INTRODUCTION

Minerals are among the several gifts of Nature to man. Available in abundance all over the country, minerals are location specific. They are the basic raw materials for many industries.

As the demand for minerals goes up day-by-day, there are unscrupulous elements having a heyday by exploiting the mineral wealth indiscriminately.

A word of caution here would not be out of place. Mineral wealth is renewable only if mining is carried out carefully. It is obvious that mining involves breaking of ground. This affects the environment. Paying back nature when we have extracted what we wanted would mean that mining has to compulsorily take care of environment. We need to bring it back as close to its previous status as possible. Traditionally, however, mining and conservation wereseen as antagonistic to each other. Generally, there was an impression that mining is an aggressive and reckless industry. It used wasteful methodologies and caused a lot of damage to the environment. While, by and large, this is what has happened, it is not true to say that mining has to totally stop so as to enable us to conserve minerals. What has indeed to change is the methodology. Some large mining companies adopted new techniques to conserve minerals even while extracting them from these sites. The need for conservation and nature-friendly methods in mining assume all the more importance due to the fact that many of the areas which are rich in minerals are also rich in bio-diversity.