The Rule-Making Powers, and the Register of Concessions

In one line

The Act is short because almost everything is in the rules, and sections 13 and 18 are where the central rules come from.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: section 12 requires the State Government to maintain registers of reconnaissance permits, prospecting licences and mining leases, open to inspection; section 12A governs the transfer of a mineral concession; section 13 empowers the Central Government to make rules for regulating the grant of concessions, the rules for the conservation and systematic development of minerals being made under section 18; section 13A empowers it to make rules for concessions in the territorial waters or the continental shelf; and section 14 provides that sections 5 to 13 do not apply to minor minerals, which is what makes minor minerals the State's field under section 15.

Section 12: the registers

Section 12 requires the State Government to keep, in the prescribed form, registers of reconnaissance permits, prospecting licences and mining leases, and to keep them open to inspection by any person on payment of the prescribed fee.

A register is not an administrative nicety in a resource statute. It is how anybody outside the department knows what has been granted, over what area and to whom, and it is the document a public interest petition is built from. The Goa and Odisha illegal mining cases both depended on knowing what had been granted: in Goa the Justice Shah Commission found about 2,796 hectares under encroachment by the lessees, and in Odisha the Central Empowered Committee accounted for 187 leases one by one.

Section 12A: transfer

Section 12A allows the holder of a mining lease, composite licence or exploration licence granted under the procedure laid down in the Act to transfer it to another eligible person, with the previous approval of the State Government, which is taken to have no objection if it does not respond within ninety days; the transferee accepts all the conditions and liabilities of the transferor, no transfer charge has been payable since the amendment of 2021, and the section does not apply to coal, lignite or the atomic minerals. A transfer that contravenes the Act is void under section 19.

Read it with section 8B, under which the statutory clearances travel with the lease. Together they make a mining lease a tradable asset, which was the point: an auction market needs a secondary market, or a bidder who cannot work the block is stuck with it.

Section 13: the central rule-making power

Section 13(1). The Central Government may, by notification, make rules for regulating the grant of reconnaissance permits, prospecting licences, exploration licences, mining leases and composite licences in respect of minerals and for purposes connected therewith.