The Odisha mining order differs from earlier ones
It could open the doors for recovering similar penalties from illegal mine owners in Goa and Karnataka
Had the Great Odisha mining loot — a mining scandal of enormous proportions and one involving megabucks — continued unchecked, the iron ore reserves in the state would have been exhausted by 2040, leaving nothing for future generations.
Between 2001 and 2010 more than 2155 lakh metric tonnes of iron ore and mangenese ore worth ₹17,576 crore was illegally mined in the state of Odisha. Stepping in, the Supreme Court recently passed a landmark verdict directing the Odisha government to recover this money (₹17,567 cr) from the 187 mining companies.
The Odisha government will face problems in collection of these dues as out of the 187 mines, 102 are closed and the lease holders may not in a position to pay the penalty.
Expanding the environment jurisprudence, the court for the first time has held that violation of environment and forest laws amounted to illegal mining. And the value of the ore so produced or sold can be recovered from the mine owner. Neither the Karnataka nor the Goa mining judgments delivered earlier dealt with this aspect.
This interpretation of law will have far- reaching repercussions. Environmentalists suggest that the judgment has opened the doors for recovering similar penalties from mine owners who illegally mined iron ore in Goa and Karnataka. It’s only a a matter of time that petitions in the Supreme Court are filed to this effect. In the past decade, India’s mining sector has been marred by countless controversies, including over-extraction of mineral ore, illegal selling, mining outside the lease area and carrying out mining in officially closed mines .
Alive to the fact that problems in the mining sector will not disappear with judgments such as this, the Supreme Court has directed the central government to revisit the national mineral policy and announce a fresh, meaningful policy and effective policy by the end of 2017.
The court in its judgment says: At present, keeping in mind the indiscriminate mining for operations in Odisha, it does appear that there is no effective check on mining operations nor is there any effective mining policy. The National Mineral Policy seems to be only on paper and is not being enforced perhaps due to the involvement of very powerful vested interests or a failure of nerve.
Besides, the court has also suggested setting up of another panel to identify the lapses that enabled rampant illegal mining.
While this Supreme Court judgment deals just with financial penalties, the criminal liability of these companies is yet to be decided and one stakeholder that will be losing sleep over the matter is the private mining sector.