How to Start a Mining Project in Gilgit-Baltistan: Permits, Geology, and What Satellite Data Reveals First

By Sufyan · 2026-05-12 · 5 min read

I got my first mining lease in Gilgit-Baltistan in 2019. I had no idea what I was doing.

I'd flown up to Skardu with a folder of paperwork, a geologist friend who'd agreed to come along for fuel money, and a vague sense that there was chromite somewhere on the slope I'd been told about. We hiked for three days. Found nothing useful. Came back and I spent the next six months reading every USGS bulletin I could find on the Kohistan-Ladakh arc.

So here's what I wish someone had told me then. If you're thinking about starting a mining project in Gilgit Baltistan — whether you're a Karachi investor, a returning overseas Pakistani with capital, or a local who knows the ground but not the paperwork — this is the order things actually happen in. Not the order the brochures say.

The Permit Reality (It's Not What the Website Says)

GB has its own mineral regime. It's separate from the rest of Pakistan because of the constitutional status of the region, and that matters more than people realize. The GB Department of Mineral Industries in Gilgit issues licenses under the GB Mining Concession Rules, and there are three things you'll be applying for depending on your stage: a Reconnaissance License (RL), an Exploration License (EL), or a Mining Lease (ML).

A reconnaissance license is cheap and covers a large area. You're allowed to walk around, take samples, do surveys. You can't dig. People skip this stage and regret it.

An exploration license is the serious one. It's typically valid for 3 years, renewable, and it lets you drill, trench, and actually prove up a deposit. Fees vary but expect to budget around PKR 50,000 per square kilometer per year plus the application costs, security deposits, and the inevitable trips to Gilgit to follow up on files.

The mining lease is what most investors think they want on day one. You can't get one without exploration data backing the application. I've watched at least four groups try to skip straight to ML and burn 18 months learning that lesson.

One more thing on permits — the local jirga and the village it sits next to matter as much as the file in Gilgit. A permit on paper without community agreement is a permit you can't use. Honestly, I spend more time drinking tea in villages than I do in government offices, and that ratio is correct.

What the Geology Actually Looks Like Up There

GB sits on the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The Main Karakoram Thrust, the Main Mantle Thrust, the Kohistan Island Arc — these aren't textbook names, they're the reason you have ore bodies stacked on top of each other in some valleys and absolutely nothing in others.

Quick mineral-to-region cheat sheet from what I've seen on the ground:

The boring truth about gold mining in Gilgit Baltistan is that most of what's been worked historically is placer — guys panning the river. The hard rock source for a lot of that gold has never been properly traced. That's where satellite data starts paying for itself.

What Satellite Data Tells You Before You Buy a Plane Ticket

This is the part I care about most because it's why I built GeoMine AI in the first place.

Before you ever set foot on a license area, you can already know a stupid amount about it. I'm not exaggerating. With Sentinel-2 alone (free, 10-meter resolution, revisits every 5 days), you can map iron oxides, clay alterations, and vegetation anomalies that often sit over mineralized zones. ASTER fills in the SWIR bands and gives you a real shot at distinguishing alteration mineralogy — kaolinite vs alunite vs sericite, which matters a lot if you're chasing porphyry copper.

SRTM and ALOS DEM data give you the structural picture. Lineaments, fault intersections, drainage anomalies. In GB, fault intersections are where you want to be — the Karakoram fault system and its splays control a huge amount of the mineralization.

Then there's SAR — Sentinel-1 radar. Useful for slope stability and for seeing through cloud cover, which in GB during summer is a daily problem.

When we run a target through geomines, what comes out the other end is a stack: alteration maps, structural overlays, a ranked list of anomalies, and a confidence score for each. On a 50 sq km license, this typically narrows your field season from "walk everywhere" to "check these 7 spots first." That's the difference between a useful summer and a wasted one.

I got this wrong at first too. I used to think satellite data was a luxury — something the majors did. Then I realized I was burning PKR 800,000 a season on helicopter time and ground crews looking in the wrong drainages. The data costs less than one bad week in the field.

The Order I'd Actually Recommend

If I were starting tomorrow with someone else's money and my current knowledge:

  1. Pick a mineral and a district. Don't try to do everything.
  2. Run satellite reconnaissance on a 100-200 sq km area of interest before applying for anything. Cheap, fast, no commitment.
  3. Apply for a reconnaissance license on the most promising 50 sq km.
  4. Ground-truth the satellite anomalies. Two trips, maybe three.
  5. Convert to exploration license on the 10-15 sq km that actually showed something.
  6. Drill, trench, sample. Build a JORC or NI 43-101 style resource if you want serious investment later.
  7. Then — only then — talk about a mining lease.

Most people I meet are trying to do step 7 in month one. And look, I get it, everyone wants to be the guy with the mine. But the guy with the mine usually spent three years being the guy with the data.

If you've got a license area you're sitting on and you're not sure what's there, that's literally what we built the platform for. Send us the coordinates.

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