On 1 October 2026 the Ministry of Mines put two seabed blocks in the Andaman Sea up for auction: West Sewell Ridge-01 and Sewell Rise-01, together 1,632 square kilometres off Great Nicobar Island, said to hold polymetallic nodules and crusts with cobalt, nickel, manganese, copper and rare earths. It is the second try. The first offshore auction, thirteen blocks launched in November 2024, was annulled in December 2025 without a single award.

The second attempt is smaller and has a lower bar. A week before launch, the ministry amended the auction rules so that a first-round auction can go ahead with two technically qualified bidders instead of three. What has not changed, as far as the public record shows, is the main reason companies stayed away: nobody knows how much metal is down there, and no Indian company has the equipment to bring it up.

Two attempts, side by side

Sources: Ministry of Mines releases (PIB 2078782, 2317207, 2317680); the Ministry of Mines (Administering Authority) notification of 21 September 2026 under section 10 of the Offshore Areas Mineral (Development and Regulation) Act, 2002 (Gazette of India Extraordinary CG-DL-E-22092026-276390), read in the Gazette’s text; the 24 September 2026 rule change as reported by PSU Watch and Swarajya; deadline extensions from Offshore Engineer; annulment from Reuters.

Why the first tranche failed

The thirteen blocks were three very different businesses. The construction sand blocks off Kollam and the lime mud blocks off Porbandar are shallow-water dredging, a known technology. The Kollam blocks ran into the people who fish there: Kerala’s fishing unions held a coastal hartal on 27 February 2025, with support from both the ruling CPI(M) and the Congress, and on 4 March the Kerala Assembly unanimously asked the Centre to withdraw the 2023 amendment that made the auction possible. Why the Gujarat lime mud blocks drew no winner has not been explained publicly.

The seven nodule blocks off Great Nicobar faced the opposite problem: no protest to speak of, but no data either. The tender material for the West Sewell Ridge blocks said that estimated resources “have not been reported”. A composite licence asks the winner to pay for exploration first and earn only if a deposit is proved; a government document puts the Andaman seamounts that carry these crusts and nodules at roughly 600 to 1,300 metres down. The bid deadline was pushed back twice, to 1 May 2025, and the auction was annulled in December. In April 2026 Reuters quoted two officials saying there was no plan to revive it soon: Indian miners lacked the specialised equipment, and “it is not economically feasible for companies”.

What changed for the second attempt

Three things. The sand and lime mud blocks are gone, along with the fight on the Kerala coast. The nodule offer has been consolidated into two larger blocks, notified in the gazette on 21 September: West Sewell Ridge-01, 1,000 sq km, and Sewell Rise-01, 632 sq km, both declared available for composite licences for polymetallic nodules and crusts. And the bidder threshold has dropped from three to two, a change the ministry first proposed in October 2025.

The lower threshold makes an award more likely, but it also means the price could be set by two bidders. This blog has not found any new public resource estimate for the two blocks, or any change to the licence terms that would shift the exploration risk away from the winner.

The one offshore block that has been handed out

India has granted one offshore mineral concession, and it did not come through an auction. Under the 2023 amendment, blocks can be reserved for government companies. A sand block off Daman, 20 to 25 metres deep, was reserved in December 2023 for the Vadhvan port being built by the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority, and the letter of intent was handed over in February 2025. The sand will be used to reclaim land for the port. That is the model that has worked so far: a public buyer with a known use, in shallow water.

Twenty-four years of exploring the deep sea

India was the first country registered as a pioneer investor for seabed nodules, in 1987. Its International Seabed Authority contract for 75,000 square kilometres of the Central Indian Ocean Basin was signed in 2002, extended in 2017 and again in 2022, and is due to expire in March 2027. It has added contracts for sulphides on the Indian Ocean ridges, the latest for the Carlsberg Ridge in September 2025. Its 2024 application for cobalt crusts on the Afanasy Nikitin seamount has stalled because the area is also claimed as continental shelf, reportedly by Sri Lanka. The Ministry of Earth Sciences’ Deep Ocean Mission, approved in 2021 at about ₹4,077 crore, is building the submersible and collector technology; its crewed 6,000-metre dive has been reported as slipping to December 2027.

None of that exploration has turned into mining. As far as this blog could find, no country yet mines seabed nodules at commercial scale. The Andaman blocks are inside India’s own waters, so they do not need the Seabed Authority’s permission, but they need the same technology.

Timeline

What would fix this

• The Geological Survey of India and the Ministry of Mines should publish the exploration data behind each offshore block before it is auctioned: survey lines, samples, grades and the exploration stage reached, so bidders are not pricing a block that “has not been reported”.
• The Ministry of Earth Sciences should make the results of its Central Indian Ocean Basin work and the National Institute of Ocean Technology’s nodule-collector trials available to licensees, on published terms, so the public money already spent on deep-sea technology lowers the risk for whoever explores the Andaman blocks.
• The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change should notify environmental baseline and impact-assessment requirements for seabed mining before any composite licence turns into a production lease, including what monitoring is needed near Great Nicobar.
• The Ministry of Mines, with the Department of Fisheries and the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, should publish fishing-ground maps and hold public consultations before any sand or lime mud block off Kerala or Gujarat is offered again.
• The Ministry of Mines should publish the outcome of each offshore auction: how many bidders bought documents and qualified, and why an auction was annulled.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.