KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) - A key piece of Indian mining legislation, which makes it mandatory for miners to share profits with project-affected people, was set to lapse shortly, and would not be presented before the current Parliament session - the last before the country holds national elections.

The Mines and Minerals Development & Regulation (MMDR) Bill does not figure in the legislative agenda of the lower house of Parliament (Lok Sabha), during the second leg of the winter session, which got under way on Wednesday.

The tenure of the Lok Sabha would end with this session as the country goes to poll around April to May, in another example of legislative initiatives going into a limbo amidst the rising heat and dust of political campaigning.

“We are in no position to table it in the current session as there is no certainty that the 39 pieces of legislation already listed would all be placed before the lower house,” Mines Minister Dinsha Patel said.

With the MMDR Bill lapsing, the government sworn in after the national elections would have to start from scratch and go through the legislative formalities of Parliament, an official in the Mines Ministry said.

A standing committee of the Parliament to which the Bill was referred, had made several suggestions and all of them had been incorporated and the new additions had completely changed the contents of the legislation to have been put before the Lok Sabha, the Minister said.

Originally, the legislation had proposed that 26% of profits of miners would have to be mandatorily shared with project-affected communities, but this was subsequently changed, with a system of royalty payments to be shared with locals.

In the case of non-coal and lignite minerals, miners would have to share with project-affected people funds equivalent to the royalty paid by mining companies to the provincial governments.

Apart from the profit sharing law, the government’s move to set up a National Mining Regulatory Authority and similar bodies at the provincial level, through the legislation, has also been scuttled for now.

The legislation was first conceived and presented before Parliament in 2011, seeking to replace the over 50-year-old legislation governing the Indian mining sector; however, the Bill was subsequently referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Coal and Steel to address the reservations of the mining sector’s allied industries.