Gold is found in which of the following districts of Bihar?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Jamui. Two written parliamentary replies by the Ministry of Mines settle this, and neither leaves room for a second district. On 1 December 2021 the Union Minister of Coal, Mines and Parliamentary Affairs told the Lok Sabha, in one flat sentence: 'The entire resource of gold ore in Bihar is located in Sono area of Jamui district.' Sono is one of the ten blocks of Jamui, in the broken hill country where the Chotanagpur plateau pushes north across the Bihar–Jharkhand border. The same reply gives the numbers behind that sentence, drawn from the National Mineral Inventory as on 1 April 2015: India's total resources of primary gold ore stand at 501.83 million tonnes containing 654.74 tonnes of gold metal, of which 'Bihar is endowed with 222.885 million tonnes (44%) of ore containing 37.6 tonnes of metal'. Every tonne of the Bihar figure is then classified under the United Nations Framework Classification as code 333 — 128.885 million tonnes of ore with 21.6 tonnes of metal — or code 334, 94 million tonnes with 16 tonnes of metal. Those are the inferred and reconnaissance classes; nothing in Bihar is a proved reserve, and no gold is mined in the state. The earlier reply, given in the Rajya Sabha on 26 July 2021, puts Bihar at the head of the national table — 'largest resources of gold ore (primary) are located in Bihar (44%) followed by Rajasthan (25%), Karnataka (21%), West Bengal (3%), Andhra Pradesh (3%), Jharkhand (2%)' — and records that of India's 501.83 million tonnes only 17.22 million tonnes sit in the reserves category, the remaining 484.61 million tonnes being remaining resources. The Commission wanted the district, and on the Government of India's own record there is exactly one: Jamui, and inside Jamui, Sono. The 1 December 2021 reply does name two other Bihar districts, but only as ground GSI has walked over — a G4 reconnaissance survey for placer gold in the Siwalik foothills of West Champaran, where the average concentration ran between 0.0061 and 1.96 ppm and 'no resource has been estimated', and a G3 preliminary exploration in Gaya district. Neither appears among the options, and neither Munger, Saran nor Siwan is credited with a single tonne of gold ore anywhere in the National Mineral Inventory.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The sharpest trap on the paper, because it was true in an administrative sense within living memory. Munger has had five districts partitioned off its territory — Begusarai in 1972, Khagaria in 1988, Jamui in 1991, and Lakhisarai and Sheikhpura in 1994 — and the Sono tract went out with Jamui on 21 February 1991. Any account of Bihar's gold written before that date, and a great deal of coaching material copied from such accounts since, therefore places the deposit in 'Munger'. Thirty-two years separated that reorganisation from this paper, and the National Mineral Inventory records no gold-ore resource against Munger. Munger is a real answer to other Bihar questions — the 1,419 sq km district holds Bhimbandh Wildlife Sanctuary and its hot springs, and Jamalpur is one of the state's industrial towns — but gold is not its fact.  (b) Saran lies in the north-western Gangetic plain, in the doab between the Gandak and the Ghaghara, under hundreds of metres of Quaternary river alluvium with no crystalline basement anywhere near the surface. That is the wrong geology for a lode deposit, which needs old vein-bearing rock in place and reachable. The official record treats the district accordingly: India-WRIS lists Saran (Chhapra) among the districts commanded by the Gandak canal system, and the National Mineral Inventory credits it with no gold-ore resource at all. Saran's claims on a general studies paper are agrarian, riverine and political — Chhapra its headquarters, and Sonepur at the Ganga–Gandak confluence with its famous fair — not mineral. A candidate marking it is reasoning from the sound of a Bihar district name rather than from where old rock actually surfaces.  (c) The same geology and the same disqualifier as Saran, which is no accident — Siwan was a subdivision of Saran district before it became a district in its own right, and it shares Saran's deep alluvial cover north-west of the Ganga inside the same Gandak canal command. It covers 2,219 sq km of that plain, and the National Mineral Inventory records no gold ore for it. Siwan's standing in general studies is historical rather than geological: it is the birthplace of Dr Rajendra Prasad, at Ziradei, and the district administration's own list of eminent personalities runs to Maulana Mazharul Haque and Khuda Baksh Khan. Nothing in its record points at mining, and a candidate who marks it has not applied the geological filter that removes both north-western options in one step.

Concept: Gold occurs in two very different settings, and the distinction runs through this whole question. Primary or lode gold sits inside the rock in which it crystallised, typically in quartz veins threading ancient Precambrian greenstone belts. Placer gold has already been weathered out of such rock and re-concentrated by rivers or waves in loose sand and gravel. India's inventory of the primary kind is compiled by the Indian Bureau of Mines as the National Mineral Inventory and graded under the United Nations Framework Classification, in which exploration runs through four stages — G4 reconnaissance, G3 preliminary, G2 general and G1 detailed — and the three-digit codes fall away from proved material towards merely reconnoitred material as you move from 331 to 334. A 'reserve' is what can be economically extracted on today's technology and prices; a 'remaining resource' is everything else that is known to be there. Bihar's gold is the textbook illustration of the gap between the two: the state tops the national table for the quantity of ore and contributes nothing whatever to national output, because all of its resource sits at codes 333 and 334 and the metal locked in each tonne of rock is too little to pay for moving the rock.

State PCS 2023 Q89 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q89 — Geography PYQ with Answer