Sri Lanka’s strategic location in the Indian Ocean often pulls the country into the geopolitical rivalry between regional giants India and China. In 2023, for example, Sri Lanka’s granting of permission for Chinese research vessels to dock in Sri Lanka’s territorial waters met with strong opposition from India. The tension subsequently resulted in Sri Lanka imposing a one-year moratorium for research vessels from all countries from entering into Sri Lanka’s waters.
For India, Chinese research vessels aren’t merely a security threat. India is also concerned about China accessing vast seabed resources in the Indian Ocean. India’s influence on Sri Lanka – being a close ally and the closest neighbor – ensure that Sri Lanka’s effort to access mineral resources on the seafloor is likely to be entangled with geopolitics and regional security.
These concerns are already surfacing with Sri Lanka and India’s interests to tap into massive critical mineral resources in the Indian Ocean, especially near the Afanasy Nikitin Seamount (ANS), located about 1,050 kilometers from the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka and roughly 1,350 km off the Indian coast. A marine mountain ridge spanning roughly 400 km in length, the ANS is enriched in highly sought-after critical minerals, including cobalt, nickel, and manganese, which are vital for strategic and cutting-edge tech applications like electric vehicle batteries and aerospace technology.
Notably, the seamount is located in what are currently considered international waters – but is locked in a maritime dispute involving Sri Lanka and India.
For both countries, these critical mineral resources are of high importance. For India, the minerals thought to be located in the ANS, especially cobalt, are crucial to facilitate the country’s green energy transition. For Sri Lanka, the mineral resources in the ANS are important as a potential source of foreign currency.
Sri Lanka has been grappling with serious debt troubles and is still recovering from its sovereign default declared in 2022. Even after the debt relief, Sri Lanka’s public debt-to-GDP ratio would remain close to 90 percent, with almost half of it being foreign currency debt. Yet Sri Lanka’s exports – a key source of foreign currency – remain low at 19 percent of GDP in 2025, down sharply from 39 percent in 2000.
Sri Lanka, however, just like many Global South countries, does not have the extensive capital or advanced technology required to carry out deep seabed exploration. Whether mining or simply conducting large-scale explorations, deep sea projects require large-scale initial capital investment. The Sri Lankan government, with its high debt burden, is unable to make such investments. The country’s private sector also does not have the capacity to invest in large-scale projects like mining the ANS. This means Sri Lanka would require the support of foreign companies to do any form of critical mineral exploration or mineral processing that requires substantial capital investment upfront.
It seems that Sri Lankan government has acknowledged this reality, despite its left-leaning ideology. For example, on June 23, Sri Lanka’s largest private sector group, Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, hosted a Mineral Sands Technical Conference and invited the global private sector to join hands in exploring mineral sands in Sri Lanka. Speaking at the event, Sri Lanka’s Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development Sunil Handunneththi made it clear that the mineral industry is one of focus areas of the government. Its mission is to transform Sri Lanka into a competitive leader in mineral processing and supporting industries, with an eye toward research, innovation, and skilled employment generation.
Sri Lanka’s Claim, India’s Pushback
While this ambitious plan paints an optimistic picture about promoting Sri Lanka’s critical mineral industry, the reality is more challenging. It’s also intertwined with geopolitics, as is visible in the case of the ANS.
The ANS, and its vast unexplored resources, is currently embroiled in a contentious legal dispute. The debate is centred primarily around a legal claim by Sri Lanka on its maritime boundary. In 2009, Sri Lanka filed a claim at the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) to extend its maritime boundary up to 350 nautical miles.
The ANS is located approximately 650 nm off Sri Lanka’s southern coast, way beyond the standard 350 nm limit of the extended continental shelf. But in the request Sri Lanka used a specific legal provision – Annex II of the Final Act of the Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea – which allows littoral states in the southern parts of the Bay of Bengal, with specific continental shelf conditions, to use an alternative mathematical method to draw their shelf boundary. To invoke the clause, states should have a continental shelf with thick sedimentary deposits lying beneath the continental rise close to the shore. Sri Lanka argued that by applying this method, the outer limit of its maritime jurisdiction extends beyond the 350 nm limit, to a boundary that includes the ANS.
Although Sri Lanka’s geological claim remains to be proven, if the CLCS does validate the claim, Sri Lanka’s legally recognized maritime seabed jurisdiction would be extended and the ANS would legally fall under Sri Lanka’s national jurisdiction, preventing other states from exploring the seabed without Sri Lanka’s consent.
At the time of the initial CLCS filing in 2009, India did not express any formal objection to Sri Lanka’s claim. But a combination of domestic interests and resource-driven geopolitics shifted India’s stance on the ANS in 2022. In 2021, attending the COP26 summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India’s goal to cut its emissions to net zero by 2070. The public target increases the demand for clean energy applications such as electric vehicles – in turn driving India’s search for essential minerals, including cobalt.
New Delhi’s foreign policy shift was also fueled by China’s growing maritime reconnaissance in the Indian Ocean. China has conducted extensive expeditions in the Indian Ocean through multiple research vessels, which garnered heavy criticism from India and the United States. Several of these vessels, most notably the Chinese research vessel Shi Yan 6, docked in Colombo Port further fueling protest by both international and local actors. As a result, Sri Lanka declared a one-year moratorium on maritime research vessels from all countries from entering its waters, beginning January 1, 2024. The yearlong moratorium concluded by the end of 2024.
In its 2022 complaint, India opined that Sri Lanka’s claim prejudiced India’s strategic and economic interests and formally expressed its protest through a note verbale requesting the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf not to consider or qualify Sri Lanka’s pending claim. This immediately put the CLCS on hold from evaluating Sri Lanka’s submission, as the commission is strictly forbidden from considering or evaluating a request if there is an ongoing dispute related to the claimed area, unless the parties concerned have given explicit consent (Annex I Rule 5(a)). Since the CLCS is a scientific commission without a legal mandate, it cannot proceed to consider and evaluate the claim until the dispute is settled, resulting in a legal deadlock. It is noteworthy that in addition to India, Maldives has also disputed Sri Lanka’s claim for the extended seabed.
In 2024, two years after Sri Lanka’s sovereign claim was effectively frozen, India applied to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for a license to conduct mineral exploration at the Afanasy Nikitin Seamount. The ISA, headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica is the U.N.-mandated international body with oversight of the international seabed, commonly referred to as the Area. The Area is legally declared as a common heritage of mankind that no single sovereign state can exclusively claim. Any requests to conduct exploration, mining and extraction of resources in the Area should be approved by the ISA under a strict legal framework.
India’s application to the ISA, submitted by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, is for an independent 15-year exploration license covering an area of 3,000 square kilometers of the ANS. That is the maximum area the ISA permits under a single exploration licence for cobalt-rich crusts.
However, the ISA cannot process India’s licence request because the ANS currently has an ambiguous legal status. It is unclear whether it falls under Sri Lanka’s extended continental shelf claim or the international seabed. If Sri Lanka’s claim is legally recognized, the ANS will not fall under the international seabed, effectively removing the ISA’s authority over it and rendering India’s application void. The ISA is therefore unable to act until the legal dispute is resolved.
Legal Stalemate
The dual bottleneck of the CLCS being unable to evaluate Sri Lanka’s claim for an extended seabed due to the maritime dispute initiated by India and the ISA being unable to grant an exploration licence to India due to undefined maritime boundaries has created a legal stalemate preventing either state from securing their access to the ANS.
Technically, Sri Lanka can legally challenge India’s dispute in an international legal tribunal like the International Tribunal on Law of the Sea (ITLOS). There are legal precedents for such instances, like the maritime dispute involving Bangladesh and Myanmar in 2012. In this case Myanmar blocked Bangladesh’s claim for an extended continental shelf using the same dispute rule. Bangladesh later sued Myanmar at ITLOS, which ruled in Bangladesh’s favor, prompting CLCS to accept Bangladesh’s claim. However, there is an additional hurdle that prevents Sri Lanka from seeking a similar legal remedy.
Under Article 298 of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), when a state party ratifies the convention, it is allowed to declare that it will not accept a ruling by an international court related to maritime boundaries, maritime military activities, or those related to disputes being debated in the U.N. Security Council. Since India has made this declaration, Sri Lanka cannot hold India legally bound by an international court ruling pertaining to the ANS.
That said, Sri Lanka could compel India to participate in “compulsory conciliation” (Annex V), where an appointed commission evaluates the disputing claims. However, the conciliation commission can only make recommendations that are not legally binding. This means that while Sri Lanka can bring India to a negotiation table, it can’t compel India to accept the outcome.
Therefore, until the dispute is settled in a way that is acceptable to both parties, the ANS will be treated as a disputed territory and provisionally considered as a part of the international seabed with an ambiguous legal identity.
A Way Forward
One alternative to resolve this legal stalemate is for Sri Lanka and India to form a bilateral partnership for the joint development of the ANS. UNCLOS stresses that disputing states shall make every effort to enter into provisional arrangements of a practical nature (Article 83). In such a negotiation, Sri Lanka has a significant bargaining chip because without cooperation from Colombo, India’s licensing request at ISA will remain unprocessed. Using this vulnerability, Sri Lanka can effectively leverage India into a partnership over the ANS and prompt India for a deal that includes capital investment and technology transfer to Sri Lanka.
Similarly, there is no strict legal provision restricting Sri Lanka from entering into simultaneous partnerships with third states such as China or the United States. However, the ways in which New Delhi interacted with Sri Lanka in recent past suggests that India is proactively working on increasing its economic footprints in Sri Lanka, through providing new loans, investments and other forms of corporation.
Having India co-managing the ANS could therefore complicate an already fierce geoeconomic competition. Although there is no report of India and Sri Lanka having bilateral negotiations for a joint partnership, it is highly likely India would ensure that such partnership has specific clauses to keep its rivals far from the seabed. It will dissuade Sri Lanka from forming partnerships with a third country.