At 60 metres per hour, the system performs within a range that supports primary production use, not just supplemental or safety-only application
Decision Lens
The conventional case for remote drilling focuses on removing personnel from hazardous underground environments. The Hindustan Zinc rollout at Rajpura Dariba adds a harder commercial argument: the company reports a productivity gain of approximately 17 percent, built on continuous drilling across shifts at speeds of around 60 metres per hour. That pairing — safety benefit and production uplift simultaneously — reframes tele-remote drilling as a throughput lever rather than a pure risk control. For operations directors evaluating semi-autonomous additions to underground fleets, the multi-site deployment across three Hindustan Zinc properties provides a rare within-operator comparison point that most technology case studies do not offer.
90-Second Brief
As the week closes, hindustan Zinc has deployed tele-remote drilling at its Rajpura Dariba underground mine in Rajasthan, extending a program already operating at Sindesar Khurd and Rampura Agucha. The system operates at approximately 60 metres per hour and supports continuous drilling across shifts through wireless connectivity. The company reports an overall productivity gain of around 17 percent from the Rajpura Dariba deployment.
What’s Actually Happening
The Rajpura Dariba system allows surface-based engineers to operate drilling equipment with real-time control at an effective range of 600 metres, with the architecture scalable to 800 metres. The mechanism behind the productivity improvement is shift continuity: wireless connectivity eliminates the personnel-rotation constraints that typically interrupt underground drilling cycles, allowing equipment to run without breaks tied to crew changeovers or ventilation windows.
At 60 metres per hour, the system performs within a range that supports primary production use, not just supplemental or safety-only application. This is the third Hindustan Zinc site to receive the technology. Prior implementations at Sindesar Khurd and Rampura Agucha are reported to have improved safety outcomes and equipment utilisation, though no site-level quantitative comparisons across those earlier deployments have been published. The Rajpura Dariba rollout follows the same operational template, with the 17 percent figure as its headline result.
Why It Matters for Mining Operations Directors?
Underground drilling availability is frequently the constraint limiting stope sequencing flexibility. When crews cannot sustain continuous operation across shifts — due to ventilation cycles, fatigue limits, or ground exposure risk — stopes queue and development lags. Tele-remote systems directly attack that constraint by decoupling personnel position from equipment position.
In practical terms, more metres drilled per shift cycle without increasing underground headcount means more stopes available for charging and blasting on schedule. The 600-metre effective range signals that this is not a technology limited to shallow geometries or simple orebodies — though how it performs under high-seismicity conditions or in complex ground remains unaddressed in current reporting. For operations directors managing deep underground assets where personnel exposure is both a safety variable and a scheduling bottleneck, the productivity case now has a quantified reference point from a live multi-site deployment.
The Forward View
Hindustan Zinc’s declared next step is LiDAR-enabled drone-based stope scanning, which would pair spatial accuracy in underground mapping with the remote drilling capability already deployed. If scan data can feed directly into drill planning, the integration creates a tighter loop between actual stope geometry and drill execution — reducing the grade dilution and mis-blast risk that occurs when as-built conditions drift from design assumptions.
The broader automation stack — AI-powered surveillance reducing manual monitoring intervention by nearly 50 percent, robotic automation in smelting, and over 50 active projects with technology startups through V Spark Deeptech Ventures — suggests an intent to build interconnected layers rather than isolated tools. Whether that architecture delivers compounding productivity gains or introduces new coordination complexity depends on implementation sequencing that is not yet publicly detailed. The near-term signal for peer operators is that multi-site deployment validation is now available to assess.
What We’re Uncertain About?
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The 17 percent productivity baseline is not disclosed. The gain is reported as an overall figure without specifying the baseline metric — metres per shift, utilisation rate, or cost per metre. Published technical papers or annual operational benchmarks from Hindustan Zinc would be needed to contextualise the magnitude.
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Cross-site performance variation is unquantified. Sindesar Khurd and Rampura Agucha showed reported improvements in safety and utilisation, but no comparable percentage figures are available for those sites. Whether Rajpura Dariba’s result is replicable across different ground conditions and orebody geometries remains an open question.
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Workflow integration depth is unspecified. The deployment is operationally live, but how drill data connects to grade control, blast scheduling, and stope sequencing is not described. Productivity gains from similar systems at other operations often depend heavily on this integration — making the reported figure difficult to transfer directly to a different operational context.
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Performance at depths beyond 800 metres has not been demonstrated. As underground mines deepen, the current scalable upper range may constrain applicability in next-generation deep stoping environments without further infrastructure investment.
One Question to Bring to Your Team
If tele-remote drilling can sustain continuous operation across shifts at 60 metres per hour, what is the actual constraint limiting our drill metres per day right now — equipment range, wireless infrastructure, stope access sequencing, or a bottleneck in blast and charge-up cycles we have not yet isolated?
Sources
- Constructionworld — Hindustan Zinc Deploys Tele-Remote Drilling at Rajpura Dariba (Link)
