The Surda Mine is located in Jharkhand State within the Singhbhum Mobile Belt of eastern India. The Singhbhum belt comprises a 200km long, east-west trending arcuate belt of folded supracrustal rocks, overlying the northern margin of the Singhbhum-Orissa Craton. The belt is host to a number of mineral deposits and existing underground copper mines.

The Surda Mine is part of the Indian Copper Complex, a group of six mines owned by HCL that operated between 1928 and 2003. The mine closed in January 2003 and for the six years prior produced a total of 1,473,000 tonnes at an average grade of 0.9% copper. It was the second largest copper producer from the six mines making up the Indian Copper Complex.

IRL’s main project is to re-open the Surda Mine and Mosaboni Concentrator of the Singhbhum Copper Belt in Jharkhand to supply and deliver copper concentrate at Maubhandar works of Indian Copper Complex. It has an initial objective of delivering annual production of 4,500 tonnes of copper concentrate.

Mineralisation styles and characteristics

Surda, one of the largest deposits in the belt has the following characteristics:

• mineralisation is developed over 2.2km along strike, and to a depth of 474m on the 13 level
• the mineralized zone is tabular; shear zone hosted and dips at an angle of 30-35 degree towards the northeast
• three main lodes occur, termed Hanging Wall, Intermediate and Footwall or Main lode. In places these merge to form lodes up to 20m thick, but average about 6m, comprising a “braided” lode system within the shear zone
• the host rocks of the mineralisation are quartz chlorite schist and “granular-quartz rock”, now mylonitised
• the footwall is composed of metabasite with  minor quartzite
• the hanging wall is made up of mostly sericite-chlorite-quartz schist to sericite-quartz rock of the Chaibasa Formation
• the ore is composed mainly of chalcopyrite (80%) and pyrite (20%) with none of the copper minerals common at the other mining centres such as bornite, chalcocite, tetrahedite or enargite
• very limited malachite or azurite at surface reflecting the lack of carbonates in the oxidised zone
• some minor metals in the concentrate: nickel, molybdenum, cobalt, gold, silver and uranium but no significant lead or zinc.

Exploration Potential

The Surda Mine represents an early opportunity for IRL to access and evaluate a producing copper operation in India, with significant potential based on historical production figures of 8,986,348 tonnes at 0.95% Cu. IRL has recently commenced compilation and interpretation information on Surda. Thorough assessment, review and re-interpretation of this data are required and IRL plans to focus on developing an improved structural understanding of the deposit which should assist in targeting specific high grade zones. The project area is inherently prospective, as demonstrated by its production history, and the along strike and depth extent to reported mineralisation.