Finding ukku for the digital age

Long before lithium and silicon powered our world, India’s forges produced ukku, or Wootz steel, a material so advanced that it gave Damascus blades their famed strength and shimmering pattern. This was more than metallurgy; it was geopolitics. Damascus controlled the brand, but India held the secret of conversion, transforming ore into high-carbon crucible steel. That mastery made India a global material power two millennia ago.

Today, the same principle defines the modern world. Power lies beyond owning raw materials and mines, in mastering the refining and processing of critical minerals. Lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth elements (REEs) are essential for semiconductors, batteries, wind turbines, and defence systems.

China saw this future early. Beginning in the late 1970s, it built dominance by mining but also by controlling the midstream – the complex, chemical-intensive refining stages that turn raw ore into high-purity material. While China mines less than 70% of the world’s rare earths, it refines more than 90% of them. It processes nearly all the world’s battery-grade graphite and over two-thirds of global lithium output into usable chemicals.

This control was achieved through patient industrial policy, state support, and the acceptance of early environmental costs, which deterred Western competitors. The result is extraordinary leverage. When Beijing imposed export controls on gallium and germanium – metals vital for advanced chips – it instantly exposed the world’s dependence. And the more recent Nexperia issue involves the Dutch government taking control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned chipmaker, due to national security concerns and potential technology transfer to China. China retaliated by temporarily blocking Nexperia’s chip exports, disrupting the global automotive supply chain and causing significant problems in the UK, which had previously blocked a separate Nexperia takeover on national security grounds. The situation appears to be de-escalating after a recent US-China deal, though the core tensions remain.

The United States and Europe are trying to rebalance this equation. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the US and the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) in the EU both aim to rebuild refining and recycling capacity at home or in “friendly” countries. These are serious efforts, but they face steep hurdles – high capital costs, slow permitting, and stringent environmental standards. Diversification will take years, not months. For India, this new material map presents both opportunity and urgency. The country sits on rich endowments – an estimated 5.9 million tonnes of lithium in Jammu and Kashmir, vast monazite sands containing rare earths along the coasts, and roughly 11% of global ilmenite and rutile reserves for titanium. Yet India’s refinement gap is stark. We extract some minerals but process a few into high-value products. Without mastering this step, India risks becoming an exporter of ore and an importer of technology – the reverse of the ukku era.

The newly launched National Critical Mineral Mission is an important start. It brings exploration, processing, and recycling under one policy umbrella and opens rare-earth mining to private participation. But to close the refinement gap, India must now move from policy to plant.

Focus and integrate. Select two or three strategic value chains – for example, mine-to-magnet for electric-motor rare earths, and mine-to-cell chemicals for lithium batteries. Assign each a lead public-private consortium with explicit offtake guarantees. The titanium sponge programme led by ISRO, DMRL, and KMML shows that this model works.

Build processing parks. Establish National Mineral Processing Zones within the next three years – industrial clusters with power, water, and pre-cleared environmental approvals: Co-locate R&D centres and pilot plants to compress innovation timelines.

Go outward to secure inputs, but refine inward. Through KABIL, India should lock in equity or offtake deals in lithium- and cobalt-rich nations, ensuring that concentrates are processed in India – the goal: partial self-reliance within five to seven years in at least two critical minerals.

Recycle and substitute. By 2030, battery recycling must become a mainstream domestic industry. Standards for design-for-disassembly and digital tracking of EV batteries can ensure a steady flow of recovered lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Simultaneously, India should invest in sodium-ion batteries and non-rare-earth magnets to reduce long-term vulnerabilities.

Two thousand years ago, India shaped the world’s most sophisticated steel and traded it for global renown. In the 21st century, the challenge is to recreate that legacy with the materials of the digital age. If the next decade sees India mastering the chemistry between rock and product – the transformation from ore to oxide, from metal to magnet – we will once again move from ingot to influence, from ukku to neodymium.

(The writer is The former CTO of Tata Group and founder of AI company Myelin Foundry is driven to peel off known facts to discover unknown layers.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.