Afghanistan’s Minister for Mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, speaks to India’s Business Standard about tendering of the Hajigak iron ore mine project, which includes an integrated steel plant that will consume high-grade coking coal from nearby deposits; a road or rail evacuation route.

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China, which was awarded the Aynak copper mines in Loghar province, Afghanistan’s first big sale of mining rights in the post-Taliban era, has undertaken to build a railway line from the northern provinces, to Bamiyan (where Hajigak is located), to Kabul, and then to Torkham on the Pakistan border at the Khyber Pass.

Shahrani believes that a viable alternative that could form the Hajigak evacuation infrastructure would be a railway line running westwards to Iran, along the Zaranj-Delaram highway that India had built in the mid-2000s, to the Iranian port of Chabahar.

Source: New Afghanistan mining projects create opportunity for India, Ajai Shukla, Business Standard, 2011-06-07