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With gold prices close to touching their all-time highs India's venerable Kolar gold mines may be revived with the Union cabinets backing. It has now cleared a proposal to look into the feasibility of this operation.  The mines were declared sick and shut down in 2001.
Atleast 121 years old, the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) have the second deepest mine in the world after South Africa and experts estimate that they still have enough reserves to yield 10 tonnes of gold annually over the next 15 years. With gold prices at record highs, and its status as a safe haven investment still intact in the face of sluggish economic growth around the world, yield from the mines could prove to be a windfall for the country. According to estimates arrived at by a number of parliamentary standing committees, constituted to look at reviving KGF in the periods 1994, 1997 and 2000, the Kolar fields still have unexploited reserves of at least 30 lakh tonnes. Experts says that gold reserves could also be extracted from the tailing dumps (cyanide dumps) that now litter KGF. Tailing dumps are the residue left over after the process of separating the valuable mineral from the worthless portion of the ore.
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