Explorers in Telangana have identified a naturally-formed stone pillar site, called the columnar basalt formation, on a hilltop in the reserved forests of the Borilalguda village in the Komaram Bheem Asifabad district. Geology enthusiast Tirupati Githe and friends, who identified only the second such site in Telangana, said that the basaltic lava flow, which comes to the surface through fissures, is spread over an area of 5 lakh sq km, in the form of Deccan Traps on the Deccan Plateau. When this basaltic lava flows cool down into different natural structural formations, in Central and Western India, they become columnar basalts. Sriramoju Haragopal, the convenor of Kotha Telangana Charitra Brundam (KTCB), Chakilam Venugopala Rao, the retired deputy director-general of the Geological Survey of India, and a group of history enthusiasts said that such columnar basalts have been identified for the second time. In 2015, a similar site was identified by Manne Eliya, another member of KTCB, in the Shantipur Reserve Forest in the Adilabad district. They appealed to the government to recognise these sites and conserve them. The Borilalguda columnar basalts appear similar to the Chincholi columns in the Beed district of Maharashtra. These are identified as ‘Lava Columns’ or ‘Basalt Columns’ or ‘Columnar Jointed Volcanics’, they said, adding that such geological formations worldwide have been developed as geo-tourism centres. Columnar basalt formations have also been identified in Kanwad Pahad, Palasi (near Bagli) in Madhya Pradesh; Manavar, Koteda, and Dimadhar in Anjar Kutch of Gujarat; Andheri Gilbert Hill, Kolhapur, Osmanabad, and Chincholi in the Beed district of Maharashtra.
