The proposed amendments to the Mines and Mineral (Development and Regulation) Act (MMDR), to incorporate various aspects of the National Mineral Policy (NMP) 2007, is unlikely to be tabled in the monsoon session of Parliament which begins on August 10.
?The proposed amendment in the
MMDR Act for incorporating various aspects of NMP will take some time as a lot of finetuning in needed. It is likely to take at least another 20 days for the Cabinet note to be prepared. Hence, it is virtually impossible to table it in the monsoon session? a
senior official told FE.
Also, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh directing Home minister Shivraj Patil, who is heading the group of ministers on the mineral policy to call a meeting of chief ministers of various mineral rich states is likely to delay the process further.
Chief ministers of 4 states?Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Rajasthan?have jointly written a letter to Prime Minister expressing their concern over the content of new NMP and urged him to call a meeting with CMs before finalising the mineral policy.
The GoM proposes to allocate captive iron ore blocks even to companies not undertaking value addition in mineral-rich states. The chief ministers feel that if this clause is corporated in the MMDR Act, it will jeopardise their plans to attract big bang investments in these mineral rich but otherwise poor states as companies prefer to establish plants in comparatively developed states which possess better infrastructure than these states.
As a result of the proposed clause, these states also feel that their effort to reduce poverty will go in vain. However, this spells good news for Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd, Essar and Ispat Industries as their steel plants are located in non-mineral rich states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra but may still get captive iron blocks.