KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) - The Indian government has reported an increase in the country’s monazite reserves.
According to official data, India’s monazite reserves have gone up by 1.25-million tonnes to 11.93-million tonnes, following exploration and assessments carried out by Geological Survey of India between 2009 and 2013.
The reserves are spread across provinces and the government data showed that Andhra Pradesh in southern Indian was reported to have the highest monazite reserves of 3.72-million tonnes, followed by Tamil Nadu with 2.46-million tonnes, Odisha with 2.41-million tonnes, Kerala with 1.90-million tonnes, West Bengal at 1.22-million tonnes and Jharkhand with 0.22-million tonnes.
According to Junior Minister of Mines and Steel Vishnu Deo Sai, directions had been given to government-owned companies like Indian Rare Earth Limited (IREL) to step up exploitation of monazite resources across the country in view of the higher available reserves.
He said that IREL, under direct control of the Department of Atomic Energy, had been processing monazite at its rare earths plant, located at Alwaye in the southern Indian province of Kerala, since 1952, but stopped processing monazite in 2004 owing to a lack of markets, as processed monazite was easily imported from other Asian countries at lower costs.
However, in the last two years, IREL established a monazite processing plant, the Orissa Sands Complex with a capacity to process 10 000 t/y. The project was, however, yet to hit production in the face of delayed mandatory approvals from both provincial and federal governments.
Government officials said that despite reported higher monazite reserves, exploitation and development of the radioactive mineral had been hamstrung by a funding crunch, with IREL, the country’s sole authorized rare earth mineral processing company, not having the financial muscle for optimal exploitation of the resource.
Barely 1% of the country’s land mass had been explored for monazite resource and though IREL had been mandated to increase exploration and development of the mineral, the company had limited ability to undertake such high risk-high investment activity without financial support from the government, the officials added.