The Kolar Gold Fields

A century of deep gold mining, now flooded

Kolar Gold Fields, or KGF, lies in the Kolar district of Karnataka, about 100 kilometres from Bengaluru, and for more than a century it was a gold town. John Taylor III acquired a number of mines here in 1880, and his firm, John Taylor & Sons, ran them until 1956. Gayatri Chandrashekar, author of a mining and social history of the field, writes that over two decades bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a British company turned a remote corner of old Mysore state into a close-knit industrial community skilled at mining at great depths, with a labour force in the tens of thousands right up to the 1930s.

The mines got one of India's first power-generation units in 1889, and in 1902 they were electrified by a 140-kilometre cable that General Electric ran from the hydroelectric plant at Shivanasamudra Falls. Workers came from the Tamil districts of Dharmapuri, Krishnagiri, Salem and North and South Arcot, and from Chittoor and its neighbours in Andhra Pradesh, settling on the outskirts, while British and Indian engineers, geologists and supervisors lived in the centre. The townships of Robertsonpet and Andersonpet carry the names of two British mine officials, and most of the Tamil population today traces its ancestry to labourers the British brought in during the late nineteenth century.

The field produced 27 tonnes of gold in 1905, its record year, and over 900 tonnes in all. The mines were nationalised in 1956, and the Indian government closed them on 28 February 2001 for economic and environmental reasons, with gold still in the rock. The workings were allowed to flood. According to Chandrashekar, mining professionals agree that draining them is impossible: the water carries dissolved chemicals unfit for irrigation, and it now helps hold up the honeycomb of tunnels and shafts, so pumping it out would raise the risk of land slips and rock bursts.

Physicists also used the deep workings, running particle physics experiments there from the 1960s until 1992. Above ground, the Geological Survey of India has declared the field's pyroclastic rocks and pillow lava a National Geological Monument, for their protection and to encourage geotourism.