PM Modi and Morrison draw roadmap to jointly tap lithium and other critical minerals

India and Australia are taking their Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to a new level with extensive collaboration to identify opportunities for strategic investment in Australian critical minerals projects.

During the second Virtual Summit between India and Australia on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison welcomed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between India's Khanij Bidesh India Limited and Australia's Critical Minerals Facilitation Office on March 10.

Through the MoU, Canberra is working with New Delhi to realise the shared ambition of developing robust and commercially viable critical minerals supply chains.

"As you can imagine, this is an important area for both our countries and this agreement would give us the opportunities to both invest in Australia's critical mineral sector and get Australian expertise in this area," said Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla after the summit.

Australia, which has been blessed with extraordinary reserves of the critical minerals, produces around half the world's lithium, is the second-largest producer of cobalt and the fourth-largest producer of rare earths.

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