India's natural resources

By 2024, India was the world’s third largest economy based on purchasing power parity. India has been a source of cheap natural resources for much of the past 250 years, but signs showed that it may be transitioning into a supplier of finished goods and technology services as technology industries outpace agriculture and raw materials in the gross domestic product (GDP).

The Country

Located between 7.5° and 36° north latitude and 65° to 97.5° east longitude, India borders the regions of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar (Burma), with Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, China’s Xinjiang Province, and Tajikistan in close proximity. India includes the Andaman-Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and the Lakshadweep archipelago in the Arabian Sea. With a warm, humid climate and plentiful rivers, this region has seen continuous human habitation for more than ten thousand years and is home to a very diverse population of more than one billion people. Himalayan peaks in the northern part of the country rise well above 8,000 meters and slope down to the fertile northern Indus-Ganga-Brahmaputra plain. The Deccan Plateau in south-central India is bordered by the Eastern and Western Ghats mountain ranges along the respective coasts, the Vindhya-Satpuras to the north, and the Nilgiris in the South. Key resources in addition to ones already listed include aluminum, titanium, petroleum, natural gas, diamonds, limestone, and small reserves of uranium. Agriculture and dairy farming employed 46.1 percent of the workforce as of 2024.

Sunshine

India receives an average of three hundred days of annual sunshine, giving a theoretical solar power reception of 5 quadrillion kilowatt-hours per year. Dense population in most of India means that a good percentage of incident solar power can be captured at the point of use. The western Thar Desert and the dry Deccan plateau of central India are suited to large solar plants. India planned to use solar power to eliminate more than 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year by 2020. From March 2023 to March 2024, India added roughly 15 gigawatts of new solar power to its power grid.

Coastal Resources

India has a total of more than 7,000 kilometers of coastline, including the Andaman-Nicobar and Lakshadweep Islands. Fishing and salt extraction employ millions of people. The backwaters of Kerala on the southwest coast and the river deltas in the Rann of Kachchh and the Sunderbans in Bengal are unique ecosystems, enabling special rice crops and fishing. These resources sustain a large seafood industry that also specializes in prawns and shrimp. ICoconut and other palm-based industries are major employers in the coastal states.

Hydroelectric Potential

The Deccan plateau is relatively dry, while the coasts and northern plains receive heavy rains from the southwest monsoon (June to August) and the northeast monsoon (November to December), and the northern plains receive Himalayan snow melt through spring and summer. In 2016, 14 percent of Indian installed electricity capacity came from hydroelectric projects, and by 2022, India ranked sixth in the world in net hydroelectric generation.

Major hydroelectric projects are the Damodar Project, serving Jharkhand and West Bengal; Bhakra Nangal Dam on the Sutlej River, serving Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan; Hirakud Dam on the Mahanadi River in Orissa; on the Kosi River in Bihar; on the Chambal River, serving Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan; Thungabhadra Dam, serving Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; Nagarjuna Sagar Dam on the Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh; Narmada Dam, serving Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan; Indira Gandhi Canal, connecting the Beas and Sutlej rivers and serving Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan; Krishnaraja Sagar Dam in Karnataka; and Idukki Dam in Kerala. Micro-hydel plants are suitable for distributed generation in areas that are hard to reach for the main power grid. Large dam projects encounter extreme political opposition in India, stemming from public concern over the displacement of the generally poor people in the fertile catchment areas and the potential for earthquakes in a seismically active region.

Arable Land and Agriculture

The northern Gangetic Plain, spanning Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Punjab, and the eastern and western coastal strips of India have rich alluvial soil suitable for cultivation. The large Maharashtra-Gujarat region has black soil, suitable for cultivation of cotton and other crops that do not demand as much water as rice. Tropical rain forests and deciduous forests occur in the coastal and northeastern regions and in the Andaman-Nicobar Islands. Temperate forests and grasslands are found in the foothills of the Himalayas between 1,000 and 3,000 meters, rising to alpine and tundra regions above 3,600 meters. Terraced cultivation is practiced extensively in the mountains.

In 2022, the share of agriculture in the Indian GDP was 18.2 percent. However, the industry still employed more than 45 percent of the total Indian workforce. India is among the world’s leading producers of coconuts, tea, black pepper, turmeric, ginger, cashew nuts dairy milk, wheat, rice, sugar, peanuts (called “groundnuts” in India), freshwater fish, and tobacco. India also produces a significant amount of fruit, led by bananas and kiwifruit.

Farms are generally fragmented, averaging less than 20,000 square meters. Therefore, farming depends heavily on human labor. Exceptions are the larger wheat fields in the Punjab, where modern machinery enables efficiencies of scale. Tea, coffee, and rubber are major products from plantations in the hilly regions of Assam, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu/Kerala/Karnataka.

Since ancient times, the growing of crops in India was tied to the monsoon rains and northern snow melt flooding cycles, with limited establishment of artificial irrigation. Indian crop cycles are classified into three seasonal names: kharif (or monsoon) crops, sowed in June and harvested in November, which include rice, maize, cotton, millets, jute, sugarcane, and groundnut; rabi (or winter) crops, sowed in November and harvested in March, which include wheat, tobacco, mustard, pulses, and linseed; and zaid (or hot season) crops, sowed in March and harvested in June, which include fruits and vegetables. Although an extensive network of dams and canals has been established for flood control, irrigation, drinking water, and hydroelectric power since Indian independence in 1947, irrigation reached only 16,278,000 hectares of agricultural land by 2014; therefore the dependence on monsoon timing and intensity remains strong. Wells are used in most microfarms, and these again depend on the groundwater table through the year. Rainwater harvesting was practiced in some regions in ancient times and has been reestablished in the twenty-first century through home building codes and public education, with mandated rooftop collection on new homes and drilling of groundwater replenishment holes to compensate for tube wells. While these activities alleviate the monsoon dependence, the monsoons are such massive water deliverers that even a delay of a few days and variations in intensity still have large effects on national crop yield.

Given fragmented farms and a distributed marketing system dependent on cattle-drawn carts and unpaved roads to deliver produce, agricultural output grew more slowly than population in the impoverished colonial and postcolonial years, and India was known as a nation in which monsoon failures resulted in mass famine in several parts. In the 1960s, modern agricultural practices were adopted through national-level planning. High-yielding strains of rice and wheat from American and Indian agricultural research were introduced in the larger farms of north and east India. Japanese intensive cultivation techniques suitable for microfarms were adopted in other parts. From the 1950s to 1990, food grain output rose from 46.07 million metric tons to 159.6 million metric tons, a 246 percent increase, outpacing the 175 percent population growth. By 2000, India was a net exporter of food, and it remained so into the early 2020s. Wheat production rose by a factor of eight in forty years, and rice grew by more than 350 percent. In the twenty-first century, there is rising concern that agricultural output is not increasing fast enough to meet demand, as rising urban wealth and population accelerate demand.

Textile Fibers

Textiles from natural fibers have been one of India’s largest industries for both the domestic market and exports for many centuries. The black soil of the Deccan plateau is suited to cotton cultivation. The silk industry employs people in Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. Silk output is tied into a village industry and urban marketing system that achieves superlative levels of artistry, craftsmanship, and quality, highly attuned to changing fashions and customer preferences.

Coal

India had proven coal reserves of 111,052 billion metric tons in 2022, which was one of the largest in the world. Production was 985.671 million metric tons in 2022. Open-cast methods are used to mine deposits located within a depth of 300 meters. Coal accounts for about 44 percent of India’s total energy consumption. Noncoking coal constitutes the majority of reserves. High ash content of 15 to 45 percent means low calorific value for Indian coal. Coal deposits are spread over the states of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, and Meghalaya. Lignite (60 percent carbon) resources are present in Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu.

Iron Ore

Crude iron-ore deposits of 3.4 billion metric tons were estimated to be in India in 2022. These are found in the states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Andhra, Karnataka, West Bengal, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh and in two locations each in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu. India produced 96 million metric tons of raw steels in 2023 and 135 million metric tons of pig iron in 2022. However, much of the country's iron ore is used for export. This is a controversial issue in India as domestic demand and the Indian steel industry expand.

Thorium

The black sands of southern Kerala beaches contain large deposits of thorium, which is a low-grade nuclear fuel. This deposit has been known since Germany tried to ship out large quantities of black sand for its nuclear weapon program prior to World War II. India is estimated to have one of the world’s largest reserves of thorium. With the civilian nuclear deal with the United States and Nuclear Suppliers Group, uranium imports are projected to enable India to irradiate the thorium and set up a “third-stage thorium cycle” in which thorium becomes a primary energy source for electric power reactors, making India self-sufficient in nuclear energy and eliminating the need for uranium imports. Because thorium is much more abundant than uranium worldwide, the Indian thorium reactor approach is watched with great interest as a possible breakthrough technology for nuclear power.

Oil and Natural Gas

As of 2021, India had 4.605 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Petroleum production in 2023 was 795,000 mectric tons, dropping more than one million metric tons from 2020. Petroleum dependence has had a primary destructive effect on Indian economic growth, with “oil shocks” in the 1970s and 1980s draining foreign exchange revenues and forcing steep loss of value of the Indian rupee by as much as 90 percent between 1972 and 2000.

Domestic production of natural gas was about 26.2 billion cubic meters per year, as of 2016. Development of fields in the Krishna-Godavari basin led to a sudden growth in production from 30,000 cubic meters per year. Production rose to 28.67 billion cubic meters by 2021. India had 1.3 trillion cubic meters of confirmed natural gas reserves by 2024.

Other Resources

India contributes about 5 percent of the world supply of mica scraps and flakes, used as a nonconductor in electrical switchgear manufacturing. Major mica-producing regions are Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra, and Rajasthan. Bauxite and other aluminum-ore reserves are estimated at 830 million metric tons, out of a global estimate of 30,000,000 metric tons. India produced 2,720,000 metric tons of aluminum (spelled as aluminium in India) in 2016. India is known to have more than 16 percent of the world’s ilmenite reserves, but production of titanium is very low. The catastrophic tsunami of December, 2004, exposed substantial offshore deposits along the Tamil Nadu coast. Sitting on approximately 5 percent of the world’s resources, India is among the world's top ten largest producer of manganese. Deposits are found in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu.

Medicinal herbs are a major for India. Empirical experience over thousands of years has been codified through the Ayurveda medicinal knowledge base. As modern diagnostics open up genetic engineering and nanoscience, the importance of these various natural resources is beginning to be understood.

Finally, the fauna of India serve as natural attractions to a growing tourism industry, complementing geographic attractions such as the Himalayas, the Sunderbans river delta, the Nilgiri and Kerala mountains, and the ocean beaches. Several unique animal species, including the Indian elephant, lion, tiger, rhinoceros, peacock, pheasant, and black deer, are found in the forests and animal sanctuaries of India.

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