It does not take a commission to find out that there has been illegal mining across most of the mineral rich states of India. Diligent officers, villagers and even journalists with no particular training have reported extensively over the past few months on the depredations in the hillsides brought on by illegal mining. The one line command should, therefore, be to tell the agencies to stop it. One presumes that even 18 months later, the commission will not condone the mining and still ask for the same to be stopped.
But if that is so, does this mean that for the next year and a half whatever is happening at these mines can go on until the report is placed on the table. Obviously, neither GoI nor any of its agencies are contemplating such a sequence of events. Mining by unscrupulous traders has, as a corollary, deepened the impact of the Naxalite menace?both of which have sharply escalated the scale of violence in central and eastern India.
We, therefore, need clear indication to believe the government has become quite keen to put a stop to illegal mining and check its ominous implications. Yet, possibly because it?s a political hot potato, while the same government at the Centre is pushing hard to develop a coherent mining policy, illegal mining, it hopes, will be tackled through a combination of plain-vanilla state action and a regime of sustained drop in global prices, especially of iron ore.
In other words, given the sensitivities involved, Manmohan Singh?s government is basically stalling for time on illegal mining. It hopes that with the takeover of large swathes of Indian mining tracts by large companies, the room for such shenanigans will be reduced, commission or no commission.
There is little else to justify the intense dialogue going on over the draft Mines and Minerals (Development & Regulation) Act to replace the large number of contradictory amendments (seven sets since 1958) in the mining sector. This candour is not this columnist?s discovery; instead it has been stated by the mines ministry on its Web site to explain why further amendment to the National Mineral Policy of 2008 is not possible and so the need for a new Act. In a way, this is inevitable. The commission set up by the PMO and the mines ministry to investigate illegal mining, therefore, promises to be a largely fruitless exercise.
The first impediment for the commission in its exercise is to pinpoint where illegal mining has taken place. A large mine dotting a hillside belching dust with an obscure owner?s name is a good way to start, but this does not lead us far enough. The miner can and will produce documents to prove he has a right over what he is extracting. Assuming the papers are not forged, there is no way to prove him wrong.
The problem is a simple but basic one. No state has a fully mapped set of land records that can be called upon to check the dimension of the mine. Since the mine is often in a jungle, the land record for the area is sparse even by weak standards.
The land record and the district mining officer?s certificate, based on which a mine area is mapped out, has reference coordinates that are often as far off as several kilometres at the edge of the jungle. Their accuracy can be easily guessed.
During my visit to these parts, the mining employees of the state governments blandly told me they depend on the veracity of the claims made by the large companies and try to check only those who have no reputation to lose by taking the risk of extending the boundary of their mines. Meanwhile, if the employee can be bought over, it is the end of the checking process.
In other words, in the case of the Reddy brothers, for instance, there is no agreed set of points on the field by which to demarcate the boundary of the two states of AP and Karnataka. So, if there is a complaint of illegal mining, no action can be taken as it is virtually impossible for the local police to figure out whose jurisdiction has been violated.
There is a way to partially overcome this problem with technology. A mine boundary can be defined through the use of differential GPS. At its basic, it gives a set of latitudes and longitudes that can be plotted on the ground.
But that too needs a reference marker, which is the set of land records. So, unless the land mapping is improved drastically, the chances of pinning responsibility on any company for encroachments on land is impossible.
Since the commission has not been tasked with the responsibility to make the land record congruent with the differential GPS, it seems quite certain that at the end of 18 months, it will make a series of recommendations and just hope for the best.
That best will hopefully come from the new MMDR Act. The Act, all companies angling to pick up a piece of the mining action aver, is the best hope for the sector. It has to wring out the ?directive principles?-like clauses to offer free shares of up to 26% of the mining companies? equity to the land holders as starters. But once this is done, the basic principle of a rule-based mining sector will come into play. The only spoiler could be one more flareup in the global prices of some ore. Until that happens, the government?s gamble could pay off.
subhomoy.bhattacharjee@ expressindia.com