The mining sector is bracing itself for a dark new year, with two difficult deadlines set under laws governing forest conservation, forest dwellers’ rights and the mines and mineral development and regulation law of 2015 looming over hundreds of existing and proposed mines.
Industry body FICCI has written to the Mines Ministry to request an extension of the December 31, 2016 (for forest clearances in mineral-rich Odisha) and January 11, 2017 (for converting letters of intent issued by states for mining operations before January 12, 2015, when the new MMDR law kicked in) deadlines to provide ‘a lease of life’ to these mines.
“I would like to bring to your attention the issue of two immediate deadlines for mining leases where it is not practically possible to obtain requisite clearances under the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006,” FICCI secretary general A. Didar Singh has said in a letter sent to Mines Secretary Balvinder Kumar last week.
“The deadline is December 31, 2016 for Shabik and Hal settlement of land records in Odisha and the other issue pertains to Letter of Intent (LOI) issued by state governments before January 12, 2015, covered under section 10 A 2(c) of the MMDR Act of 2015 for which deadline is January 11, 2017,” Mr. Singh has pointed out.
The Odisha problem
For existing mining leases in Odisha, the problem arises from the forest conservation law which came into effect on October, 25, 1980 and environment ministry guidelines on mines in areas designated as forest under the law.
While the forest land within mines was labelled as forest in government records from 1980, such areas were recorded as non-forest or hal land while processing approvals for the use of forest land under the law.
“The state governments may allow concerned user agencies to continue, for a period ending December 31, 2016, mining in such already broken forest area which were or are recorded as forest in the government record after October 25, 1980,” according to the guidelines.
Miners with forest areas within their operational lease, had sought the requisite green nods to continue beyond the end of this year, but a number of cases recommended by the state government as well as the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) or Regional Empowered Committee are yet to be approved by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.
Moreover, during its meetings in November, the FAC imposed two additional stipulations for miners to comply with — obtaining a certificate under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) to get a Stage-I forest act approval and proposing a suitable scheme for compensatory afforestation on an equivalent degraded forest patch.
Getting a FRA certificate from a Collector alone takes at least three months. Hence, securing that as well as stage-I and stage-2 clearances under the Forest Act is virtually impossible before the end of December, according to FICCI.
Since the 2015 mining law requires all mining rights to be auctioned, in a bid to do away with the discretion enjoyed under administrative allocations done in the past, all miners who had secured an LoI for a mine from a state government before January 12, 2015, were given a two-year window to execute and register their mining leases. This requires obtaining all necessary green clearances as well. Where the leases couldn’t be registered before the deadline, the applicant’s right over a mine would be forfeited as per the new mining law. There are about 317 such cases across 12 major mineral States such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Even in these cases, the environment ministry clearances are delayed, partly because the FAC was dissolved in August 2016, reconstituted in October and a new online application process for forest clearances was introduced in November. Although it later allowed processing of existing offline applications being processed at the State or Central level, the FRA and compensatory afforestation norms mentioned earlier have also been made a pre-condition for the green approvals necessary to execute new mining leases. Meeting the January 11 deadline seems implausible for most mines.
