This paper discusses basement structures and mineral potential derived from the analysis of gravity, magnetic, geology, and some seismic data from NW Bangladesh and also infers the tectonic paleo-stress regime.

The idea of the paper is very good, but there are problems in some of the use of magnetic and gravity data.  The paper is generally well-written and well-structured.

The main issue is with the processing of reduced to pole (RTP) maps (Figures 3b and 4a) and their subsequent interpretation. The intent of using the RTP data is to  remove skewness in anomalies caused by varying inclination/declination of the magnetic field and also magnetization. In this case, it is to associate anomaly features with the faults with possible mineralization.  Since the skewness caused by strong localized reversely remanent anomalies is not removed and the bipolar nature of the anomalies is present, one can only approximately associate the anomalies with faults seen in geology or inferred from gravity.  This residual bipolar nature is what is referred to by the authors as “characterized by alternating magnetic highs and lows”  and is misleading for their interpretation.  The current writing suggests that the alignment of the line between the positive and negative parts of the bipolar anomaly with the observed and inferred faults argues for the magmatism along faults and mineralization.  This is not correct in this case and should be clearly indicated that the localized anomalies show the approximate location of the sources of the strong localized anomalies.

The authors should discuss the remanence of the localized strong anomaly features, e.g. bipolar positive to the north and negative to the south features and the opposite of what is expected at the inducing inclination of ~39° for this region.  Authors should also argue for “inferred magnetic sources are expected to lie close to the crossover from negative to the positive lobe of the bipolar anomalies” and then show/interpret that they could be formed along the faults observed in geological and gravity data.

The second problem is the total horizontal derivative of residual gravity map (Figure 6c).  The speckled appearance and positive/negative banding on the map is caused by inadequate gravity station spacing.  The resulting linear appearing features on the total horizontal derivative map are really not correct and should not be interpreted as is done in Figure 6d.  If you would like to use the total horizontal gradient, first upward continue the residual gravity map in Figure 4b (top panel) to a point where the speckling and banding doesn’t appear in the derivative map and then use it for interpretation.  I also think that even though Figure 6c says the total horizontal derivative  is of the residual gravity map, it could be of one of the derivative maps.  Figure 6c has a distinct appearance of the second derivative product of a sparse gravity station spacing and so please check it is what you say it is.

Other specific comments are in the annotated review of manuscript file attached.