INDIA'S COAL MINES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 23, 28 January 1939, Page 18 (Supplement)

INDIA'S COAL MINES.

Most of us think of India as the home of abiding heat and seasonal deluges; but it extends over 28 degrees of latitude, one extremity reaching far into the torrid zone, the other embracing cold mountain regions where the chief heights are for ever wreathed in enow. Happily Nature has prepared a coal cellar 011 the spot. Probably there remains much for the geologists yet to discover, but even now she is known to possess 3.5.000 square miles of land capable of yielding coal. A land of immense antiquity, India hag huge deposits of rock composed almost entirely of fossil life of other ages. Her forests were from time to time engulfed by the sea and converted into coal. Much of the coal is different from that found in England, yielding only half or a little more in power, and so British coal lias in the past been welcomed there. Nevertheless, there must be good coal in India, for not only do they employ it for their own industries, they have markets for it in Malaya, China and South Africa, all now bombarding India with orders more than she can meet. So it is not by her coral strand, of which the hymn reminds 11s. but by lier black diamonds that India now commands a place in the industrial history of the time. Her mineral riches are almost inexhaustible. She has abundant iron, which she smelts by means of charcoal into ore of excellent quality; she has manganese, copper, gold, silver, mica and a host of other precious possessions waiting to be brought to light to enhance her own treasury and the market supplies of the worldL