The mystery behind Subarnrekha: the river of gold in Jharkhand

India is a country of many wonders and unsolved mysteries! One such mystery flows through the unexplored terrains of Jharkhand, known as the Subarnarekha River. You’ll be amazed to know that the river has pure gold in its water!

The river flows through regions of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. In Jharkhand, it flows in the Ratnagarbha region. You would be surprised to know that gold has been found in huge amounts from the sand of this river for years and its tributary, Karkari.
The river, which is 474 km long, originates from a place called Rani Chuan in Nagdi village, which is nearly 15 km from Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand. From there, it enters Odisha and West Bengal before merging in the Bay of Bengal in Baleshwar.

An unsolved mystery
No one knows the mystery behind the phenomena yet. Local tribal workers have been engaged in filtering sand and getting out gold from the river bed. One can extract some 60 to 80 gold particles in one month!

Except for monsoons, the filtering of the sand and collecting gold particles goes throughout the year. These particles can be the size of a rice grain or smaller.

Subarnarekha in English translates to Streak of Gold. There’s a village called Piska in Ranchi, where gold was first mined near the origin of the river. People say that gold was found in the river bed first and in its sand later.

Movies and poems

In 1965, Ritwik Ghatak directed a Bengali film Subarnarekha, based on the partition of Bengal. The river was also immortalised by Rabindranath Tagore and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in several of their famous works.