While we’ve forever been taught the importance of forests and on land natural resources, through school instilled slogans such as “Hariyo Ban Nepal ko Dhan”, the natural resources that lie below our rather rich soil have always found themselves as a footnote to natural resource utilisation plans. The lack of importance or attention shown to these very resources, in their development, their research and their sustainable extraction is well evident in the rather narrow mandate the Department of Mines and Geology of Nepal operates under.

 Severely understaffed and shunned, the Department of Mines & Geology(DoMG) sits on the precipice of possibly launching long-term projects that could see the department become economically self-sustainable and Nepal self-sustaining in the production of many important resources in the roadmap to development.