Geoscience Australia, Australia’s national geological survey, has launched a programme to help Geological Survey of India (GSI) in adopting modern practices and upgrading its capacities to help uncover new mineral deposits.

According to an agreement between the two countries last year, Geoscience Australia has taken a two-year programme to train the capable Indian scientists to adopt a geological process based understanding of ore deposits to add predictive capacity to their exploration techniques. “This is a change of approach and mindset. It’s a shift from empirical documentation of the geology of the country in which GSI a long tradition to understanding geological process, which we refer as mineralisation approach that has much bigger footprint than simply the ore deposit itself,” James Jhonson, Deputy CEO of resources division of Geoscience Australia, told BusinessLine .

He was in the city in connection with the IMME and Global Mining Summit, 2016 in Kolkata.

Training scientists

Referring to Geoscience’s involvement as ‘training the trainers’, Johnson said his organisation started training the first batch of scientists in the new approach and they will in turn train the rest of the manpower and create a capacity to asses the technology upgrades required.

According to him, the change in approach should not require additional staffing as GSI has a few thousand employees when compared to 600-people strong Geoscience Australia. Of the 600 people, a mere 50 is dedicated in finding minerals.

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