Cobalt, Continental Shelf, And Cul De Sac: Unravelling Afanasi Nikitin Impasse

Somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, roughly three thousand kilometres from the Indian coast and just over a thousand from Sri Lanka's, there sits a mountain^[1] named after a 15th-century Russian merchant, Afanasi Nikitin. He was one of the first Europeans to travel to and document India, arriving roughly 30 years before Vasco da Gama. In 1994 a small fraternity of marine geologists from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) along with an international team identified high-grade cobalt and ferromanganese crusts under the seamount. Since January 2024, this invisible ridge, the Afanasy Nikitin Seamount, has become the subject of a quiet but stubborn standoff between two governments that have been fairly good neighbours.

Cobalt goes into the batteries of electric vehicles and mobile phones. Nickel and manganese go into the same batteries and into a dozen other things besides. India imports almost all the cobalt it uses, and has been looking to the ocean floor to change that. But there was a hurdle. Sri Lanka claimed that the Afanasi Nikitin was part of its extended continental shelf way back in 2009.

Under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a coastal state's continental shelf ordinarily runs two hundred nautical miles from its coast. Beyond that, a state may claim more if it can show the seabed is a genuine extension of its own landmass, but any such claim has to be examined and endorsed by a body called the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, sitting not so innocuously in New York. Sri Lanka lodged such a claim in 2009, covering a wide stretch of the Bay of Bengal and the central Indian Ocean. India had no objection to it till October 2022, when India told the Commission that such a claim would prejudice India's own rights over the area and asking the Commission to hold off. Under the Commission's own procedure, once any interested state objects, the file may stop moving.

Fifteen months later, in January 2024, India tried a different route: it applied to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, the separate body that controls mining in the deep sea beyond any nation's shelf, seeking a licence to explore the very same seamount asserting that it lies in international waters, not on any nation's continental shelf. Sri Lanka wrote back within months, telling the Authority that the area was already covered by its own pending claim and asking it, in turn, to withhold consideration. The Authority's legal commission examined the matter, put some pointed written questions to India, and concluded in July 2024 that it could not proceed until Sri Lanka's claim over the seamount is settled.

There was no substantive hearing of a judicial nature on the dispute, other than an exchange of formal diplomatic notes between two secretariats. It is a deadlock built almost entirely out of paperwork. International relations is a strange beast.

One may be reminded of the Samudra Manthan in the Puranas^[2], where the devas and the asuras want what lies at the bottom of the ocean of milk, but neither side can churn it alone. They use Mount Mandara as the churning rod and the serpent Vasuki as the rope, rivals gripping the same coil from opposite ends, pulling against each other yet toward the common goal of obtaining Amrita, the nectar for eternal life. Amrita comes up, but so does Halahala, a poison strong enough to undo everything the churning was meant to produce. The parallel is difficult to miss.

That impasse has now held for the better part of two years, and understanding why required the short detour above into how the law of the sea actually works.

The only public sign of any effort to break it came in April 2025, when President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, meeting Prime Minister Modi in Colombo, asked for India's help in starting technical talks on Sri Lanka's shelf claim. Since then the two countries have met often and warmly, on everything from temple restoration to cyclone relief, without a single public word on the seamount, holding up potential economic and even strategic gain. Geoeconomics is usually less exciting than geopolitics, but often more important.

International law does not require disputes of this kind to sit in limbo until one side wins outright. It positively encourages the opposite. The same Convention that created this deadlock also prods neighbouring states, in Article 83, “shall make every effort to enter into provisional arrangements of a practical nature and, during this transitional period”, and to do so without prejudice to whatever the final decision turns out to be. In plain terms, the Convention encourages practical cooperation while the legal map remains unsettled. The cooperation may begin with joint science, environmental assessment and a negotiated institutional pathway. The parties need to explore legally permissible ways of extraction and sharing of the product, if that is the course they wish to pursue in the interim. Even the old story recognised that someone still had to divide what came up fairly once it surfaced, which is why the tale gives that task to Mohini rather than to either side of the original quarrel. But modern conciliation must improve upon Mohini in one respect: the neutral should not do so by sleight of hand.

Modern international law has its own version of that figure: a conciliation commission, whose only job is to help two parties reach a division neither could reach alone. Australia and Timor-Leste spent decades disputing their own stretch of the Timor Sea, tried and failed at ordinary negotiation, and then in 2016 submitted themselves to exactly such a UN conciliation process, one neither side was legally bound to accept and neither much trusted going in. Two years later they signed a treaty fixing their maritime boundary and setting up shared arrangements for the oil and gas fields straddling it. It worked because both governments decided that a smaller, certain share of something was worth more than an unlimited, uncertain claim to everything.

Malaysia and Vietnam made a joint continental shelf claim to their own corner of the South China Sea back in 2009. China objected, and so did the Philippines. That file has not moved in seventeen years, and shows no sign of moving in the next seventeen. A deadlock of this kind is not a stalemate that quietly resolves itself with the passage of time. Left alone, it simply becomes permanent. This would certainly be against India's interests.

There is also a genuine legal wrinkle here that a straightforward joint development deal does not entirely solve. India's own application to the Seabed Authority proceeds on the footing that the seamount is international seabed, open to any qualifying state; a joint arrangement with Sri Lanka would proceed on the opposite footing. That is precisely why the Authority felt unable to act. But that legal puzzle is a reason to talk sooner, not a reason to wait. They can provisionally agree to disagree about which regime ultimately applies, without either of them formally surrendering its position in the meantime, but collaborate on exploration and mining of the critical minerals in the seamount.

A word of caution is in order. There is growing evidence that undersea mining has adverse environmental consequences. But that is no reason for India and Sri Lanka to abandon the seamount. It is a reason to build environmental safeguards into whatever arrangement they reach from the outset, rather than as an afterthought: protected no-mining zones set aside in advance, independent monitoring with real power to halt operations if damage exceeds agreed limits, and collector technology chosen for its lighter footprint rather than its speed. Battery recycling will help over time, and deserves real investment, but it currently meets barely a fraction of global demand for these metals and will not replace new supply for at least a decade. The nectar and the poison are both real. Sensible regulation, adopting the myth's Shiva approach is the way forward: taking responsibility for the risk rather than pretending it does not exist.

India and Sri Lanka are not Malaysia and China. Whatever their occasional frictions, this remains a genuinely close relationship, closer by most measures than almost any other bilateral tie either country has in the region. That ought to make a negotiated arrangement easier to reach here than almost anywhere else it has been tried, not harder. A joint mechanism over the seamount, built with neither side formally conceding the contested underlying legal position, is well within reach. India could accept, provisionally and without prejudice, that Sri Lanka's claim deserves a proper hearing at the table. Sri Lanka could agree to let exploration proceed under some jointly agreed structure, in exchange for a genuine share of whatever eventually comes out of the ground. Till such time a final agreement is reached or the parties agree to submit it to an adjudicatory process or an arbitral tribunal that settles the issue of the status of the mount and jurisdiction of the ISA, there is no reason why both cannot profit from benefit from any lawfully authorised exploration or extraction. Imaginative lawyers schooled in International Law can help structure the arrangement that is compliant with this peculiar regime complex.

There is a third country hovering at the edges of this story that neither government wants to mention aloud. As of 2026 China holds five exploration contracts with the ISA more than any other nation, and a well-documented strategic interest in exactly this stretch of ocean. Under these circumstances, it is neither prudent strategy nor robust economics to allow this deadlock to persist by default.

One is reminded of Tamil poet of yore, Subramania Bharati's call:

"We will bridge the sea to Sinhala island,

Build a road to link the divided shores;

Churning the deep waters for hidden gems,

We shall bring forth the wealth of the waves."

The seamount itself is going nowhere. It has sat under that water for millions of years and will sit there for millions more, entirely indifferent to whose flag eventually flies. The 21^st century tale has to be rewritten: the devas and asuras need to share the nectar; but even they understood one elementary rule of ocean governance: nothing gets churned by exchanging notes verbales.

1. Stretching approximately 400 kilometres in length and 150 kilometres in width, its plateau rises nearly 1,200 metres from the surrounding abyssal seabed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasy_Nikitin ↑

2. https://harishyam.com/blogs/news/the-story-of-samudra-manthan-churning-of-the-ocean?srsltid=AfmBOopkL-TIwjKt34mGxQ5lKmUMkKwRdELviwGY3Gp87poDzVaCg7Gj ↑