By Navneet Mishra

New Delhi, Feb 23 (IANS): Day after the news of discovery of gold deposits estimated to be around 3,000 tonnes in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) on Saturday rejected any such finding and issued a clarification that the estimated reserve is about 160 kg.

Now, the question arises...how did the information spread?

An investigation by IANS revealed that the entire thing started after the correspondence between the mining department of Uttar Pradesh and the collector of Sonbhadra got leaked.

IANS has a letter dated January 31, 2020 from the Directorate of Mines and Minerals (Mining Directorate) of Uttar Pradesh, which has estimated a total of 2943.26 tonnes gold in Sona Pahadi block and 46.15 kg gold in Hardi block of Sonbhadra district. Thus, this letter states that there are likely to be about 3,000 tonnes of gold in the district.

This letter also states that the report of auction of minerals has been made available by the GSI. The land is to be identified before auction of blocks of minerals. The seven-member team has also been informed to extract the gold. In the letter, information has also been given on behalf of the District Magistrate (Collector) of Sonbhadra.

The GSI stated that the organisation is not a party to the news reports published by various media houses about the estimation of the amount of gold.