New Delhi: The government on Friday said that despite having existing technology, there is a need to make rare earth magnets at a commercially competitive rate, which is a challenge. The industry and academia in collaboration with the government are working to resolve the issues concerning rare earth magnets, which are used in the automobile sector and other devices, a senior ministry of electronics and IT (Meity) official said.
“Technology is there, but we have to see how commercially we can do it at a competitive price. So that is the main challenge. The work on the technology development has been going on for some years as the government realises the importance of material technologies. So the government will surely work because these things are now becoming strategic and important,” Meity additional secretary Amitesh Sinha said in an event here.
The Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET), a research wing under Meity also signed a transfer of technology agreement with Ahmedabad-based firm Somal Magnets for the production of rare earth magnets. “It is an effort of the last few years. So C-MET has already been working on it, but suddenly the focus has come on this rare earth material. For such things, first we will have to develop a capability, which, at the time of crisis, can be easily scaled. So that kind of infrastructure or capability we are aiming for now,” Sinha said.
The secretary, however, said Meity is not directly engaged in the production of rare earth magnets but only in some technologies that are important for their production. In April 2024, China implemented strict export licensing on rare earth elements like terbium and dysprosium – key inputs for high-level performance neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets used in consumer electronics.
Industry body, Elcina, said that the move has disrupted global supply chains, hitting India’s fast-growing hearables and wearables sector hard, and the device makers are switching to import fully assembled speaker modules from China. Elcina estimates that the rare earth metal-based magnets account for around 5-7 per cent of the Bill of Materials, and India imports nearly 100 per cent of its NdFeB magnet requirement, with China accounting for 90 per cent of the total imports.
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