Facing North: India's Strategic Stakes in the New Arctic

For most of recorded history, the Arctic has been defined by its inaccessibility: a vast, frozen expanse at the edge of the navigable world. That definition is dissolving, rapidly and irreversibly. NOAA's Arctic Report Card 2025 confirms that surface air temperatures across the Arctic from October 2024 through September 2025 were the warmest recorded since 1900. The Arctic is warming at approximately four times the global average, driven by the albedo effect, receding ice exposes darker ocean surfaces that absorb rather than reflect solar radiation, accelerating further melt in a self-reinforcing spiral. In September 2024, Arctic sea ice averaged just 3.9 million square kilometres, the lowest extent recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979. What was once a geophysical curiosity has become a geopolitical fact.

The stakes are significant. The Arctic holds an estimated 13 percent of the world's undiscovered crude oil and approximately 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas, alongside substantial deposits of rare earth minerals critical to the global energy transition. But it is the transformation of shipping that has most sharply focused strategic attention. In 2025, the first vessel completed a China–Europe transit along the Northern Sea Route in roughly 20 days, covering 7,850 nautical miles when compared to the Suez Canal route, which takes approximately 27 days across 11,167 nautical miles. Over the past decade, Arctic shipping has increased 37 percent, with 1,781 unique ships sailing a combined 12.7 million nautical miles in 2024 alone. As seasonal navigability extends, the Arctic is transitioning from a geographic footnote to a commercial and military corridor of the first order.

The major powers have not waited for the ice to fully recede before positioning themselves. Russia has significantly increased its military activity in the region, establishing a new Arctic Command, reopening former Soviet-era airfields and deep-water ports, and testing novel weapons systems. Moscow views the Northern Sea Route as central to its 2035 Arctic Strategy, projecting cargo volumes of 130 million tonnes along the route.

The United States, recalibrated by the post-Ukraine strategic environment, released its 2024 Pentagon Arctic Strategy and appointed its first Ambassador-at-Large for Arctic Affairs. With Finland and Sweden now inside the Alliance, seven of the eight Arctic Council member states are NATO members: a development that effectively doubled NATO's border with Russia and fundamentally redrawn the security geometry of the High North. In December 2025, NATO restructured its command boundaries to bring the Nordic allies under a unified Arctic operational framework. What was once governed by consensus among circumpolar nations is now contested terrain.

Against this backdrop, India's posture merits honest scrutiny. India is not entirely absent from the Arctic. It has maintained the Himadri Research Station at Svalbard since 2008, deployed the multi-sensor moored observatory IndArc in Kongsfjorden in 2014 and has held Observer status at the Arctic Council since 2013. In March 2022, New Delhi released its Arctic Policy: a document organised around six pillars covering science, climate, economic development, transportation, governance and national capacity building. The policy is competent in its framing.

But as analysts at the Observer Research Foundation have noted, it does not address the growing militarisation, great power rivalry, and geopolitical significance of the Arctic which are the very dynamics now defining the Arctic region. India has no icebreaker, no dedicated Arctic budget line and no articulated strategic doctrine. As of now, it has a presence without a purpose.

This matters because India's interests in the Arctic are neither peripheral nor speculative. On energy, Arctic LNG reserves offer meaningful diversification away from Gulf hydrocarbons: ONGC Videsh has the institutional framework and precedent to pursue this avenue more aggressively. On trade, the Northern Sea Route could substantially reduce India-Europe shipping distances, with direct implications for exporters and the government's maritime connectivity ambitions.

On critical minerals, Arctic deposits are strategically relevant to India's semiconductor and electric vehicle supply chain goals. And on climate, the connection is both scientifically established and existentially significant: Arctic melt disrupts the Indian Ocean dipole and monsoon variability, with cascading consequences for agriculture, water security and coastal communities across the subcontinent. India, with 1.4 billion people and a 7,500-kilometre coastline, is among the world's most climate-exposed nations. Basically, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

Nowhere is India's potential contribution more distinctive than on the question of the Arctic ecosystem itself and nowhere has its voice been more conspicuously muted. The Greenland Ice Sheet lost an estimated 129 billion tonnes of ice in 2025, and glaciers in Arctic Scandinavia and Svalbard experienced their largest annual net loss on record between 2023 and 2024. Receding sea ice is altering the migratory patterns of narwhal, beluga, bowhead whales, caribou and salmon, resulting in food shortages for Indigenous Arctic communities and jeopardising their livelihoods, cultures and health.

Industrial expansion, new ports, mining roads, oil and gas drilling is compounding climate-driven stress on biodiversity at a pace that outstrips governance. India, as a climate-vulnerable nation and a leading voice of the Global South, carries both the credibility and the moral weight to advocate within Arctic governance forums for binding environmental standards, meaningful limits on extractive activity and the genuine inclusion of Indigenous peoples in decision-making. This is not a soft dimension of Arctic engagement, it is the moral anchor around which India's presence in the region can be most distinctively and persuasively framed.

There is also a strategic lesson to be drawn from the one actor that has most successfully inserted itself into Arctic affairs despite having no geographic claim to the region. In its 2018 Arctic White Paper, China formally described itself as a "near-Arctic state" with rights to participate in Arctic affairs under international law, a self-designation with no basis in geography but considerable geopolitical intent. Just as the Belt and Road Initiative enabled China to establish transcontinental influence without formal political alliances, the Polar Silk Road offers an Arctic corollary, linking economic cooperation with geopolitical presence. Regular use of the Northern Sea Route normalises China's position in a region where it holds no territorial standing; over time, operational presence translates into political influence, particularly in governance forums where practical experience carries weight.

India need not replicate Beijing's approach, which has generated significant pushback from Arctic states for its opacity and dual-use concerns. But the underlying logic is instructive: states that engage with intent, consistency and institutional seriousness shape Arctic norms. Those that do not, accept norms shaped by others. 

The path forward for India is neither complicated nor beyond reach. It begins with deepening the bilateral relationship with Norway, India's most natural Arctic partner through a formalised cooperation framework, expanded scientific exchange and potentially a second research station.

It requires pursuing Arctic energy investments through ONGC Videsh, particularly in LNG projects that offer supply diversification alongside governance presence. It demands elevating Arctic affairs institutionally within the Ministry of External Affairs, treating Observer status at the Arctic Council as a diplomatic platform rather than a credential. And it calls for coalition-building with like-minded non-Arctic Asian partners such as Japan and South Korea that share India's concerns about unchecked great power competition and the erosion of rules-based governance in the global commons to collectively advocate for transparency, environmental accountability and equitable access.

The Arctic is not a challenge India can defer. The ice melts on its own schedule, indifferent to competing domestic priorities or bandwidth constraints in the South Block. The nations that are present, engaged and institutionally invested today will write the governance frameworks, transit norms, resource agreements and environmental standards that will govern the region for the next century. India has the scientific foundation, the legitimate national interests, the climate standing and the moral authority to be a consequential actor in this emerging theatre. What it presently lacks is urgency. Every year of strategic dormancy is not neutrality, it is a concession of influence, ceded by default to those who have chosen to show up. The Arctic rulebook is being written now. India must be at the table.