NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s state-run miner NMDC is expected to extract 6,500 carats of diamonds, worth $3.4 million, this fiscal year from ores in a mine near a tiger reserve, after receiving mining clearances last year, two sources said.
The miner faced delays in securing environmental clearances and had to halt mining for over three years at the Panna mine in the central state of Madhya Pradesh due to its proximity to the tiger reserve.
The Supreme Court later permitted NMDC to mine, subject to certain guidelines, paving the way for the company to resume operations.
NMDC, which has not yet started new rounds of mining, is focusing on extracting and processing diamonds from ore stockpiles at its Panna mine, the sources said.
“We will start ore mining from the mines in two-three months, and in the meanwhile diamonds are processed through feeding of old stockpiles,” the company told Reuters in an e-mailed statement.
Since resuming operations, the company has extracted diamonds worth 3,700 carats or $1.93 million from the ore, said the sources, who did not wish to named before NMDC publicly shared its diamond output data.
The mine, covering an area of 275.96 hectares (681.91 acres), first began operations in the early 1970s and is the only mechanised diamond mine in the country.
Madhya Pradesh state is among the major diamond mining regions in Asia.
Global and domestic mining companies have also tried to mine diamonds at the Bunder project, near the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh, but with little success.
Before exiting the Bunder project in 2016-17, Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto spent about $90 million over 14 years on the mine.
Since Rio Tinto’s departure, mining has not started at the Bunder project, largely due to concerns over its location in a forested area home to tigers and other wildlife.
(Reporting by Neha Arora; editing by Mayank Bhardwaj and Bernadette Baum)
