How a young entrepreneur is building domestic tin capacity in an import-dependent market

Tin is not a metal that often makes headlines. Yet it sits quietly at the heart of India’s electronics, renewable energy, and manufacturing supply chains. From circuit boards to soldering material, the metal is hard to replace. Despite this, India has long imported almost all the tin it uses, about 95 percent of its annual requirement.

Realising a business opportunity for Indian manufacturing, Delhi-based Yash Gupta, a 27-year-old entrepreneur set up one of India’s first facilities capable of refining high-purity tin within the country.

A metal India does not make
India consumes over 10,000 metric tonnes of tin every year, most of it sourced from Southeast Asian producers such as Indonesia and Malaysia. The country has little domestic tin mining and, until recently, no meaningful capacity to refine tin to the quality required by electronics manufacturers.

This meant Indian companies were exposed to global price swings, supply disruptions, and currency risks, vulnerabilities that became more visible during the pandemic and subsequent supply chain shocks.

Gupta set up Rikayaa Enterprises in 2020, initially trading metals and working in recycling. Instead of focusing on mining, Gupta and his team took a different route. They began working on refining tin from scrap and electronic waste, areas that were largely under-utilised domestically. Over several years, the company developed a refining process that combines hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical methods to extract tin with 99.9% purity.

In 2022, Rikayaa Greentech commissioned a tin refining plant in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh. The facility marked a first for India, producing tin of a quality comparable to global benchmarks and suitable for electronics and industrial use. Today, the company supplies tin to about 25–30 clients.

A modest but meaningful impact
Rikayaa Greentech’s production is still small compared to India’s total demand. Even at an annual capacity of around 4,000 metric tonnes, the company covers only a fraction of the country’s needs. But the shift is symbolic for a sector where domestic refining capacity was virtually non-existent.

Tin may be the starting point, not the end. Rikayaa is now expanding into aluminium products and exploring recovery of other metals such as copper, silver, and gold from electronic waste. These are areas where India also relies heavily on imports, despite generating large volumes of scrap and e-waste. Gupta’s work was also recognized in the Forbes India “30 Under 30” list for 2026. For India, the lesson from tin is not about replacing imports overnight.