No negative impact on taxes in new mining bill: Mining Sec

The New Mining Bill has substantially covered most of the areas of reforms, Mining Secretary Vijay Kumar said.

Throwing further light on the bill, he said the bill has been worked upon comprehensively. It has been discussed with various parties -state governments, central government, industrialists - over two years. This has resulted in the formulation of a very robust bill. The bill will look into all the problems that the industry has been grappling with - regulation, concession grants and concession management, scientific mining, sustainable development.

In this process lot of changes took place, he added. “We would like the bill to be as forward looking as possible within the parameters of the locals not seeing mining as a threat but advancing in their own benefit,” he said.

Addressing the concerns of the industry over tax implications of the bill, Vijay Kumar said, the bill will not affect the taxes that companies pay. He also added that India is not comparable to countries like Australia because the process of calculating royalties in both the countries is different from one another.

“The major issue of worry is the high transaction cost, transport cost and handling costs,” he said. This results in some areas of the mineral sector becoming unnecessarily incompetitive. Reiterating that royalty in India is not high, Vijay Kumar said, " We are prepared to look at royalty again."

He said that a study group has been constituted to look into the issue of royalty. It was made a couple of weeks ago. Industry and states are members of this committee which will give its recommendations early next year.

When asked about the situation in Karnataka, he said it was not comparable to that in Goa. In Goa the violations are predominantly on the environment side, he said.

“We have done the best we could in the circumstances,” he said, adding that some things tend to be a bit of the compromise. But by and large all parties feel that very significant progress has been made through this bill, he added.

“There is a scope for improvement but we have substantially covered all areas of reforms,” he said.

Here more from him in this chat with Udayan Mukherjee, Managing Editor, CNBC TV18.

Watch video ….