Talc Mining

Mining In India Talc deposits are mostly mined by the opencast mining method in India. In the opencast method, overburden is removed by drilling, blasting and mechanical excavators. After the removal of overburden, soft mineral (soapstone lumps/talc lumps) is mined out and transported to its defined destination. In India most of the mines are manual and some are semi-mechanized and very few are mechanized. In India talc is produced in a number of states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand. Rajasthan is the biggest producer of talc in India. Rajasthan covers a substantial quantity of almost 49% of the resources present in India but the in Rajasthan talc is generally not found in its purest form. Their are impurities like quartz, calcite, dolomite, magnesite, serpentine, chlorite etc. The second largest producer of talc is UTTARAKHAND and it covers about 29% of the total estimated talc resource in India. Talc found in Uttarakhand is in the purest form among all the other states. There are very less impurities and Uttarakhand has the best quality talc producing mines in India. Rest of the 22% of the total natural resources is shared by the remaining states. Mining In Uttarakhand Almost all the talc mines in Uttarakhand are mined by the opencast method. In Uttarakhand mining is done in 3 districts Almora, Bageshwar and Pithoragarh. Surface conditions for mining in Uttarakhand are not very friendly because of high elevation of the surface. Mining in Uttarakhand is done manually and overburden removal is done by the help of mechanical excavators. Drilling and blasting is done in very rare case. Removal of the impurities and sorting of material grade wise is done visually by skilled labour who have specialization for this job. After mining talc is filled in the bags and stacked in the mine site. Talc bags are then transported by trucks to the defined destination. Loading and unloading of the bags is done manually by the labour.