India: Goa to allow nine cos to export from old iron ore dumps in June

Nine companies will be allowed to sell low-grade ore from next month onwards, informed Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant.

These low-grade ores that were once unmarketable had been dumped for over decades on land outside the mines, creating little hills across Goa's mining belts. These mounds turned into lucrative lots once China began buying low-grade ore in the early 2000s. The dumps were rampantly exploited by anyone that could lay their hands on them, contributing eventually to mining being halted in the state of Goa.

The government had attempted to regularise the dumps outside the leasehold charging a land conversion but had to wait for the Supreme Court to let it resume mining,

What the state now intends to permit is the export of iron ore sitting on land for which a conversion fee has been paid and material that is part of the Indian Bureau of Mine's records, declared in the ex-lessees mining plans. Those that qualify include VM Salgaocar, Chowgule, Fomento but excludes Vedanta, which, according to industry sources, is focused on fully operationalising the Bicholim block it won in auction.

In a statement to a national daily, following a review meeting with the Department of Mines and Geology, Sawant said Goa would be levying a fee on ore exported from these dumps. The report also claims that while the DMG intended verifying the quantum and grade of the dumps it has found it difficult to do so and now intends to allow each qualifying miner to sell up to what they had declared to IBM. BigMint could not ascertain the volume and grade of material available in these dumps, but the Chief Minister had in the past pegged potential earning for the government at INR 200 crore.

Sawant's Cabinet had also cleared a dump mining policy in March this year formally paving the way for auction millions of tonnes of low-grade ore from dumps that now belong to the state.