Tag: Mining
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Missing in the panel set up to frame India’s new mineral policy: Adivasis, ecologists, civil society
Does the KR Rao Committee ring a bell? It was set up last month by the Union Ministry of Mines after the Supreme Court’s tough judgement on illegal iron ore mining in Odisha. Disposing of a petition filed by the non-profit Common Cause, Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Deepak Gupta not only ordered the […]
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The lid on illegal sand mining in TN might finally be lifted (but perhaps for the wrong reasons)
In a day of fast-paced developments, Income-Tax Department officials raided the house of Tamil Nadu Chief Secretary P Rama Mohana Rao on Wednesday morning where they seized Rs 30 lakh in cash in new, post-demonetisation currency notes, according to the Hindu. Later in the day, Central Bureau of Investigation sleuths also arrested Shekar Reddy, one […]
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Sand mining in Tamil Nadu is incredibly destructive – but it’s also unstoppable
For the longest time, V Chandrasekhar fought a lonely battle. When sand miners first came to his village near Pondicherry in the 1980s, most of his fellow villagers stayed quiet. They stayed quiet when the local riverbed went down by 30 feet, local groundwater levels collapsed, wells dried out and then filled up with saline […]
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Think sand mining damages the ecology? It ruins politics as well
…Villages talk about collapsed groundwater levels, wells that do not fill even when the river is brimming, wells in coastal areas which have turned saline. Little here is surprising. These ecological changes are well-known side-effects of sand mining. But the damage done by sand mining isn’t just ecological. As Scroll found while reporting from Tamil […]
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Politicians aren’t only messing with Tamil Nadu’s water – they’re making Rs 20,000 crore from sand
Out today, the first instalment of our three-part series on sand mining in tamil nadu. Stepping onto the bank, the first thing that’s visible is a ten-wheeled tipper. It grinds to a halt at the end of a queue of similar trucks. Beyond it stretches a vast riverbed. That is the Thenpennaiyar, one of the […]
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Why Odisha sees little protest despite the state’s poor public services
Stay in Odisha for a bit and you will run into a puzzle. Despite healthy finances, the state is failing to provide basic services to its people. Its schools and hospitals are badly understaffed. Jobs are not easy to find, as a result of which young people are getting disillusioned with education itself. Welfare programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee […]
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Part 3: How Odisha squandered valuable mineral resources without any gains for its people
In Unchabali village in Odisha’s Keonjhar district, a massive house is under construction atop the ridge that looms over the village. It belongs to the local MLA, Sanatan Mahakud. Given his zealous security guards, you cannot give the sprawling complex the close attention it deserves, but as you drive by, you see a temple coming […]
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Part 2. Meet the Odisha MLA whose assets grew by 1,700% in five years
Travel around the district of Keonjhar and you hear stories of the MLA who distributes money among his constituents every month. Elected as an independent candidate in 2014 from Champua constituency in the heart of Odisha’s richest iron ore-rich belt, Sanatan Mahakud distributes anywhere between Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 to more than half the […]
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Part 1: How a contractor from Tamil Nadu carved out an enormous mining empire in Odisha
the first part of our trilogy on illegal iron ore mining in Odisha, a boom in which only a few benefitted. this story looks at the rise of b prabhakaran and his thriveni earthmovers.
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why odisha’s empty engineering colleges hurt students and not their owners
As colleges go, Krutika Institute of Technical Education is certainly educative. Located on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, this private engineering college works out of a half-built red and cream building with iron rebars bristling from its top. The lobby stands unfinished with its girders exposed. Similarly unfinished, the water fountain in front is no more […]
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What the one-time mining boom-town of Koira tells us about modern Odisha
Once a tiny village surrounded by forests, (Koira) had been taken over by the trucking economy. Lured by miners willing to pay high rates for every ton of ore transported down, truckers were flooding in from as far away as Uttar Pradesh. Miners were bribing them to take quicker routes, or paying bonuses to those […]
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The Dongria Kondhs of Odisha now face a more formidable enemy than Vedanta
Two years ago, when the tribal people of Odisha’s thickly forested Niyamgiri hills unanimously rejected the plans of the London-based conglomerate Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite in their lands, it appeared that a decade-long struggle to protect the hills and forests – and the tribal way of life – had finally succeeded. But that might have […]
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the clause that landed emta its coalblocks…
As litigation amps up after the Supreme Court’s cancellation of all captive coal-block allocations, court documents are throwing light on one of the more puzzling aspects of the coal scam — the 74:26 MDO agreements… These JVs had several striking features. The MDOs held 74% in the JVs — which meant they controlled the mining […]
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and the supreme court deallocates all blocks…
yesterday, shortly after 2 pm, the supreme court deallocated almost all captive coalblocks — sparing just the umpps and two JV-less blocks of sail and ntpc. with that, i guess, ends my reporting on the captive coal block allocations. see these two links. one, this bouncy little primer written yesterday on what coalgate was all […]
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what the affidavits submitted by the 40 operational coal block owners tell us…
Earlier this month, companies with operating captive coal blocks submitted affidavits in the Supreme Court. Attempting to ensure their blocks, 40 in all, are not deallocated along with those where mining has not started, these affidavits listed investments made, the quantum of coal produced and the production from the End Use Plant (EUP) paired with […]
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#coalgate. as for the attempts to avoid deallocation of operational blocks…
my previous story on the supreme court hearings into the captive coal block allocation was a bit of a curtain-raiser. it said when hearings resume on monday, the biggest question before the judges will be re: what to do with the blocks where mining has already started. as things turned out, a set of industry […]
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what should be done with the coalblocks where mining has already started?
On Monday, the Supreme Court will decide what to do with captive coal blocks, having deemed more than 200 allocations made since 1993 to be illegal. While writing their order, one of the biggest questions before Chief Justice R M Lodha and his fellow judges Madan Lokur and Kurian Joseph will relate to the 40-odd […]
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how to clean up the coal allocation mess
With the Supreme Court announcing that the captive coal block allocations were illegal, India needs to engage with a new set of questions on coal. Right now, our coal industry is a mess. It has spawned oligarchs, hurt local populations and decimated local ecosystems. While doing all this, it simultaneously failed to supply the country […]
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and the supreme court comes in with an excellent verdict
yesterday, the SC ruled that all coal block allocations, from 1993 onwards, were illegal. and i, little rajshekhar, wrote this edit. The Supreme Court’s ‘Coalgate’ verdict needs to be welcomed. It gives India a rare second chance to fix terrible decisions made by our politicians. The coal allocations scandal is not an outrage merely because […]
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on coal and ppps
The Economic Survey, last month, said there was an urgent need to fast-track the entry of private sector in coal mining to increase production of this mineral and, by extension, reduce imports. Subsequently, coal and power minister Piyush Goyal stated the government was considering the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to achieve this objective. PPPs […]
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On the new forest diversion norms
Last week, India’s environment ministry overhauled the process it follows for identifying forests where industrial activities can be permitted. Instead of using six parameters — forest type, biological richness, wildlife value, density of forest cover, integrity of the landscape, and hydrological value – for deciding whether a forestland can be given over for, say, mining, […]
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as in iron ore, so in sand
Last Sunday, the Uttar Pradesh government suspended Durga Shakti Nagpal, the sub-divisional magistrate of Gautam Buddh Nagar who had been cracking down on the sand mafia. Three days later, Pale Ram Chauhan, a Noida-based activist who had taken on the local sand mining mafia, was killed. Sand mining is back under the scanner. As are […]
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coal to liquid projects. #coalgate
In the report it submitted last week, the parliamentary standing committee on coal observed that the inter-ministerial group (IMG) whose recommendations formed the basis of allotment of two large coal blocks to private players for conversion to oil “has not performed its duty honestly”. While the report does not elaborate on the IMG’s alleged failings, […]
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a seemingly innocuous transaction
A company owned by former and current directors of the Naveen Jindal Group, and then by Naveen Jindal himself, gave an unsecured loan of Rs 2.25 crore in 2008 to a nondescript trading company, which used it to buy new shares on extremely generous terms of a company owned by Dasari Narayana Rao, one of […]
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on rising murmurs of rent seeking in india’s environment ministry
while working on the coal and hydel stories (the latter is yet to be published), i kept hearing about rising corruption in the environment ministry. some of those conversations found their way into a story in today’s ET, by my colleagues soma, urmi and me, on why the environment ministry and environment minister jayanthi natarajan […]
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And more on coal…
After a draft report by the Comptroller and Auditor General saying the government had foregone revenues of Rs 10 lakh crore by not auctioning the blocks was leaked, most public discussions had pivoted around two themes. One, why did UPA1 ignore the suggestion of the then-Coal Secretary to allot blocks through auctions, preferring instead to […]
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On the real contours of “Coal-Gate”
This post aggregates all the stories my colleagues John Samuel Raja D, Avinash Singh and I did on India’s captive coal block allocation scam between June last year and now. The articles were an attempt to understand ‘coalgate’ in as much detail as possible. Given that we now live in an age of media clutter, […]
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on coal, forests and farmers
Take Chotia, a captive block in Hasdeo Arand with about 35 MT of reserves, allotted to Prakash Industries. Chouhan says 1,500 hectares of forest land is being lost to produce about 1 MT of coal a year. Wouldn’t it have been better to give Prakash a coal linkage? Or take Mahan, the block that will […]
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Why Coal India Could Not Up Its Production
For all the problems that plague thermal power plants across India — coal stocks of just one week or projects struggling to come up for want of assured coal — Coal India Limited is mostly cited as the fall guy. This Public Sector Undertaking, which holds a near monopoly on coal in India, has seen […]
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On Coal and Power
more on king coal. today’s economic times carries the first instalment of our final set of stories on Coal. the stories till now have been mainly diagnostic, focusing on the extent of mismanagement in the coal sector. the stories, starting today, take a look at the outcomes of how india manages coal on land, power […]
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Chronicles from a field trip
in october, i travelled to chhattisgarh to take a field-based look at coalgate. what were its wider implications — on power generation, on forests, on land, on farmers. vignettes from that trip. for a more detailed look at coalgate, head here, my composite post on all the stories my colleagues and i did on the […]
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an embattled naveen jindal hits out
“You can find out from analysts if in their valuation of JSPL, they ascribe any value to any of these (coal) blocks? What they tell me is ‘no’.” in this interview to ET, naveen jindal, the head of Jindal Power and Jindal Steel and Power, makes a startling claim.
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the five habits of successful coal block allottees (that manage to pip more eligible companies to coal blocks)
today’s ET carried a story which tries to answer one of the many puzzling questions thrown up by the coal scam — how did small, obscure companies like Jas Infrastructure or Vini Steel & Power bag a coal block where larger, more established ones failed? a part of the answer lies in, yes, the screening […]
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On why the institutional action being taken to clean up coal is necessary but not sufficient
On Tuesday, ET carried a small update on how the institutional response to coal-gate was shaping up. That article ended by concluding it will take more than these responses to clean up the suppurating mess in the indian coal sector. A story by my brilliant friend/colleague Avinash Celestine and me in today’s ET Magazine elaborates […]
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a third skeleton in the UPA cupboard
A company brand new to the steel business and owned by the sons of Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Prem Chand Gupta applied for a coal block when he was the Union minister for corporate affairs and bagged it about a month after his tenure ended along with that of his government. This is the third […]
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Coal. The Measure of Institutional Action
The story of alleged irregularities in the allocation of coal blocks to private players for captive use is taking a distinct turn, with institutions at three levels responding within their jurisdiction, and a chance of a fourth one stepping in. a quick and dirty update on what the CBI, the Parliament and the government itself […]
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the man who controls 14 coal blocks
heard of a company called emta? no? i hadn’t either when i started work on the coal stories. and yet, over the last 15 years, it has silently raced up to become one of the largest cos in india’s coal economy. its coal reserves, say industry wallahs, rival those of western coalfields, which is one […]
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parsing the coal allocation numbers
parsing the list of allocated coal blocks throws up some interesting patterns. for instance, some companies got coal blocks that would last them less than five years. others got enough coal to last them over 200 years. similarly, the top ten business groups garnered as much as 20% of all the reserves alloted, the top […]
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is the cag’s coal report too conservative?
one of the major strands of media reporting in the aftermath of the coal report being tabled in the parliament is whether the cag report got its arithmetic right. all manner of reporters and pundits have been loudly arguing that it presents too inflated a number. the finance minister has recently said that there was […]
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Coal and Corruption. Part Two. Enter, Political Funding
following from the previous story, this one too says that corruption in coal goes far beyond the allocation of captive coal blocks. and that one of the larger forces driving corruption in this sector is the opaque manner in which our political parties are funded. It was a roundtable on ‘campaign finance reforms in India’, […]
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The Mess in Coal. The Rot Runs Deeper
while writing on coal, it is essential to remember that corruption here is not limited to just the allocation of captive coal blocks. if anything, corruption is rife in this sector which seems to be creating india’s own personal resource curse. this story focuses on one of the other ways in which corruption in coal […]
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Understanding India’s coal shortage: Captive blocks
something doesn’t add up here. over the last few months, the country has been awash in news reports about the sudden coal shortage being faced by power projects and others across india. these assertions are somewhat puzzling. for instance, india needs 731 million tons of coal every year. however, the total coal allocated to companies […]
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is the environment ministry responsible for the shortfall in coal production?
a red letter day. i had two stories in the paper today. the first explored a rather curious contradiction. all this time, we have been hearing that the environment ministry has been diluting environment and forest clearance processes and clearing every project that hoves into sight. at the same time, there is this insistence by […]
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on india’s coal shortage
Blocks were to be given to companies that needed captive coal-mines- to feed their steel, cement, power and sponge iron plants. A lot of companies showed plants on paper – as something they were planning to set up – and they were allocated mines… The companies that got the mines are not extracting coal. They […]
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More Trouble for Lafarge
Lafarge’s plan to set up a Rs 900-crore cement plant in Himachal has run into environmental trouble with the National Environmental Appellate Authority quashing the clearance granted to the project by environment ministry in June 2009. More here. The curious thing is this. The NEAA order quashing the clearance said Lafarge erroneously represented the mining area as […]
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NC Saxena committee says “No!”
It’s very easy to mine in this country once you take the consent of the local communities. They are rational people. If the project is beneficial for them, they will agree. But, look at the development tribals get from these projects. Local communities get less than 5% of the jobs created by these projects. In […]
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The New Committee to Study Vedanta
THE Anil Agarwal promoted Vedanta Aluminas plans for sourcing bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills in the Kalahandi district of Orissa will have to wait.The environment ministry has set up a four-member committee headed by National Advisory Council member NC Saxena.The other three members of the committee are Dr S Parasuraman,director,Tata Institute of Social Sciences;retired IFS […]
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The story taketh a turn…
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has written to the environment ministry to give clearance to the (Vedanta) project after “a thorough scrutiny by the expert appraisal committee and due consideration of all aspects”, a top government official said. the story indeed takes a turn.
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The Rule of Law as an Optional Extra
And then, there is Lafarge. The issue is whether Lafarge Umiam Mining should have sought a forest clearance while seeking environmental clearance in 2000 to mine limestone in the East Khasi Hills to feed a Lafarge cement plant in Bangladesh. Critics, like the SC’s Central Empowered Committee, say the company submitted a misleading Environmental Impact Assessment […]
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sense and nonsense in the debate over vedanta’s lanjigarh plans
for the longest time, vedanta’s bauxite mining plans in lanjigarh, orissa, have been a lightening rod for criticism. earlier this year, the environment ministry abruptly turned against it. one reason cited for this switch was the congress’ need to hold onto the tribal vote. but things had been simmering at the ground as well. and so, in […]
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Vedanta, Niyamgiri and the Congress
Plans by Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite in Niyamgiri in Orissa, already delayed by vehement protests from non-governmental organisations, seem likely to suffer further damage—quite possibly terminal—as the Congress reaches out to India’s tribal population, sections of which have come under the influence of the grand old party’s arch rival BJP while others have fallen […]
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Vedanta, Dongria Kondhs and the fight over natural resources.
The plan by the London-based Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite in Orissa a key part of a giant aluminium complex which the company is building in the mineral-rich eastern state could be jeopardised if the Environment Ministry accepts the findings of a report by a government appointed committee. The complete story, here.
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Santosh Hegde, Karnataka and the Illegal Mining Machinery
In 2007, the Karnataka Lokayukta, established to investigate grievances with administrative actions, was asked by the state government to study rampant illegal mining in the state. Though this report, finalised as early as December, 2008, has been doing surreptitious rounds in government, legal and mining circles, it is yet to be made public. This document, a […]
Fractured/Earth 