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Within days of one another, official platforms of the Ministry of Mines cast several northeastern States in a similar frame — as repositories of strategic minerals and untapped potential. Manipur was described as a “quiet mineral frontier”, Arunachal Pradesh as a “resource-rich frontier”, while Meghalaya and Mizoram were portrayed through comparable narratives that emphasised the hidden wealth beneath their hills. Governments routinely publicise natural resources and development opportunities, and such descriptions would ordinarily attract little attention.
Taken together, however, they point to a broader shift in the language through which the northeast is increasingly being framed in the national conversation and strategic picture.
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The critical mineral push
The timing is significant because critical minerals have moved from geological discussions into strategic ones. Lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel and rare earth elements increasingly shape industrial competition, technological manufacturing and energy transitions. Batteries, semiconductors, renewable technologies and defence systems depend upon them, and countries have begun repositioning themselves around access to these resources. India itself continues to depend on imports for several critical minerals and has consequently expanded exploration efforts. According to a Ministry of Mines reply in Parliament, the Geological Survey of India undertook 43 critical mineral exploration projects across northeastern States during the 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 field seasons, covering minerals such as graphite, vanadium, lithium, rare earth elements, nickel and cobalt. Exploration activity has expanded across Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Assam, Nagaland and Manipur. In Manipur, projects involving nickel, cobalt and chromium exploration have recently been initiated.
Geological surveys have pointed toward mineral potential across the region for years. What appears to be changing is the language through which that significance is increasingly being understood. The northeast has long held strategic significance that extends beyond geology, but the framework through which that significance is understood now appears to be widening.
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Shift in language
For decades, the northeast has figured in national strategy largely through the language of borders and security. Discussions have centred on insurgencies, territorial management, connectivity initiatives and geopolitics considerations involving neighbouring countries, while infrastructure and development were often justified as instruments of strategic access and territorial security.
The language of resources is increasingly entering a strategic space once dominated by concerns over borders and security. Critical minerals are now discussed alongside trade corridors and geopolitical access, with territorial and resource security converging. Places once viewed mainly as sensitive border regions are increasingly seen as strategic assets.
The repeated use of the word frontier is revealing, because frontiers rarely function as neutral descriptions. They do not merely describe geography; they often reflect how States imagine it. Historically, frontiers have been viewed as spaces awaiting integration, development or extraction because they appear as landscapes of future possibility.
The difficulty is that frontiers are rarely empty spaces waiting to be discovered. The hills and valleys of the northeast already contain dense social and political worlds structured around customary land systems, local institutions and long-standing relationships with territory. Questions of land often extend beyond economics, as they are also tied to authority, identity and memory. Resource extraction thus enters landscapes that already possess institutions and histories of their own.
These questions become particularly significant in regions where political uncertainties continue to shape everyday life. In Manipur, years of violence and displacement have intensified debates over land and territorial arrangements. Similar concerns about ownership, ecological vulnerability and local participation have surfaced across the northeast at different times. Projects involving land often acquire meanings that extend beyond development, as communities interpret them through the lens of trust, representation and political inclusion.
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Resources and inclusion
India’s search for critical resources is understandable within a global environment increasingly shaped by supply-chain uncertainty and strategic competition. The northeast itself also requires infrastructure, employment and economic opportunities that have remained uneven for decades. Questions surrounding resource development rarely fit neatly into positions of support or opposition.
How quickly these transitions unfold and who shapes them may matter as much as the resources themselves. For a very long time, national priorities and local realities in the northeast often moved at different speeds. Connectivity projects sometimes arrived without corresponding economic ecosystems, while strategic considerations frequently overshadowed questions surrounding participation and representation. Resource development risks reproducing similar tensions if extraction begins moving faster than institutions capable of managing its social consequences.
What is being debated extends beyond the minerals beneath the hills. The northeast has spent years being viewed first as a border to be secured and then as a corridor to be connected. If it now begins entering national imagination as a landscape of strategic resources, the question is whether this new frontier will finally include the people who already inhabit it, or merely assign another purpose to the land beneath their feet.
Critical mineral ambitions must account for the people, land and history of northeast India
Sangmuan Hangsing is a researcher and alumnus of the Kautilya School of Public Policy
English (US) ·