Silicon on India's Critical Minerals List: What It Means for Quartz and Solar

What India's critical minerals list is

In 2023 the Ministry of Mines released India's first list of critical minerals: 30 minerals that an expert committee judged essential to the economy and national security and exposed to supply risk. The list was meant as a guide for exploration, auction, policy and investment, and the ministry said it would be revisited from time to time.

Silicon is on it, alongside minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, gallium, germanium and the rare earths. For the solar and semiconductor industries, that is the policy signal that matters: the element at the heart of every wafer is officially treated as strategic.

• Released by the Ministry of Mines in 2023
• 30 minerals, silicon among them
• Intended to guide exploration, auctions, policy and investment
• To be reviewed periodically

Is quartz a critical mineral in India?

Not as a separate entry. Public coverage of the 2023 list, including Mercom and Project Blue, names silicon but not quartz or high-purity quartz as a line item. The practical link is still direct, because quartz is the mineral that silicon comes from.

Two different quartz materials are involved, and they should not be confused. Quartzite or lump quartz is reduced with carbon in an arc furnace to make metallurgical-grade silicon, the feedstock for polysilicon. High-purity quartz (HPQ) sand is a much purer, separately processed material used to make the fused-quartz crucibles in which Czochralski ingots are grown. A policy that secures silicon without looking at crucible-grade quartz leaves a gap in the middle of the chain.

• Quartzite → metallurgical-grade silicon → polysilicon
• High-purity quartz sand → fused-quartz crucibles → ingot growth
• Both routes start with quartz; only silicon is named on the list

Why silicon is flagged: concentrated supply

USGS's 2026 Mineral Commodity Summary estimates that China accounted for almost 80% of global silicon-materials production in 2025. On the import side, BigMint reported that China supplied roughly 90% of India's silicon metal imports in the first half of 2024.

Further up the solar chain the exposure is sharper. Mercom reported in September 2026 that India's polysilicon pipeline had reached about 30 GW but that production had yet to begin. Until domestic polysilicon runs, every Indian ingot depends on imported feedstock, which is why the government is preparing a polysilicon incentive alongside the critical-minerals effort.

The National Critical Mineral Mission

The Union Cabinet approved the National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM) in January 2025. SolarQuarter reported a total outlay of ₹34,300 crore, combining central government spending with expected investment by public sector undertakings.

Coverage of the mission describes a whole-chain programme: exploration in India and abroad, acquisition of overseas assets, processing and recycling, and building reserves. For silicon, the most relevant pieces are processing and recycling, because India's gap is less about raw quartz in the ground and more about turning it into furnace-grade, crucible-grade and electronic-grade material at scale.

• Approved January 2025
• Reported outlay: ₹34,300 crore in total
• Scope reported to include exploration, overseas assets, processing and recycling

What it means for solar and semiconductor buyers

Critical-mineral status does not change a purchase order tomorrow. It does change the questions that lenders, government programmes and large buyers ask. Expect more scrutiny of where silicon feedstock and crucible quartz come from, how concentrated the supply is, and whether there is a domestic or diversified fallback.

This lines up with the ALMM clock. List-III for ingots and wafers is scheduled from 1 June 2028, and an ingot plant that has thought about polysilicon sourcing, crucible supply and high-purity quartz traceability is a stronger counterparty than one that has only ordered crystal pullers.

• Document the origin of polysilicon and crucible quartz
• Identify a second source for each critical consumable
• Track the polysilicon PLI and ALMM List-III timelines together