PIB TrackerGSI ends field season; finds natural hydrogen
The Geological Survey of India's 2025-26 exploration year, marked by a first natural-hydrogen discovery and a hard pivot to critical minerals.
What happened
- The Geological Survey of India (GSI), under the Ministry of Mines, formally concluded its Field Season (FS) 2025-26, the annual exploration cycle in which its teams fan out across the country to map, sample and drill.
- The closing announcement doubled as a milestone marker: GSI is in its 175th year of service, having been founded in 1851.
- The year's headline scientific result was the first discovery of naturally occurring hydrogen in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands — a frontier "geologic hydrogen" find rather than hydrogen manufactured in a plant.
- GSI ran 458 mineral exploration projects, of which 230 targeted critical minerals and 92 targeted rare earth elements (REEs) — a deliberate tilt toward the inputs that electronics, EV batteries and defence depend on.
- It handed over 80 Geological Reports for mineral-block auction (39 of them on critical minerals), feeding the blocks that the government later puts up for commercial bidding.
- Looking ahead, GSI has set a FS 2026-27 programme of roughly 500 projects, with about 300 on critical and strategic minerals — a planned increase of about 30% in that category.
Background & context
The Geological Survey of India is one of the oldest scientific institutions in the country. It was established in 1851, originally to locate coal for the railways, and over time grew into the nation's principal agency for geoscience information and mineral-resource assessment. It is an attached office of the Ministry of Mines, with its headquarters in Kolkata and a network of regional and State unit offices. Its core mandate is to generate and update the national geoscientific and mineral baseline — geological mapping, mineral exploration, and the study of the ground beneath the country — so that policy-makers, the mining industry and disaster managers all work off a common, official dataset.
The yearly rhythm of this work is the Field Season. Because India's terrain and weather only allow field geology for part of the year, GSI plans its surveys, mapping and drilling as a season-by-season programme; the FS 2025-26 announcement is the official accounting of one such cycle. What makes this particular accounting examinable is less any single number and more the direction it confirms: a national reorientation of exploration toward critical and strategic minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, the rare earths and similar inputs — which India largely imports and which underpin clean energy, electronics and defence supply chains. The companion policy backdrop is the National Critical Mineral Mission and the auction-led regime created by amendments to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, under which GSI's reports become auctionable blocks. GSI sits at the front of that chain: it explores and proves a resource; the government then auctions the block; a private or public miner extracts it.
It helps to place GSI inside its institutional family, because UPSC frequently tests the boundaries between these bodies. GSI finds and surveys. The Indian Bureau of Mines (IBM), also under the Ministry of Mines, looks after mineral conservation and the regulation of mining once a mine is operating. The National Mineral Exploration Trust (NMET) is the funding trust that finances exploration, including some of the blocks GSI hands it. Mineral Exploration and Consultancy Ltd (MECL) is a public-sector exploration company. The Atomic Minerals Directorate (AMD), by contrast, handles atomic minerals and sits outside the Ministry of Mines. GSI's outputs are graded by a standard exploration ladder — reconnaissance (G4), preliminary (G3), general (G2) and detailed (G1) — which is why the release speaks of "G3 blocks": these are early-stage, preliminary-exploration blocks being passed up the chain for fuller work. Reading the FS 2025-26 totals through that ladder shows the agency operating across the whole spectrum, from broad regional mapping down to drill-tested, auction-ready reports.
The exploration figures also need to be read alongside GSI's quieter, continuous mandates. The agency maintains the country's geological map, runs geochemical and geophysical baseline surveys, studies glaciers, seismicity and coastal geology, and — increasingly — anchors geohazard early-warning. The FS 2025-26 numbers reflect all of this at once: tens of thousands of square kilometres of fresh mapping and survey, the rollout of drone-based magnetic surveys as a new method, and the build-out of the National Geoscience Data Repository so that the data is open and machine-readable rather than locked in paper reports. That last point matters for governance: the value of a survey agency lies not only in what it finds but in how usable its data is to industry, researchers and other arms of the State.
For Prelims
- What GSI is: Geological Survey of India — an attached office of the Ministry of Mines (not an independent statutory body, not a PSU), founded 1851, headquartered in Kolkata, in its 175th year in 2026.
- Field Season 2025-26 scale: 458 mineral exploration projects — 230 on critical minerals, 92 on rare earth elements.
- Auction pipeline: 80 Geological Reports handed over for auction, 39 of them on critical minerals; plus 4 coal blocks, 11 Exploration Licence blocks, and 7 Regional Mineral Targeting + 15 G3 blocks (Siwana, Rajasthan) passed to the National Mineral Exploration Trust (NMET).
- The landmark find: first detection of naturally occurring (geologic) hydrogen in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands — distinct from green/grey hydrogen, which are manufactured.
- Survey coverage in the season: large-scale geological mapping over ~22,000 sq km; geochemical surveys over ~28,000 sq km (Deccan Traps); ground geophysical surveys over ~3.8 lakh sq km; and airborne surveys over ~95,000 sq km, with drone-based magnetic surveys in Rajasthan and Odisha.
- Data systems: the National Geoscience Data Repository (NGDR) now holds 18,000+ reports and is being integrated with Bhoonidhi; GSI also won recognition at the India AI Hackathon 2025.
- Landslide preparedness: the National Landslide Forecasting Centre (NLFC) expanded its coverage from 16 to 21 districts across 8 States, supported by the Bhusanket Portal and the Bhooskhalan app.
- Energy & heritage: GSI appraised 8 Pumped Storage Projects (10,200 MW); and 7 geoheritage sites were added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List (August 2025).
- Forward plan: FS 2026-27 — ~500 projects, of which ~300 on critical/strategic minerals (about +30%).
- What it is NOT: GSI is not the regulator that grants mining leases (that sits with State governments and the centre under the MMDR framework) and it is not the body that auctions blocks — it is the exploration and survey agency that supplies the geological reports those processes rely on. The Andaman hydrogen is natural geologic hydrogen, not the green hydrogen of the National Green Hydrogen Mission, which is produced by electrolysis. GSI is also distinct from the Indian Bureau of Mines (IBM), the National Mineral Exploration Trust (NMET) and the public-sector Mineral Exploration and Consultancy Ltd (MECL) — all separate entities in the same minerals ecosystem.
Why it matters
The strategic problem this addresses is import dependence. India relies heavily on imports for many critical minerals and rare earth elements — the materials inside lithium-ion batteries, electric-vehicle motors, wind turbines, semiconductors and precision-guided weapons. A handful of countries dominate both the mining and the processing of these inputs, which makes supply a question of national and economic security, not just commerce. By steering its exploration toward these minerals, GSI is working at the very first link of that chain: a resource cannot be auctioned, mined or processed domestically until it is first found and proven. The jump from 230 to a planned ~300 critical-mineral projects is the visible edge of that policy.
The Andaman natural-hydrogen result matters for a different reason. Geologic hydrogen — hydrogen that occurs in the ground on its own — is an emerging global interest because, if it can be tapped at scale, it would be a low-carbon energy source that does not have to be manufactured at all. A confirmed first occurrence in Indian territory puts the country on the map of a frontier energy search, even though commercial extraction is a long way off. Beyond minerals and energy, the release shows GSI's second public face: geohazard management. The expansion of the National Landslide Forecasting Centre to 21 districts, and the appraisal of pumped storage sites, place GSI inside both disaster preparedness and the clean-energy transition. The geoheritage nominations, meanwhile, connect the agency to conservation and to India's standing on the UNESCO World Heritage track.