Digging is a dirty business. Always has been. But lately, we’ve started pretending it’s a form of environmental penance. The government just kicked off its second round of auctions for exploration licenses, putting 11 blocks of critical and "deep-seated" minerals on the block. Think lithium. Think cobalt. Think the raw ingredients for the batteries that are supposed to save us from ourselves.

It sounds clean on a slide deck in a climate-controlled room in New Delhi. It looks different when you're staring at a map of Chhattisgarh or Karnataka.

These aren't your grandfather’s coal mines. We're talking about minerals buried so deep they require a level of geological gymnastics most domestic firms aren't ready for. The government is dangling these licenses like carrots, hoping some venture-backed mining outfit or a legacy giant will bite. They want us to stop looking at China every time we need a battery. It’s a nice dream. A necessary one, perhaps. But the math is getting ugly.

Let’s look at the friction. You don’t just walk into a forest, tap a vein of nickel, and call it a day. There's the upfront cost of exploration—we’re talking roughly $30 million to $50 million just to see if a site is even viable. Then there’s the local reality. Take the Hasdeo Arand region, for instance. It’s a massive stretch of forest often called the "lungs" of Central India. It's also sitting on top of the very things we need to "clean" the grid. The irony isn't subtle. It’s a sledgehammer. You can have the ancient trees or you can have the zero-emission SUV. You don't get both.

The government’s pitch is all about supply chain security. We're tired of being beholden to Beijing’s whims. But mining is a slow, agonizing game. If a company wins a bid today, they won't be pulling ore out of the ground for another decade. Maybe fifteen years. By then, the "critical" mineral we’re obsessed with today—say, lithium—might be replaced by sodium-ion tech or something we haven't even named yet. We're betting billions on a snapshot of today's tech.

And who’s actually bidding? The first round wasn't exactly a stampede. Out of the 20 blocks offered last time, several saw zero interest. Investors aren't stupid. They see the regulatory hurdles. They see the protests. They see the sheer technical nightmare of extracting minerals from depths that would make a mole claustrophobic. Deep-seated minerals like gold, silver, and copper require massive capital and even bigger stomachs for risk.

The bureaucrats say this second round is different. They’ve tweaked the rules. They’ve made the incentives juicier. But at the end of the day, a license is just a piece of paper. It’s a permission slip to go spend a fortune in the hopes of finding a treasure map that might lead to a productive mine.

It’s a high-stakes poker game where the house always wins its cut, and the players are betting with money they haven't made yet. We’re told this is the only way to reach Net Zero. That we have to tear up the earth to save the sky. It’s the kind of logic that only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than ten seconds.

Meanwhile, the global price of lithium has been a rollercoaster. It crashed harder than a crypto-bro's ego over the last twelve months. Why would a sane CEO sink billions into a deep-seated mine when the market is this twitchy? They wouldn't. Unless, of course, the subsidies are so thick they can't afford not to.

So here we are. Eleven more blocks. More maps. More promises of a green future built on a foundation of heavy machinery and displaced communities. We’re doubling down on the extraction model because we don't know how to do anything else. We’ve traded one kind of dependency for another, and we’re calling it progress.

If we find what we're looking for, we might finally break free from foreign supply chains. If we don't, we've just spent years and billions of rupees turning pristine terrain into expensive geological surveys.

I wonder if the people living on top of those 11 blocks think the trade-off is worth the extra few miles of range on a luxury sedan they’ll never be able to afford.

Maybe the second time’s the charm. Or maybe we’re just getting better at auctioning off the hope of a solution rather than the solution itself. Let’s see if anyone actually brings a shovel this time.