Ashoka’s Gold Mine Set For Comeback Next Year

Subject :History

Section: Ancient

Context:

In a rock edict, the emperor Ashoka declared all the gold and gemstones found at Jonnagiri were his. Now, a private company ‘Geomysore’ is gearing up to start gold mining at the ancient site again.

About Suvarnagiri or Jonnagiri:

The ancients called it Suvarnagiri (Gold mountain).
With time the name changed to Sonnagiri and then Jonnagiri.
Jonnagiri in Andhra Pradesh’s Kurnool district is just a village now, but in the days of Ashoka The Great it was the headquarters of the southern part of his empire.
Some of his famous 3rd century BCE rock edicts have been found here. A huge rock-cut well near a temple is probably a relic of an ancient gold rush.
Hundreds of years later, the Cholas were masters of Jonnagiri’s gold.
In the colonial period the British tried but weren’t very successful so they moved on to Kolar, about 300 km away in Karnataka.

Back To Golden Age:

The studies from Geological Survey of India (GSI) between 1991 and 1994 identified the potential for gold extraction.
In Jonnagiri the mining company has to sift through up to 2 tonnes of soil to find 1 gram of gold.

About the mining company:

Geomysore is jointly owned by Thriveni Earth Movers Pvt Ltd (60%) and Deccan Gold Mines Ltd (40%).
It has spent the past 10 years analyzing the Jonnagiri site.
Advanced exploration for gold mining includes trenching, soil sampling, IP survey, magnetic survey and drilling.
Full-scale commercial operations at Jonnagiri by August 2024.
They will be only the second operational gold miner in India after the Karnataka government-owned Hutti Gold Mines Co Ltd, and have set a target of producing about 1 tonne of gold every year through the open pit mining and processing project.

How much gold does Jonnagiri hold?

The gold is distributed across the four blocks – east, west, south and north – of the license area and detailed evaluation of the east block has shown the presence of 6.8 tonnes of mineable gold. Enough to keep the mine going for 8-9 years.

Moving Mountains Of Ore

Gold in the Jonnagiri ore can be recovered with the cheap ‘gravity separation’ method.
To achieve the target of 1 tonne per annum of gold, a processing plant with a capacity to sift through 1,500 tonnes of ore daily will be set up.
The ore will be crushed in three stages and then pulverized in a ball mill before the gold is separated from the dirt in a hydrocyclone, a kind of centrifuge.

Closed now, Kolar Gold mine was far bigger

The Kolar gold mines are centuries old. The Cholas have tried for gold mining here more than 1,000 years ago.
British industrialist John Taylor III (his company- John Taylor & Sons) succeeded in extracting gold from the Kolar mine in the 1880s. In 1956 the company was nationalized.
The Kolar mine was shut in 2001 due to a sharp fall in international gold prices. At that time the mine had yielded about 900 tonnes of gold.
India’s only significant gold producer now is the Hutti mine in Karnataka that was revived in 1947. Since then, it has produced nearly 2 tonnes of gold per year.