Economics of exhaustible resources has been one of the frontier areas of research for the last few decades. Yet, after decades of research one feels a little sceptic about the progress of knowledge achieved so far. Economics of environment and exhaustible resources as a branch of economic science had a challenge of providing a feedback to the mainstream economic analysis. But the disintegrated volume of literature that has generated has not been able to suggest any alternative to the conventional framework of economic analysis, which was the primary requirement to deal with the issues and questions on the field that remained outside the conventional faculty of economics. Moreover, most of the fundamental questions in the field have remained unanswered, while the focus of research programmes shifted to some fragmented issues. The central theme of the book deals with two fundamental questions – the notion of scarcity of natural resources and the concept of technological progress as the saviour of civilisation from the doomsday apprehended due to scarcity of resources. The book investigates the case of mineral resource in India from these two aspects. In course of this investigation several limitations of the existing notions and analytical framework of conventional economics are noticed. The major one of these is found to be value-added conception at the foundation of the neo-classical production function. This book also introduces a concept of material-saving technological progress, which has so far not been focused in conventional economic analysis or grasped in the neo-classical formulation of value-added production.
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