The draft Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, or MMDR Bill, includes a crucial provision to share the wealth of mining — 26 per cent of the annual profits — with people who live near the projects. But industry wants this profit-sharing clause dropped. The Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (Fimi) says it will breed lazy people, who will only drink and beat up their women. The Confederation...

When former Karnataka Lokayukta N Santosh Hegde recently said that vested interests were controlling the mining industry, he was not exaggerating, considering that India registered over 182,000 cases of illegal mining across 17 states in the last five years alone. The Union government data show that Andhra Pradesh — the single largest contributor to the country’s mineral production of roughly Rs 1,28,000 crore — alone registered a 110 per cent increase...

If there is one sector that is visibly the intersection of backroom politics, crony capitalism and serious threats to India’s internal security, it is mining. The business of resource extraction has always had its own peculiar economic logic: modern, yet dependent on the land; high-tech, yet somehow, indefinably, with feudal overtones. These anomalies have traditionally been recognised by economists, who categorise mining as the only “industrial” component of the primary,...