IF THE CAPE FITS

Vedanta Resources chairman Anil Agarwal’s superpower is resuscitation. He has 10 examples to prove it.

- ASHISH GUPTA

THE 130 KM-LONG TUNNEL, around 1.5 km below the earth’s surface, does not make for an easy ride. (Tolkein fans, picture the Mines of Moria. That gloomy.) Think dark, bumpy, and damp; also narrow—5.5 metres wide and 5 metres high— with sharp inclines and turns. The road is lit with small low-powered bulbs, and sprinkled with 140 kilolitres of water daily to keep the swirling dust down. A sense of claustrophobia is inevitable.

But the pots of zinc at journey’s end make the schlep to the Sindesar Khurd (SK) mine in Rajpura Dariba, a two-hour drive from Udaipur in Rajasthan, a business necessity. Among India’s most modern and richest zinc-, lead-, and silver mines, SK is part of Hindustan Zinc Ltd (HZL), a Vedanta group company since 2002 after it bought 65% of the then public sector entity.

A constant flow of 50-, 63-, and 65-tonne trucks plies the tunnel, taking the ore to the mill for cleaning and then to the smelter to separate metal from impurities: Each tonne contains 2.3% lead, 3.99% zinc and 170 parts per million of silver. Vedanta, which restarted the mine in 2007 after a two-year hiatus, was extracting 4.5 million tonnes of ore as of FY19, with a target of 8 million tonnes by 2021. “The earlier management [the government], which was extracting one million tonnes a year, mostly through open-cast or surface mines, had actually closed the mine saying extraction had become unviable,” recalls Sunil Duggal, CEO, HZL, and also the vice president of the International Zinc Association.

But the deeper they dig, says Duggal, an electrical engineer from the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Punjab, the better quality they find—essentially, ore with a higher concentration of silver. “Perhaps God wanted us to dig deeper. That’s the only explanation that I can offer,’’ he says.