Mining opportunities abound in India

Rana Sarkar is president and CEO of the Canada-India Business Council. — Photo courtesy Canada-India Business Council

When Rana Sarkar talks about the opportunities that are emerging in India, he generates an excitement that is almost palpable. President and CEO of the Canada-India Business Council (C-IBC), Sarkar helped found Rawlings Atlantic, a cross-border advisory firm, and Content Partners, a leading European media agency. He’s also co-chairman and senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and is on the advisory board for the Mowatt Centre for Policy Innovation, both associated with the University of Toronto. He’s using his wealth of experience within C-IBC to help lead Canadian companies towards what he calls India’s next phase of growth.

“The Canada-India Business Council is sort of the link-up for major Canadian businesses between Canada and India,” said Sarkar. “We have 130 members in Canada and India that represent about 70 per cent of the trade between the two countries.”

C-IBC offers members services from agenda and awareness raising with official India and also with the larger named corporates to advocacy efforts that can reach out to Indian governments more directly. The agency is also working to bridge the gaps between Canadian companies and their Indian counterparts by assisting and providing them with outside advice as India works to develop its mining act, something that Sarkar said is serving to have India recognize Canadian partners as a go-to source for information as they work to develop a robust mining and exploration development ecosystem.

“Canada has already been seen and positioned as one of the premier resource countries in the world,” said Sarkar, “not just in the physical resources that can come from Canada but from the entire value chain of resources that we have. So what we really try to push is our resourcefulness and our ability to work with India with all of the global know-how that Canadian companies in these extractive industries have.”

India is swiftly becoming one of the largest economies in the world and is already the No. 3 energy consumer in the world. While to date India’s infrastructure growth has been slow, its forecasted infrastructure spending sits at US$1 trillion over the next five years. Paired with its young population (60 per cent of the population are under the age of 35) and its resulting gravitation to a consumerism that will result in what Sarkar calls a “capital-intensive infrastructure-led period of growth,” there are a multitude of opportunities for Canadian companies.

“Whether we show up to the party or not, India will be one of the great consumption marketplaces for resources in the next 50 years,” said Sarkar. “So we need to recognize the scale of the marketplace that they offer and secondly identify the particular types of transactions that we could do with India that would be of import.”

A number of Canadian companies, including Teck Resources Ltd., are already hard at work exploring these opportunities. Early in November, top executives from Teck accompanied Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on his trade mission to India, where they took part in the Canada/India Business Forum hosted by C-IBC, the largest gathering of Canadian senior business leaders in India ever to have taken place. Sarkar said that meeting helped to define some of the roles Canadian companies can play and how they can partner with India in the future.

“Even if you’re not looking at directly developing within India—because that may be a conversation for the next few years, not next year—you should be looking at partnering with these new Indian companies, both on the private-sector side and with the new public side in India," said Sarkar, "and looking to develop those relationships.”

Sarkar sees the opportunities for Canadian companies as numerous: from working with India and being a part of the conversation as the country revamps its mining act to providing soft infrastructure and templates for the inclusion of aboriginal communities and other regulatory and governance aspects to exploring India as a marketplace for everything from iron ore amd non-metallurgical coal to potentially gold and diamonds. He cites the example of Saskatchewan's Cameco with its new-found uranium market in India as just one of the deals that are in the works.

“Saskatchewan is a great story between India and Canada,” said Sarkar. “It’s peas, pulses, potash and power, so it’s quite active. Cameco originally put an office in India in 2009, waiting for the finality of this new co-operation agreement . . . so that’s a marketplace that will pick up fairly shortly.”

There are a number of growing partnerships between Canadian and Indian companies that are being explored. While exploration developments within the country itself are trickier and less assured, as India works to grow its own mining sector, those who contribute to those soft infrastructure developments and who take part in the conversations now, said Sarkar, will be companies that will be better positioned to expand into India when its mining sector does grow and open up.

“And India has to open up,” said Sarkar. “It’s just the pure math of its resource requirements which will lend itself towards the opening up of its own domestic reserves and further exploration. So that will happen. The time frame of that happening is the key question.”