The anatomy of a non-policy

Mining in India is about livelihood, deforestation, pollution, and a lot more. The New Mineral Policy deals with all this by simply hoping corporates will turn into good citizens.

After two-and-a-half years of wrangling between mineral-rich states and the centre, between steel-makers and iron ore miners, India now has a new National Mineral Policy — NMP, 2008 — which is devoid of substance and is unlikely to solve the fundamental problems associated with mining in the country.

The policy has drawn the ire of the mining states. Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has described it as against national interests and alleged that the policy is influenced by the international mining lobby. The Indian Steel Alliance, the umbrella body of domestic steel companies, has joined the chorus through ‘public interest' advertisements in leading newspapers denouncing the exports of iron ore, which the NMP, 2008 seeks to promote.

Amidst all this hullabullo, the social and environmental implications of the policy have largely remained outside the public discourse.

Let's look at a few facts first. A vast majority of India's mineral wealth lies beneath its forests: the top 50 mineral-bearing districts alone account for about one-fifth of the forest cover of the country. These districts are tribal-dominated, and 70 per cent of them fall in the list of the 150 most backward districts of the country. About 80 per cent of these districts are also affected by naxalism. Moreover, these districts are the watersheds of some of the major river systems of central and eastern India. Mining in India, therefore, is not a simple ‘dig and sell' proposition; it is about tribals and backward castes, their lands and livelihood security, and about poverty and discontent. It is also about deforestation and biodiversity impact, water security and large-scale pollution.

Any mining policy that is divorced from these facts will not work: the NMP, 2008 has not only sidelined most of these facts, but has painted a picture of mining which is patently false. For instance, the policy believes that the miner will leave the mining area in a better ecological shape than he found it in — an assertion which even the most die-hard mining supporter will find hard to digest. It also, in contradiction to all available facts and the government's own previous admissions, states that mineral development has already made substantial contribution to regional and more specifically, to peripheral development of the mining areas.

The objectives of NMP, 2008 are clear: it essentially wants to promote privately-owned, large-scale, mechanised mines — if they happen to be multinationals, still better. The lack of FDI in the mining industry was the very reason why the need was felt to revise the national mineral policy, 1993 (NMP, 1993). The policy is amazingly ambiguous and open-ended as far as social and environmental issues are concerned. Apart from using high-sounding words like Sustainable Development Framework and international best practices, the policy has nothing concrete to offer. In fact, the bureaucrats will have a field day converting the policy into law. And most probably they will do what they did with NMP, 1993; will promote large-scale mining, but without any laws or institutions to take care of the negative externalities of mining.

To start with, the policy has failed to recognise that mining has large-scale livelihood implications. Despite all its rhetoric about the employment potential of mining, the fact is that modern large-scale mines do not need local people; it needs local resources — minerals, water, forests and land — and ends up alienating local livelihoods, but cannot replace them. This is the major point of conflict between miners and local communities. Added to this is a huge trust gap that exists between them. Mining industry has very poor rehabilitation and resettlement record. It is estimated that not even one-fourth of the people displaced by mining, most of whom are tribals and backward castes, have been resettled. The result is that people in the mineral-rich areas do not believe that mining is going to improve their lot and are unwilling to give up their land. In such a situation, instead of ensuring substantial direct benefits to the local communities and developing a plan of action to address genuine grievances, the solution offered by the NMP, 2008 — to follow the R&R policy of the government and rely on corporate social responsibility (CSR) — is just not going to work. In fact, with the intent of the policy to push for large-scale mining, one should expect large-scale social unrest in the mining belt in the coming years.

As far as protection of environment is concerned, NMP, 2008 has essentially copied the prescription of NMP, 1993, which the government has failed to implement in the past 15 years. There is however, a difference. NMP, 2008 plans to mitigate the environmental and social fallouts of mining by relying on a voluntary mechanism — Sustainable Development Framework (SDF). It believes that CSR will solve all problems.

SDF is the creation of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) — an organisation promoted by the leading multinational mining companies to clean up their image. It is a set of broad and vague principles — for example, "contributing to social, economic and institutional development of communities" — which ICMM wants its members to comply voluntarily. The problem is that it is no different from many voluntary systems like ISO 14001 going around the town. None of these systems have any accountability built into them and can be bought off-the-shelf. The fact that the government has included this farcical industry-sponsored mechanism into its major policy statement speaks volumes about the influence of corporations in policymaking in the country.

The fact is that mining is creating huge environmental and social problems because laws and institutions assigned to regulate mining have failed. There is a multiplicity of regulations and regulatory institutions; besides, most regulatory institutions do not have a capacity to regulate and there is a complete lack of deterrence for non-compliance. The entire environmental and social governance in mining — from the process of granting of lease to the mining operation to the ultimate closure of mines — is a long series of paperwork, with little impact on the ground. In such a situation, instead of streamlining and strengthening laws and institutions and giving power to the affected people to decide and negotiate, the reliance of NMP, 2008 on a voluntary mechanism and corporate benevolence is a sure-shot recipe to massive environmental degradation and social unrest.

In addition, some of the harmless sounding free-market prescriptions of NMP, 2008 — seamless transition from prospecting to mining and security of tenure — will also lead to huge environmental and social problems. Seamless transition means that if a prospector has found an ore body, then it will be obligatory on the part of the government to give a mine lease, even if ore bodies are found in ecologically or socially sensitive areas. Similarly, security of tenure can also be construed as security to continue mining even when the mine has created severe environmental and social problems. Both these clauses will completely destroy the environmental and forestry regulations.

The NMP, 2008 in essence is merely a vestige of the past, an archaic reiteration of things gone by: what it has essentially failed to do is consider current ground realities and come out with prescriptions which suit them.

The writer is the lead author of Rich lands, poor people: Is sustainable mining possible? This book, christened the Sixth State of India's Environment report, has been recently published by the Centre for Science and Environment. Extensively researched and richly illustrated, the book has been prepared as a state-of-art tome on mining in India, its impacts on environment and people, and the way ahead.

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