Before the “infrastructure investment era” began about five to six years ago, copper demand grew at 0.6-0.8 times GDP.
In line with economic growth, copper demand is expected to rise 9-9.5% annually over the next few years, reaching 3 million tonnes by 2030, Karmakar said.
ET BureauInfra push, energy transition to drive demand to 3 MT by 2030, says industry body
“As a developing economy, we are at a phase where we require copper for almost all sectors of the economy-infrastructure projects, be it hospitals, metros or airports; clean energy transition; and from the consumer side, electric vehicles and air conditioners,” he said. “All sectors of the economy will require copper to varying degrees.”
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India, once a copper exporter, became a net importer for the first time in 18 years after Vedanta’s Tamil Nadu smelter, which accounted for about half the country’s supplies at the time, shut in 2018. Rising demand from infrastructure projects, electric vehicles and power transmission has since increased reliance on imports, particularly copper concentrate.India consumed 1.9 million tonnes of copper in fiscal 2025, up 9.3% from the previous year. Of this, more than 520,000 tonnes of semi-finished and refined products, worth more than $10 billion, were imported.
“The government should look at increasing smelting-refining capacity; we require at least 500,000 tonnes of additional capacity every five years,” Karmakar said. “We had a million tonnes of capacity before 2000, and then there was a long pause till Adani came.”
State-owned Hindustan Copper is the country’s only integrated copper producer with captive mines. Aditya Birla Group‘s Birla Copper is the largest domestic producer, while the Adani Group entered copper refining and smelting with Kutch Copper in 2024.
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The JSW Group announced its entry into copper mining last year, while Gujarat-based Kiri Industries is setting up an integrated 500,000-tonne smelting and refining facility, which is expected to begin operations in 2027.
Even with these additions, India is likely to remain in deficit.
“A lot of countries did not have their own mines and have imported copper concentrates and raw copper in their development stage. It is also about the geography,” Karmakar said. Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Peru are the world’s largest copper producers, accounting for more than half of global output.