Mineral exploration - Present status and future outlook in India

Mineral assets of any country play a direct role in the growth and prosperity of a country and its people. It is therefore, unavoidable that substantial investments are made for exploration of these assets through different agencies having the skills to do the job. With the fast exploitation of known deposits and decline in the rate of locating new mineral deposits within shallow depths, it has become imperative to look deep-seated and concealed deposit under thick overburden for meeting the ever growing need of mankind. The probe for deep-seated mineral resources is obviously fraught with many high risk activities including technological and economic hurdles extending from the stages of their search and exploration to exploitation. The government agencies involved in regional and detailed mineral exploration both on and offshore are the Geological Survey of India and the Directorates of Mining and Geology of different states and the public sector undertakings of the central and the state governments such as Mineral Exploration Corporation Limited (MECL) etc. In the present paper an attempt has been made to go through the various provision in Policy, Act and Rules about mineral exploration, and discussed the stages of exploration to fulfill UNhC, JORC, etc.; system criteria, organizations involved in exploration, state of art technology, processing of data and interpretation and software used in exploration.