlier version, Varaha 1, was tested at roughly 5,270 metres in the Central Indian Ocean, while a later model, Varaha 3, operated at 1,200 metres inside India’s exclusive economic zone and successfully collected nodules between 60 and 120 millimetres across, with a further trial planned in the Andaman Sea. Put plainly, India can put a crawler on the abyssal seabed and bring nodules up. It has not yet demonstrated it can do this at commercial scale, continuously, or profitably.
India invests in all this for reasons that go beyond metal. A country that can survey and defend its own seabed can also protect the undersea cables running through the Indian Ocean, map its own continental shelf with authority, and sit at the table when the rules of ocean governance are written rather than simply being handed them.
Capability, in other words, is itself the strategic asset, arguably more than the nodules are.
This is where the deep sea mining debate becomes difficult to dismiss. The ocean floor is often described as a barren, lifeless stretch of mud. It is neither.
Take the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific, one of the places companies are looking at for seabed mining. Researchers from London’s Natural History Museum went through more than 100,000 records from the region and identified 5,578 animal species. But there was a striking catch, scientists have not yet given a proper name to roughly 88 to 92 per cent of them.
We are discussing the possibility of disturbing an ecosystem before we have even finished finding out what lives there.
The list keeps changing. In April 2026, researchers described 24 new species of amphipods, small, shrimp like creatures found about four kilometres below the surface. Some ambush their prey. Others feed on the sediment. Every new discovery makes the same point, our picture of the deep sea is still incomplete. It is not a finished catalogue; it is a book scientists are continuing to write.
The clearest evidence of what mining might do came from a large-scale trial in the eastern Pacific in 2022. A mining machine worked at a depth of 4,280 metres and brought up more than 3,000 tonnes of nodules. Scientists had studied the area for two years before the test and returned two months afterwards. Across four expeditions, they examined 4,350 animals living in the seabed sediment, representing 788 species, mostly worms, crustaceans and molluscs.
The biggest impact appeared along the machine’s tracks. The number of animals there fell by 37 percent, while the number of species dropped by 32 percent. Researchers also accounted for the area’s natural ups and downs, including changes linked to El Nino and the amount of food sinking from the surface. Even after those factors were considered, the effect of the mining tracks was clear.
The sediment plume had a subtler effect. About 400 metres from the tracks, the total number of animals did not fall noticeably. But the balance of species changed. Some became more common, others became less so. That may sound less dramatic than a visible population collapse, but it still represents a loss of biodiversity. An ecosystem can retain roughly the same number of animals while quietly losing the variety that makes it an ecosystem in the first place.
Recovery does not necessarily mean that an ecosystem has been restored. One study that returned to the site of a mining experiment carried out in 1979 found that the scars were still visible on the seabed 44 years later. The machine had left behind an eight metre wide strip without nodules, along with two deep grooves marking its path. Some small, mobile creatures and gelatinous, amoeba like organisms known as xenophyophores had begun to return. But the larger animals that attach themselves to the seafloor had barely come back at all. Forty-four years is a long time, longer than the entire history of environmental law dealing with deep sea mining.
The bigger concern is not only what these studies have shown, but what they still cannot tell us. A single experiment monitored for two years can reveal a great deal about that particular site. It cannot, however, tell us everything about an area the size of the Pacific, much less about the Central Indian Ocean Basin, where scientific surveys remain extremely limited.
The argument for a cautious approach is not difficult to understand. Mining would mean scraping away the upper layers of the seabed, sending clouds of sediment through the water, burying slow growing organisms and disrupting food webs that have taken thousands, perhaps millions, of years to develop. And all of this would happen in places so deep and dark that monitoring the damage would be difficult. These are documented risks, not exaggerated claims made by campaigners.
By the end of 2025, around 40 countries were calling for either a moratorium or a precautionary pause on seabed mining until scientists know more and stronger rules are in place. At the International Seabed Authority’s Council meeting in March 2026, Secretary General Leticia Carvalho again stressed that any country trying to authorise mining outside the ISA system would run against the principle that the international seabed is the common heritage of humankind.
Her position was that the only credible way forward is a complete and enforceable global rulebook, rather than individual countries acting on their own. Carvalho has said she wants the Mining Code’s exploitation rules completed by the end of 2026. Critics, however, warn that moving too quickly could produce weak regulations for an ecosystem that may not recover easily from damage.
That does not mean the case for staying involved is simply a corporate argument. If countries walk away from the process, mining may not stop, they may only lose the chance to influence the rules governing it. Developing countries can also make a legitimate case for access to minerals that wealthy industrialised nations secured first, often by causing severe damage through land based mining. And countries that continue to build technical expertise are better placed to demand stronger environmental safeguards from within the system, rather than limiting themselves to opposing mining from the outside.
That process is now being openly challenged. In January 2026, The Metals Company’s US subsidiary submitted what it described as the first combined application to the American ocean regulator, NOAA, seeking both permission to explore and a permit for commercial recovery in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The move avoids the International Seabed Authority’s system and relies instead on an American framework developed after President Trump’s 2025 executive order supporting seabed mining in international waters.
The main application covers about 65,000 square kilometres and contains an estimated 619 million tonnes of nodules. A second area, measuring roughly 122,000 square kilometres and said to contain around 1.02 billion tonnes, is being considered separately.
NOAA began a 60-day public consultation on August 19, 2026, with comments open until October 19 and a public hearing scheduled for October 13. The company expects a decision by early 2027. But there is an important qualification: even if the applications move forward, that would not automatically mean mining has been authorised.
The confusion deepens elsewhere. In July 2026, the ISA’s own technical body recommended extending the exploration contract held by Nauru’s sponsored contractor, a company closely linked to the same American group. That recommendation came while the contractor remained under a formal inquiry into possible non-compliance with its existing contract. The result is an awkward picture, the institution responsible for regulating the international seabed is itself being asked to extend the rights of a contractor whose conduct is under scrutiny. No one in this story, including the regulator, is entirely free of complications.
Compared with Washington’s decision to act on its own and Beijing’s habit of keeping its plans opaque, India’s approach looks more responsible. It has worked through the International Seabed Authority, applied for its exploration rights, followed the established process and invested in scientific research alongside its interest in mining. That deserves to be acknowledged, not because India has taken the easiest route, but because it has not.
Still, following the rules is only the starting point. It does not automatically mean India is ready for the next step. A closer examination raises questions that official statements usually leave unanswered.
How much independent environmental data has India collected from its own area of the ocean, rather than drawing conclusions from studies of Pacific sites operated by foreign contractors? Do NCPOR and NIOT have the money and institutional support to monitor the region continuously and publish the findings openly, instead of relying on occasional survey expeditions? Will the environmental results from India’s test mining site be made available for outside review, or treated as sensitive information, as military mapping data often is?
There are practical questions too. Does India have the facilities to refine and process these metals at home? If not, could it end up shipping raw nodules abroad, bearing the ecological risks while allowing another country to capture most of the economic gains? And how seriously will India consult its smaller Indian Ocean neighbours? Sri Lanka’s objection to the Afanasy Nikitin application should not be dismissed as a minor technical dispute. It may be an early example of the diplomatic problems that larger seabed ambitions will repeatedly create.
For now, there are no easy answers, partly because India has not yet been compelled to provide them. The approaching expiry of its Central Indian Ocean Basin contract in March next year could change that. India will have to seek another extension, show that it has reached the environmental and technical standard required to move closer to mining, or expose just how wide the distance remains between holding a licence and being ready, or entitled, to use it.
Soon, six countries will have the ability to send a person six kilometres beneath the sea. Far fewer will be able to map a seabed that remains largely unknown, identify species that science has never formally recorded and help create environmental rules for an activity no country has yet learned to regulate properly. That is the more important list, and India still has the chance to be part of it, perhaps even lead it.
India does not have to decide today whether it will eventually mine the Central Indian Ocean Basin. The more immediate question is what it wants its first lasting achievement at that depth to be, a mining permit or producing knowledge so valuable that every country entering the deep ocean has to rely on it. The seabed has existed for millions of years without asking anyone’s permission. India can afford to take the time needed to understand it properly before deciding what to do there.
NCRB data, CCTNS, TrackChild, Khoya-Paya, GHAR, helplines and Railway operations form a layered search system where finding a child is only the first step before verification, protection and safe restoration.
India could close part of that gap by creating a dedicated Brahmaputra Dam Monitor, modelled on the Stimson Center’s Mekong Dam Monitor. It could combine satellite imagery with river-gauge readings, rainfall records and seismic data.
In this third and final part, we will unpack every single layer of India’s energy roadmap for the next 20 to 30 years.
Selected issues, clear explanations and thoughtful perspectives—delivered when we publish.
