LOHUM Appoints Ex-Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria As Strategic Adviser

LOHUM, a diversified producer of sustainable critical minerals and advanced materials, on Thursday announced the appointment of former Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria as a strategic adviser to build the country's defence materials sovereignty programme.

The appointment anchors a first-of-its-kind national programme that seeks to treat phased-out defence assets not as scrap, but as a strategic reserve of critical minerals, advanced metals and recoverable industrial value.

The initiative aims to transform old and decommissioned equipment that once safeguarded the nation's borders into assets capable of supporting India's critical mineral security, energy transition, innovation and strategic industrial capabilities.

The engagement is being undertaken in partnership with VishvaSutra, the strategic advisory institution co-founded by Bhadauria, which brings together leadership and experience from across the aerospace, defence, technology, policy and industrial ecosystems to convert strategic possibilities into executable national capabilities across air, land, sea and space. This programme is an expression of that mission at industrial scale, the company said in a statement.

The programme will be built around three pillars which includes creating a trusted and secure ecosystem for recovering strategic materials from end-of-life defence assets of the Army, Air Force and Navy and advancing indigenous technologies for the sustainable extraction and refining of gallium, titanium, rare earth elements, tantalum, tungsten and other critical materials from decommissioned equipment, the statement said.

India continues to rely heavily on imports for several critical minerals needed for its defence, semiconductor, electronics, clean-energy and mobility sectors.

At the same time, decades of public investment are embedded in military platforms and equipment nearing the end of their operational lives.

These include aircraft, vehicles, radar and communication systems, batteries, cables, power systems, electronic equipment and specialised machinery containing significant quantities of titanium, aluminium, copper, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements, specialised steels and high-performance alloys.