Gold Metallogeny: India and Beyond

Abstract

Mihir Deb and Richard J. Goldfarb, Editors. Pp. 309. 2010. Alpha Science International Ltd. Oxford. ISBN 978-1-84265-646-4. Price £150.00. India has an extraordinarily strong historical, religious, and cultural association with gold since mining of the precious metal has been documented to have occurred there as long as 4,000 years ago. Currently, India has the highest consumption of consumer gold of any country on the planet, at approximately 1,000 t/year. However, gold production remains dismally small, with perhaps only 3 to 4 t/year recovered during modern times, and only as much as ~20 t/year during its contemporary apogee about 100 years ago. This massive gap will widen further as economic prosperity brings greater disposable income to India’s burgeoning middle class, and production shows no signs of increasing. The lack of any likely near-future increase in production for India has its roots in an historically inadequate minerals policy, poor geoscience datasets, and bureaucratic administrative shenanigans. India consistently ranked amongst the lower percentiles on all questions dealing with policy or data availability in the Fraser Institute’s 2009–2010 Survey of Mining Companies, In which it kept company with other mining-unfriendly regimes such as those in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Washington state (although India was just dropped from the list in 2010). It was with this background that Prof. Mihir Deb hosted a field workshop in December 2008 to bring researchers, explorers, and government officials together to …