KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) - The Indian federal government has decided to increase the deployment of security personnel, including paramilitary forces, to speed up the development of Rowghat iron-ore mines in the central Indian province of Chhattisgarh, which has been plagued by law and order violations by armed ultra-left-wing extremists.

The Ministry of Home Affairs, in charge of federal security forces, has already been in communication with the provincial government of Chhattisgarh and the government-owned and -operated Indian Railways on the deployment of the paramilitary forces, directing Indian Railways to immediately take up construction of railway linkages at the Rowghat iron-ore reserves.

The development of Rowghat, an estimated 500-million-tonne iron-ore reserve, spread across over 2 000 ha, has been hanging fire for the past four years as contractors and mine developers and operators, including Indian Railways, have been unable to commence project-related work in the face of extortion and violence by ultra-left extremists who dominate the forests across the reserve areas, a senior government official said.

The iron-ore resource was owned by Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), the country’s largest steel producer, which had drawn up plans to develop a 14-million-tonne-a-year mine at Rowghat in phases, entailing investment to the tune of $600-million, but it had not been able to make any headway owing to the law and order issues in the forested belt of Chhattisgarh.

The new iron-ore reserve was critical for SAIL’s Bhilai steel plant, also located in Chhattisgarh, as the steel producer was putting the finishing touches to expanding its capacity to 7.5-million tonnes a year from 4.6-million tonnes a year.

The expanded capacity would require a higher quantity of supplies of iron-ore as supplies from its current linked iron-ore reserves of Dalli Rajhara mines were fast depleting and were not expected to last for more than five to six years.

Officials said that the actual paramilitary deployment strategy was being kept under wraps for security reasons, but said that an estimated 11 000 personnel with special training in combating extremists drawn from the Central Reserve Police Force, a federal security agency, was already being transferred to the region, and the full deployment along with helicopter air cover would be completed by April 2015.