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The MMDR Amendment Act 2025 (Act No. 28 of 2025) is the most consequential amendment to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 since the 2023 amendment that transferred lithium, niobium, beryllium, titanium, zirconium, and REE-bearing minerals from the atomic-minerals restricted list to the general-minerals auction-eligible list. The 2025 amendment operates across five structural dimensions:
1. Captive-mine sale-cap removal. Prior law capped captive-mine production eligible for third-party sale at 50% after meeting the holder's own end-use requirements. The Act removes this cap entirely — captive-block holders (including major integrated steel producers like Tata Steel, JSW Steel, and SAIL, and non-ferrous miners like Vedanta and Hindalco) can now sell the entirety of surplus output on the open market. This structurally increases the volume of domestically produced ore available to merchant buyers, potentially compressing import dependence for coking coal, iron ore, and manganese.
2. NMET → NMEDT mandate expansion. The National Mineral Exploration Trust, established to fund upstream exploration, is renamed the National Mineral Exploration and Development Trust and given an expanded statutory mandate to fund both exploration and mine development. Critically, the NMEDT mandate now explicitly covers: (a) offshore-area mineral operations, and (b) overseas mineral asset acquisition — operationalising KABIL (Khanij Bidesh India Limited), the GOI-mandated JV that pursues overseas critical-mineral assets in Argentina (lithium, Salta/Jujuy), Australia (lithium, cobalt), Chile (lithium), DRC (cobalt, copper), and Mongolia (coking coal). The NMEDT royalty contribution is raised from 2% to 3% of royalty revenue, expanding the financing pool available to KABIL-routed acquisitions.
3. Part-D auction-premium waiver. The MMDR Act first schedule Part D lists 24 of the 30 notified critical minerals (notified by Ministry of Mines on 28 June 2023), including lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, REE, beryllium, niobium, tantalum, tungsten, antimony, PGM, indium, gallium, vanadium, molybdenum, tin, and selenium. For these minerals, no additional amount (auction premium above reserve royalty rate) is required — eliminating the economic-rent extraction layer that had deterred bidders in prior auction rounds (notably the November 2023 and March 2024 tranches where multiple Part-D blocks received zero qualified bids).
4. Mineral Exchange statutory authority. The Act creates a new statutory authority mandated to register and regulate Mineral Exchanges — defined as electronic platforms for trading minerals and metals. This is the enabling legislation for a commodity-exchange-grade price-discovery and liquidity infrastructure for India's domestic minerals market, structurally comparable to the London Metal Exchange (LME), Singapore Exchange commodities (SGX), or Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) for base metals. The mandate includes non-ferrous metals and potentially encompasses critical minerals futures/spot trading — an important precondition for bankable offtake contracts in NCMM-backed projects.
5. Structural parent of India's 2025-26 critical-minerals policy stack. The MMDR Act is the primary statute under which the following already-filed IPTM instruments operate as implementing measures: