The Real Price of Gold — National Geographic Magazine

In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world's richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world's gold and support a total of 100 million people. It's a vital activity for these people—and deadly too.

At the other end of the spectrum are vast, open-pit mines run by the world's largest mining companies. Using armadas of supersize machines, these big-footprint mines produce three-quarters of the world's gold. They can also bring jobs, technologies, and development to forgotten frontiers.

Gold mining, however, generates more waste per ounce than any other metal, and the mines' mind-bending disparities of scale show why: These gashes in the Earth are so massive they can be seen from space, yet the particles being mined in them are so microscopic that, in many cases, more than 200 could fit on the head of a pin.

Even at showcase mines, such as Newmont Mining Corporation's Batu Hijau operation in eastern Indonesia, where $600 million has been spent to mitigate the environmental impact, there is no avoiding the brutal calculus of gold mining. Extracting a single ounce of gold there—the amount in a typical wedding ring—requires the removal of more than 250 tons of rock and ore. Lured by the benefits of operating in the developing world—lower costs, higher yields, fewer regulations—Newmont has generated tens of thousands of jobs in poor regions. But it has also come under attack for everything from ecological destruction to the forced relocation of villagers.

India produces very little gold of its own, but its citizens have hoarded up to 18,000 tons of the yellow metal—more than 40 times the amount held in the country's central bank. (via The Real Price of Gold — National Geographic Magazine).

The important points ...

The poor condition of the workers who produce the ore from which gold is extracted.

The production of gold in the last 50 years is equal to half of total production in mankind's entire history.

Blaming India for high gold consumption.

The missing points ...

India has the largest reserves of gold in the world - but has never been a significant producer except when British colonialists used 'captive' Indian labour to extract gold from the Champion Reef in Kolar Gold Fields during the 1875-1925 period, when a few tons hundred tons were extracted.

But India has the largest reserves of gold. How were these reserves acquired? Trade, labour, output, products.That is how.

Not loot - like the Anglo Saxon reserves. Not genocide - like in the cases of Canada, Australia or USA. Not slavery like in South African Apartheid regime, or in Ghana, Peru.

It is this lack of slavery in India, which stopped India from becoming a gold producer - ever, in history.