Have patience: Government to Vedanta

BHUBANESWAR: The State Government, it seems, is not in a hurry to provide alternative bauxite mines to the UK-based Vedanta group for its refinery at Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district after the Centre rejected the stage-I forest clearance for its proposed mining project in Niyamgiri.

  It has asked the company to have patience to get alternative sources of raw material in Orissa. “Allocating mines to any company requires a lot of time as the process has to go through various stages. Therefore, Vedanta has to wait to get alternative reserve of bauxite,” Steel and Mines Minister Raghunath  Mohanty told mediapersons after a meeting with Vedanta’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Mukesh Kumar today.

 A team of officials from Vedanta Group led by Kumar met Mohanty and urged him to accelerate process of providing alternative source of bauxite after the company was refused permission to start mining atop Niyamgiri hills in Kalahandi district.

 Though Vedanta had earlier submitted applications for at least seven bauxite  reserves in Kalahandi and Rayagada districts, the company did not  press for them until its mining project at Niyamgiri hills was rejected by the  Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) last month.

 While it had applied for the Karlapat mines in 2003, applications for the rest six mines were submitted in 2006. But all these seven mines have small reserves compared to Niyamgiri.

The Minister maintained that Vedanta’s application would be processed according to the Mines and Mineral (development and regulation) Act. He also made it clear that the State Government had not given any specific assurance to the company for allocation of any specific bauxite reserve.

 “However, we have told them (Vedanta) to have patience as the process associated with mining projects require a lot of

time,” Mohanty said.

  The company, which had started operation from its refinery project at Lanjigarh and smelter unit at Jharsuguda, had been running plants by importing bauxite from other states like Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and now planned to lift some raw material from Gujarat to meet its requirement.

  However, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests had also raised questions on this as 11 out of the 14 mines from where bauxite was imported for the refinery did not have forest clearance.

Vedanta requires about three million tons of bauxite to run its one mtpa refinery at Lanjigarh.