Hyderabad: In what could be a strategy to limit India’s military capability, China is restricting the supply of rare earth and certain other metals, according to a top Defence Ministry official.
These metals are of vital importance in the development of several defence equipments and weapons.
Avinash Chander, DRDO chief and Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister, said on Wednesday that China has stopped the supply of basic metals like Tungsten in addition to rare earth metals.
Rare earth metals are vital components of sensors, actuators, communications and navigation systems and so forth for use in defence equipment. To add to it, India doesn’t have the requisite capability for supply of some of the finished metals for use in assembly of defence equipments.
Delivering a lecture at the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) as part of the AP Akademi of Sciences lecture series, Chander said, “Even in basic metals like Tungsten, we are struggling.
We developed the technology for Tungsten but it was set aside due to economic compulsions. Now China is not supplying the metal and there is a void.”
He further added, “India has very poor rare earth metal ores. But we still need to exploit them. China is now denying rare earth metals as well to us. We need to see what to do.”
A similar strategy was adopted by China denying the supply of rare earth metals to Japan in 2010 after a political dispute.
“When China and Japan had a clash, China stopped supplying rare earth metals and Japan came to a standstill. These metals are used practically everywhere from sensors to actuators,” Chander said.
China holds a monopoly over the supply of rare earth metals in the world, with more than half of the world’s deposits, and is feared for specifically to hold countries hostage.
However, in a recent paper, a former Pentagon official Eugene Gholz argued that other countries have also developed the technology to produce their own rare earth metals. However, by Chander’s own admission India doesn’t have the capability or quality ores.
Chander also stressed on the need to exploit existing resources and said the country needed to setup a buffer metals resource stock for emergency situations.
He outlined various sectors where the country was lagging. “We need to invest in capability infrastructure creation if we want to go for manufacture of high end equipment.
Today we are importing alloys like Aluminium-Lithium. In aerospace propulsion, single crystal turbine blades are still a key challenge. We are still working with German and French companies to get the technology to India.
We are lagging behind in higher speeds. We are not able to make world class engines because of lack of materials,” Chander pointed out.
He said the infrastructure needs to be setup by 2025 with aviation sector demand also going up. He said infrastructure capability development needs to be taken as a national challenge rather than just a lab experiment.
“Good thing is we are at least acknowledging now that these problems exist. A decade ago we were not even doing that,” Chander said.
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