KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – Soon after claiming “chaos in the Indian mining industry”, Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (FIMI) has sought the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to revive growth and job creation potential in the sector and reverse the present falling employment in mining.
“With government support and much needed reforms, the mining sector has the potential to create five-million direct jobs if the country’s rich mineral resources are sensibly explored and used for production for domestic consumption and import substitution, saving foreign exchange,” FIMI secretary general R K Sharma said in a communication to the Prime Minister.
In the letter, Sharma underlined that with every one percentage point increase in economic growth, the mining industry could generate 13 times more employment than agriculture and six times more than any other manufacturing industry owing to the large ecosystem spanning linkages and supply chains.
“Instead of exploring and extracting the mineral wealth for self-reliance in the long term we are heavily dependent on importing seven times more than the value of our own domestic production,” Sharma said.
Calling for more proactive intervention by the central government, Sharma said that, despite several changes to laws, regulations and policies over the past years, the domestic mining industry had been facing challenges owing to a lack of implementation from the central and state governments, Sharma added.
FIMI's seeking intervention from the Prime Minister comes close on the heels of its publishing of a report, ‘Employment in Mining: A case of missed opportunities, prospects for future’, underlining a jobs crisis in the industry.
As reported earlier by Mining Weekly Online, FIMI claimed chaos in the mining industry stemmed from a mix of lopsided government policy, poor implementation and court orders which had resulted in direct job losses of 200 000 over the past few months and threats of further direct and indirect job losses of 264 000 as mining leases for 329 non-captive mines were up for renewal and possibly facing delays in the fresh auction of such mining leases to keep the mines operational.
While the government was yet to officially respond to FIMI's plea, sources in government said that the Mines Ministry was considering some amendments to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act 2015 to tweak the definition of “illegal mining”.
Some of the proposed amendments would be based on recommendations made by a high level committee in April, comprising the Cabinet Secretary, the vice chairman of government policy advisory body NITI Aagyog (National Institute for Transformation of India Commission) and secretaries of allied ministries, which favoured changes in the rules on the imposition of penalties for environmental and pollution violations and the extension of relief to mining companies.