India’s neighbourhood anxieties fuel pursuit of Sri Lanka’s untapped seabed cobalt

The MRCC, agreed upon between the two nations in 2022 but technically active even before that, is designed to help broadcast weather warnings and security information across the region.

Yet India reportedly has its sights set on a far greater prize – securing access to the cobalt-rich Afanasy Nikitin Seamount, which some argue falls within Sri Lanka’s maritime borders.

The emphasis on the launch of the MRCC was Delhi’s way of strategically communicating to the world its focus on the Indian Ocean region, said Dr Bhagya Senaratne, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University Shanghai’s Centre for Global Asia.

India has a history of seeking to gain the “upper hand” over strategic resources in the Indian Ocean, Senaratne said. And its latest manoeuvre is hardly unexpected, given the disputes that have previously flared up between India and Sri Lanka over oil exploration rights in the Mannar Basin.

“If India can’t have it, then the likelihood of it allowing Sri Lanka to work with another actor to extract [a resource] is slim to none,” she said.

Sri Lanka has applied to extend its continental shelf beyond the standard 200 nautical miles, in a bid to lay claim to a larger swathe of the seabed. But this request, first submitted in 2009, has yet to be approved by the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

Initially, India did not contest the claim. However, it now seems the prospect of the potential wealth beneath those waters, and the geopolitical influence Sri Lanka could gain through extraction, has captured Delhi’s attention, Senaratne said.

Chinese research activities likely played a catalytic role in “prompting” India to take a closer look at the seabed to understand what the Chinese vessels were studying, according to Senaratne.

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