New Delhi: The Ministry of Mines is working to register India's first mineral exchange and expects it to begin operating by the next financial year. Additional Mines Secretary Veena Kumari Dermal said on Tuesday that registration was already in progress. She was speaking at the 60th annual general meeting of the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (FIMI).
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"We expect to register and operationalise the first Mineral Exchange by the next financial year. Work on the registration of the exchange is currently under way," Dermal said.
The platform will be set up under the Mineral Exchange Rules, 2026, which the ministry notified in June.
Minerals will be traded on the exchange electronically, and every trade will end in physical delivery. The aim is transparent trading in which prices are set by the market. That should narrow the information gap that now separates producers from buyers.
Dermal said the rules had been framed to build a state-of-the-art platform. Prices on it would be discovered transparently, and quality would be assessed against common standards. To guard against market manipulation and protect those trading on it, the exchange will have risk-management mechanisms. She said producers and buyers would get a marketplace for minerals that was dependable and could compete globally.
Dermal set the exchange against a wider push to cut India's dependence on imported minerals. She described minerals as the backbone of infrastructure, manufacturing and national energy security. Building a self-reliant economy, she said, is India's primary objective as it works towards the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision.
According to Dermal, India's import bill shows how large that task is. The country imported minerals worth Rs 10.12 lakh crore in 2025-26 alone. She said the industry would have to grow to ease this pressure on the national exchequer. That would mean building domestic capacity, raising output and making better use of the country's own resources.
Dermal said the sector had grown strongly over the past decade and credited the ministry's policy reforms for the rise. The value of mineral production was between Rs 49,900 crore and Rs 50,000 crore in 2013-14. By 2025-26 it had reached Rs 1.86 lakh crore, which works out to a compound annual growth rate of 11.6 percent.
Output of individual minerals rose over the same years. Iron ore production doubled, from 152 million tonnes (MT) in 2013-14 to 312 MT last year. Limestone output went from 280 MT to 483 MT, and bauxite from 22 MT to 26 MT.
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That rise, Dermal said, still fell short of what India needs. "We are seeing the increase in mineral production, but that is not sufficient to meet the aspiration of the country," she said.
