Entrepreneurship

CSR and the Mining Industry

Corporate Social Responsibility in the corporate world is perceived more as a charity or as a philanthropic activity than as a responsibility. Some good deeds to the community are done merely as  tokenisms so that something can be written under the head of CSR in the company’s website and annual report. Companies must realise or be made to realise that this is a responsibility as serious and non-negotiable as is the responsibility a parent has towards providing for his or her child. This is because the company takes from the community the majority of it’s resources both material and human …

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Blockchain in Metal/Mineral Mining

When you hear ‘blockchain’  your mind automatically moves to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Were you to utter mining in the same breath the word almost gets a digital colour and conjures the picture of a millennial computer geek punching his laptop keys and not the miner with his yellow helmet and muddy boots. Bitcoin definitely turned the spotlight on Blockchain technology. But now the revolutionary impact of blockchain is hitting diverse areas like banking, defence, voting, real estate, social networking, energy and of course the one that interests us most – mining  What is Block chain technology? Blockchain technology in simplistic …

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Delays Have Dangerous Ends!

Defer no time. Delays have dangerous ends! –  William Shakespeare (Henry VI Part 1) These words of the immortal wordsmith echo in an ominous tone, the doom that awaits Tamilnadu if it doesn’t change its course. Wait. Does that sound too morose and melodramatic? Maybe! But I have my reasons. Read on… Last week, newspapers reported the results of a survey by NewDelhi based Institute of Economic Group on how Indian states fared in specific parameters of ease of doing business. And one of the findings that fix a frown on my face is this – Tamilnadu is one of the worst states when it comes …

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Mining Bans – The Domino effect on Economy

One of the recurrent themes in our blogs is the primacy of the mineral mining industry to other industries and thereby to the economy. When a crisis hits the mining of these prized minerals, it has a domino effect on several other industries. This is why it is of absolute importance that we take the mining industry and its problems seriously. And this is also why, even at the cost of becoming boringly repetitious, we have been relentlessly hitting the hammer to drive home this point. Now let’s take the Government’s ban on mining beach minerals. An exploration of each …

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Hope on the horizon- National Mineral Policy 2018

Anyone just casually observant of the Mining Industry in India can see that the industry is bone-weary and badly needs a boost. Illegal mining in some areas has become the proverbial dead-fly-in-the-ointment, ruining the reputation of the entire industry. Bad press and Bans begrime almost every mining company operating in the country thanks to growing environmental activism. But in a technology-driven world, metals and minerals are of incalculable value for quotidian life and mining them an absolute necessity. So we simply cannot ignore the industry’s woes and let it self-heal at its own slow pace. The dispiritedness that the negativity …

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Delving Deeper into the Rare Earth Crisis

If you have been keeping a tab on international news blogs in the past week, you would have most likely come across the term ‘Rare earth Crisis’ and the torrent of discussions surrounding it. If you haven’t, then this blog is intended to de-mystify those words for you and bring out their relevance to India today. What exactly is this ‘Rare earth crisis’? The term entered newspaper parlance way back in 2010. A Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese Coastguard ship in a territorial dispute. In retaliation, the Japanese navy seized the boat’s captain. Two weeks later China hit back …

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Mineral wealth and the challenges to entrepreneurs

The world is changing and so is India. Entrenched big businesses are facing acute challenges in the hands of extremely small and isolated players and an interesting ecosystem is evolving where entrepreneurs are no longer afraid of venturing out big, something that only very few highly motivated and extremely passionate individual entrepreneurs could do in the past years.    The bullish entrepreneurship and expansion of big businesses are opening up markets beyond the national shores and globalization trends are paving way for extremely adventurous and innovative ventures by both very small and very big players without much distinction. Access to capital …

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