Techno-Economic Aspect of Dimension Stone Mining In Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Abstract

In developing countries like Pakistan which are bestowed by nature with huge deposits of minerals are
largely run by small scale mining, and mostly result in wasting precious deposits by adopting conventional mining
methods neglecting the health and safety aspect. This research endeavour analyzed the techno-economic aspects of
various mining methods for extraction of dimension stone in chitral region and proposed a suitable mining method
based on these aspects. Seven different deposits of dimension stone were taken as case studies to evaluate the proposed
approach. For each deposit, twelve criteria were compared as per the procedure of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP).
These aspects are quality, quantity, mining cost, infrastructure, mining and processing losses, mining time, equipment’s
performance, skilled labour, work capacity to fragment the deposits, benching and safety. Whereas, the alternatives are
mechanized mining, material expansion/controlled blasting and conventional mining. The criteria were compared and
methods suitable for each deposit were suggested.