A gold mining venture in Jonnagiri, a village in Kurnool district's Tuggali mandal, has completed a successful trial run of gold extraction, clearing the way for Andhra Pradesh to record its first-ever commercial gold output. Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu is scheduled to formally inaugurate the production unit on Wednesday, after which the facility will move to full-scale operations.
The project traces back to 2006, when Geomysore Services India Private Limited secured mining rights over 1,477.24 acres spanning Jonnagiri and the neighbouring villages of Erragudi and Pagidirayi, after a Geological Survey of India team investigating frequent diamond finds in the area instead turned up substantial gold ore deposits. Surveys eventually put the reserves at roughly one crore tonnes, with the eastern block alone accounting for nearly 68 lakh tonnes, found at depths ranging from 180 metres to as deep as two kilometres below the surface. Locals point to the village of Pagidirayi, which they say was once known as 'Pasidirayi' — literally gold-stone — as folk evidence that the area's mineral wealth was suspected long before it was scientifically confirmed.
Turning that confirmed reserve into an operating mine took close to three decades of regulatory clearances, infrastructure building and, more recently, a five-year stretch of delays that the company attributes to friction with the previous YSRCP state government. Officials say those obstacles were cleared after the current coalition government took office, allowing pending work to be fast-tracked. The company built a small pilot plant before investing roughly Rs 320 crore in a full-scale processing facility and hiring around 800 workers, and has already extracted enough ore to support an initial annual output of about 1,000 kilograms of gold, with extraction plans calling for roughly four lakh tonnes of ore to be mined annually as the operation scales toward a targeted 1,500 kilograms a year.
Beyond Wednesday's inauguration, Naidu is also expected to lay the foundation stone for a second processing unit in the same area, and the company plans to extend excavation to another 1,200 acres nearby. Officials are also eyeing similar prospects elsewhere in the state: gold-bearing deposits have already been identified in Anantapur district's Ramagiri, where production could begin within months, as well as in parts of Chittoor district.
The development is notable in the context of India's broader gold economy. The country is among the world's largest gold consumers but imports the overwhelming majority of the metal it uses each year, with domestic mining — historically dominated by Karnataka's Hutti Gold Mines — contributing only a small fraction of that demand. A new, large-scale private gold mine entering production would make Andhra Pradesh one of a very small number of Indian states with an active commercial gold-mining operation, adding a new strand to the state's push to diversify its industrial and mining base beyond its traditional resources.
