Just a coupla days back, Vedanta won India's first gold mine auction - that of the Baghmara mine in Chattisgarh. It is estimated to give a total yield of 2700kg. Presently, India consumes about 900-1000 tonnes of gold per annum. It produces 15 tonnes of those, and procures the remaining 885-985 tonnes. Being a gold-crazy nation, and yet locally mining for 1.5% of its total needs, our priorities seem haywire. The infamous bureaucratic red tape has also shown its magic here, by delay of licenses; and corruption also reared its head here, in the way of the recent mining scams coming to light.
Coincidentally, today, I started into looking into a career as a gold prospector. Finding gold in the wild was and is still an adventure. The cool thing is that gold is a siderophile (ie tends to bond with metallic iron) and a chalcogen (occuring in an ore like copper), so it is found commonly, albeit in trace amounts. The funny thing is, that it takes little to bootstrap oneself into finding gold. Knowledge, skill, technology, time, these four ingredients are what make it work. Even with technology missing, and time short, the former two ingredients can go a long way.
PS: Gold has the chemical symbol Au, which is Latin for Aurum, which refers to the yellow of the dawn
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