The world’s oldest industrial zinc production site is not in China or Europe — it’s at Zawar, 30 km from Udaipur, dating to 430 BCE. Dr. V. Ramanathan opens with a 1858 paper from the Journal of the Statistical Society of London documenting how British taxation deliberately dismantled India’s iron, textile, and shipbuilding industries — the three pillars of India’s pre-colonial economy. This historical context frames the tragedy: an ancient metallurgical civilisation that pioneered zinc smelting was systematically crippled by the very colonial power that now teaches us our own history.
The archaeological evidence is definitive: carbon-14 dating of timber at the Zawar mines yields dates of 430 ± 100 and 380 ± 50 BCE — the earliest known centre of industrial-scale zinc production on earth. This decisively refutes the argument that India learned zinc refining from China.
India’s current position is a paradox made visible in two tables: India does not appear in the world’s top zinc reserves list (Table 20), yet appears as the fifth largest zinc producer (Table 22) — demonstrating sustained engagement with refining technology across millennia despite limited ore. The roadmap to 2047 aims to move India from fifth to first.

About the Speaker:
Dr. V. Ramanathan currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at IIT (BHU) Varanasi. He has been a member of the Indian National Young Academy of Science and has been honoured as a Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Ramanathan has undertaken postdoctoral fellowships at esteemed institutions including the Third Institute of Physics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, the University of Basel in Switzerland, and Seoul National University in South Korea. Additionally, Dr. Ramanathan is intrigued by Ancient Indian Chemistry, the Scientific Heritage of India, Indology, Sanskrit, and Carnatic music.