The story of illegal mining in India nearly dates back to the country’s early mining history under private ownership. Miners always encroached upon the land outside the leased area, destroyed forests and environment, ruthlessly displaced Adivasis or original tribal settlers, understated production and profit to cheat the respective state and central governments on levies and taxes and bribed inspectors.

The tradition continues. The methodologies of managing and expanding illegal mining remain the same. Only the scale of operation has hugely expanded over the years. All it takes to operate illegal mines is to keep bribing regularly those running village panchayats, district administration, police, forest department, state and central government inspectors and politicians of all hues in power, irrespective of their party affiliations. Few would know this better than Srikant Jena, former Janata Dal chief whip in Parliament turned a Congress MP, who holds a portfolio that has nothing to do even remotely with mining. Jena is the union minister of state having independent charge of statistics and programme implementation in addition to fertilizers and chemicals.

Initiated into active politics while young by the late Biju Patnaik, one of the founders of Janata Dal, in 1977, Jena’s dislike for his son, Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), is common knowledge. But, this can’t be held against Jena for sharing his personal account of the extent of illegal mining in Orissa although only after the Odisha government had slapped large fines, combining Rs. 58,000 crores, on companies mining iron ore illegally in the state. The timing of his allegation of a Rs. 4,00,000-crore mining fraud, several times bigger than Goa and Karnataka fraud estimates, coincides with the repeat visit of a large inquiry team representing the Justice M P Shah Commission, mandated to look into illegal mining in states, and the Congress party’s renewed attack on the Opposition on political corruption issues.

Incidentally, one part of the Shah Commission report on Goa mining, which is now before Parliament, indicted Digambar Kamat, Goa’s Congress chief minister between 2007 and 2012, reaffirming the fact that illegal mining and corruption transcend the party lines. Like Jena, Kamath too had a background of divided political loyalties. He served three governments in Goa – two led by Congress and one by BJP. And, all his 10 years in the government, he held the mining portfolio and “abused” his power to help certain companies and individuals amass wealth, the Commission report had pointed out. The disease is deep rooted involving too many organs and checkpoints. Mining is in the joint list under the Indian constitution, with both the central and state governments enjoying legislative powers. Thus, no party can be held singularly responsible for illegal mining or being associated with it.

For instance, Jena may be aware of the case of the Rashmi group of companies, consisting among others Orissa Metaliks, Rashmi Metaliks, Rosemary Sponge and Rashmi Cement. It is mainly an Odisha centric group, having units also at Kharagpur and Jhargram in West Bengal only a few kilometers from Jena’s Balasore, which has been under lens for alleged illegal mining, processing and transportation of ore and fines and heavily robbing the railways and the central exchequer by dubious means with impunity. The group has cases pending before the court, the police, the railway authorities, income tax department, excise authorities and the central bureau of investigation. There had been several national and regional media stories about these cases. But, the business group seems to survive them all to grow at a phenomenal rate — from around Rs. 100 crore to Rs. 1,000 crore in annual turnover in just about five years. Does Rashmi’s name feature in Srikant Jena’s record of Odisha’s mega mining scam? Who will Jena blame for Rashmi’s meteoric rise – his prime minister, Manmohan Singh, or Naveen Patnaik, or both?

The illegal and slaughter mining became so rampant in the 1960s that the entire mining sector was nationalized by the then Congress government, headed by Ms Indira Gandhi, leaving some select mines held by business houses such as the Tatas (coal and iron ore), Birlas (Bauxite) and a few others, including multinational Canadian non-ferrous giant, Alcan. Goa mines were left out because they were governed by laws under the erstwhile Portugese administration. Ms Gandhi did not blame any government or ministers – central or state – for official lapses or collusion in the rise of illegal mining. Typically, she blamed only the greedy and unethical private promoters before nationalizing their mines.

In its report on illegal iron ore and manganese mining in Goa, the Commission observed that natural resources had made a few leaseholders billionaires. It found “total lack of coordination” in different wings of the environment and forests ministry, which “resulted in illegalities and consequential ecological damage.” During the last five years, the Directorate of Mines and Geology (DMG) had not held inspection of the leases. There was a “total collapse” of the fabrics of monitoring and regulatory mechanism in Goa. The 434-page report said complaints of pollution of natural streams, rivers, ponds, destruction of agriculture and failure of horticulture crops were well-known to the entire State administration. “But no inspection had been carried out which resulted in a fear-free environment causing loss to the ecology, agriculture, groundwater, natural streams, ponds, rivers and biodiversity.”

One wonders what would the Shah Commission say, if it had a say in the matter of the latest overruling of former union environment minister Jairam Ramesh’s official rejection in July 2011 of the allocation of 1,182.35 hectares of forest land at the Mahan coal block in Madhya Pradesh for captive mining by the Ruias of Essar Power and Aditya Birla group-led Hindalco Industries by the all powerful group of ministers (GoM), headed by Pranab Mukherjee, now India’s President. Even the union environment ministry’s mandatory expert panel had rejected the mining of coal in eco-sensitive Mahan forest land.

Now, Anil Ambani too is expecting official clearance to undertake coal mining in the forest land of nearby Chhatrasal block. Curiously, the GoM did not show the same exuberance to turn down the objections from Jairam Ramesh and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi to bauxite mining at Odisha’s Nimaygiri Hills by Vedanta’s Aggarwals. It is all very high level politics at the centre. And, no one holding high office in Delhi’s Raisina Hills is bothered about what the rest of the country thinks about the motivation behind the government’s such capricious decisions.

In fact, corruption in India cuts across political parties. The police, taxmen, departmental administrators and inspectors, district administration, lower judiciary and bureaucracy act as conduits. They all are accomplices to crime and corruption. The specific example of undisturbed operations of the Orissa mining group, Rashmi, despite so many charges of irregularities, F.I.Rs with the police, CBI enquiry into involvement of railways and excise department officials in duping the exchequer and media glare, shows how the corruption octopus spreads its tentacles to protect the mastermind. To catch such octopuses one must first chop off their dangerous poison-spewing tentacles. (IPA Service)