Hard rock mining resumes today after four and half months
The mine was closed due to lack of explosives required for mining
The country's only granite mining company Madhyapara Granite Mining Company Limited (MGMCL) is set to resume operation today after it was closed for four and a half months due to lack of explosives required for mine production.
The mine will run at full capacity in three shifts from the first day with a target to produce 5000 to 5500 tonnes of stone per day, Abu Daud Mohammad Fariduzzaman, managing director at Maddhapara Granite Mining Company Limited told The Business Standard.
"Importing of explosives has started again and we have already stored required explosives for next six months," he said, adding, "All necessary measures have been finalised to start the production in the mine from 7AM Thursday."
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The mine was closed from 1 May due to several explosive crises including ammonium nitrate (explosive).
Sources at Bangladesh Oil, Gas and Mineral Resource Corporation (Petrobangla) said that MGMCL used to import the explosives and hand them over to the Belarus-based mine developing contractor Germania Trest Consortium (GTC).
As per the agreement, MGMCL is responsible to provide all the machinery, equipment and explosives to the contractor for hard rock production.
Sources at the MGMCL said there is a demand of 1.5 tonnes of explosives every day to mine the hard rock.
MGMCL has been sourcing the required explosives from India, China, South-Korea and Thailand. But in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the supply of explosives was disrupted, leading to the crisis.
Besides, due to bureaucratic complexity, MGMCL often lags behind in importing and supplying explosives to the mine contractor resulting in huge production and revenue losses to the government and the contractor, said Petrobangla sources.
In order to mitigate the delay in explosive import, Petrobangla gave the import power to the contractor for the next five and half years.
However, from now on, GTC itself will import the explosives on its own as they have signed a contract with MGMCL for the next five and half years, they said.
GTC already imputed the required amount of explosives for the next six months and these explosives will be used to resume the production from today.
At present, the country has an annual demand of 1.5 crore tonnes of rocks, of which MGMCL supplies 6%.
The granite market, which is worth Tk6,000 crore, has a massive 20-25% annual growth that is met with imports.
