The Thinking  /  The Ledger  /  Reading 07
07 Technological × Geopolitical #

India sits on one of the world's largest rare-earth endowments and turns under 1% of it into output.

Rank Country Rare-earth oxide
1 China 44.0 Mt
2 Brazil 21.0 Mt
3 India ~8.52 Mt
4 Australia 6.3 Mt
5 Russia 3.8 Mt
The reading — and its limits The constraint was never geology. Comparator countries are on USGS reserves; India's figure is its own AMD in-situ resource (adjacent measures, so the rank is order-of-magnitude) — and we use India's own primary because the originator outranks the aggregator (USGS itself currently lists India as “NA”). India's decade of rare-earth trade: nil imports, 18 tonnes exported.

Method Endowment from India's AMD/DAE, read from the PIB Parliament record; output and world-share from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, read directly.

Computed 22 June 2026

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