48th Central Geological Programming Board meeting begins review in Delhi

New Delhi, Feb.3 (ANI): The Geological Survey of India (GSI) will soon procure modern equipments that will uplift the pace and quantity output of all the exploration programmes of the GSI.

Revealing this here on Thursday,Minister of State for Mines (Independent Charge) Dinshaw Patel told participants at the 48th Central Geological Programming Board (CGPB) meeting of the Geological Survey of India (GSI),that the quality management cell created last year has added a new dimension to the GSI.

He said standard operating procedures (SOPs) in various spheres of work of GSI are being prepared and these would go a long way in quality management/control of its mandated activities.

The process for obtaining ISO Certification for some of the laboratories in GSI is on the agenda and hoped that it would be achieved soon.

Mines Secretary S. Vijay Kumar said that a significant dimension of international forays is to carve out a path and define a process for acquiring mineral deposits outside India.

"We are in negotiation stage with countries such as Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Chile, Mongolia, China, Canada, Australia etc in this regard", he added.

Kumar's speech, which was read in absentia, also touched upon the debate on climate change, and in this context, he mentioned that it would be interesting to see if the studies being carried out by the GSI on glaciology, marine geology and palaeo-climate can generate crucial data that could provide some clues on the emerging trends on this subject.

Additional Secretary S.K. Srivastava said that GSI has started functioning in mission-region hybrid Matrix mode in a set up of six regions, each epitomizing 'mini-GSI' to execute the programmes while the five Missions and three Support Systems are framing policy guidelines and formulating pathways.

He said the Ministry of Mines has endeavoured to make GSI an excellent geoscientific organization. He said the strength of GSI lies in its impeccable records of field data for last 160 years and added that a fair amount of field days must be spent by the geoscientists so that maximum possible observations can be recorded. (ANI)