Ashoka’s Gold Mine Set For Comeback Next Year
- October 8, 2023
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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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.