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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Mining sector needs large-scale reform

Mining sector needs large-scale reform

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published Published on Oct 4, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 4, 2011

-The Economic Times

 

India's new mining Bill has provisions which seek, rightly, to shovel money from mining companies to rural people affected by mining, but the devil could lie in the detail. The proposal has three defects. One, it seeks differential treatment for coal and other minerals - coal miners would share 26% of their profits, while miners of other minerals would give additional royalty payments. Pray, why?

Two, it exempts captive miners from this obligation to share mineral wealth. And, three, it leaves out the key variable, the price of the ore, manipulating which companies can arbitrarily understate their profits and pay pittance as royalty, as they, indeed, have been.

The sensible thing is to link royalty to the globally traded price of the mineral in question and assign a share of reasonable royalty to the local community. Unify the sharing parameter as a share of the royalty linked to globally traded prices, for every mineral. Coal mining is done mostly by state owned giant Coal India, it will have to pay the most.

Current royalty rates, revised every three years, are pathetically low. Miners routinely understate prices at which they sell minerals to deflate the value of royalties. Crooked state government employees, including mine inspectors and forest department personnel, collude with miners to make mining an extremely profitable - and exploitative - business. It is no coincidence that the mining map of India fits almost exactly with the regions that are affected by Maoist insurgency.

That's why development has to go hand in hand with mining. The new law intends to tighten monitoring and penalties for illegal mining and set up a regulator. It also scraps the existing system of allocating mining licences for one that will allow states to auction off plots to the highest bidder. This is sound. Some of India's largest miners are actually power, steel and other metals makers that squat on large captive mines.

They, too, should pay royalty on par with others. Captive mining is a wasteful and inefficient activity and should be done away with. India's mining sector needs deep and widespread reforms, both at the central and state government levels. The present draft law is only a step in the right direction.

The Economic Times, 3 October, 2011, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-10-03/news/30238321_1_mining-licences-mining-sector-coal-mining


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