In this episode of Voices of Transformation, DPI Executive Director Florence Drummond speaks with K Prahalad, a research analyst at the Center for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. Prahalad works on India’s critical minerals and on a responsible mining and processing framework the centre is developing for the country, drawn together from provisions currently spread across the Indian judiciary. His related interest is resource-induced conflict, and how it might be mediated rather than left to escalate.

Tune in to understand:

• Why two pressures sit in tension across India’s mining regions: the urgency to secure minerals for the energy transition, and the time it takes to build projects that host communities accept as legitimate.
• How free, prior and informed consent often works in practice, where power and knowledge asymmetries can leave consent recorded on paper without genuine agreement behind it.
• Why Prahalad argues for social forecasting alongside financial forecasting, so the social conditions a project will meet are studied as closely as its economics.
• What changes when leadership shifts from managing issues as they arise to negotiating between parties, with each party leading on the questions it understands best.
• How other jurisdictions have planned for the period beyond the life of a mine, from Norway’s sovereign wealth fund to India’s District Mineral Foundation, and why young people in mining regions are central to that planning.

Prahalad speaks from direct engagement with communities on the ground, where he finds people who recognise the need for change and want a part in shaping it. He points to models that mining jurisdictions can adopt rather than design from scratch, among them Towards Sustainable Mining, the Mining Association of Canada standard, as an example of bringing varied perspectives together from a project’s earliest stage. His call to action is to map every affected party and involve them from the planning stage, beginning with the people whose land is at stake. Without that, he says, “transformation will always be lopsided.”

The full conversation is available now on the Deep Dives with DPI podcast.