Bhubaneswar:Massive Revenue of Taxpayers Looted by Mining Companies under Government’s nose.Big Players escapes just by paying an extremely small amount of Royalty to Government causing Huge loss to government exchequer.As per science, in nature iron ore occurs alongwith interstitial waste materials with high percentage of clay, alumina etcetra. These are impurities for iron ore and need to be removed before use. The whole body of iron ore including the waste material that occurs in the Earth is called the run of mine (ROM). It means, the ROM ore refers to ore in its natural, unprocessed state just as it is when blasted.
As per Supreme Court judgement, the waste material get excavated alongwith the iron ore ROM [Ref para-15 of SC Judgement dt.12/11/2018 in WP(Civil) 114/2014 : else it would be extracting flesh without spilling a drop of blood].
Clearly, the above explanation leaves us to understand, that every time ROM is extracted from the earth, it need some sort of “processing” to recover the commercially valuable /useable part and to separate the waste material of clay, alumina etc from the ROM.
The processing may be simply dry crushing and screening. In other cases it may be crushing, washing etc to separate the waste material from ROM. Therefore the processed ore quantity is always less than the ROM quantity by an amount of 18 to 25% in Odisha.
The only factor for grant of Environment Clearance (EC) is to limit the production of ROM quantity. For example, if 3.00 million ton is the EC capacity, then the mine is allowed to produce 3.00 million ton ROM; but not the quantity of processed ore.
What is happening in Odisha is that almost all big private mines are doing ROM production 18 to 25% more than the EC capacity; but reporting only upto the EC capacity and recording that the processed ore quantity is same as the ROM quantity. That means ROM = Processed Ore, which is technically and scientifically impossible. Even some mine owners showing the grade of ROM after processing is increased by 2 to 3%, say from 58% Fe to 60% Fe or from 60 to 63%; showing ROM = processed ore. That means no waste material is separated from ROM; but the grade of ROM after processing is increased. This otherwise proves that manually /artificially Iron (Fe) is added into the ROM during processing to increase the ROM grade from 58% to 60%.
Whereas, the return figures of corporate house proves that the processed ore quantity is less than the ROM by about 24%.(Aryan Mining and Trading Company, Indrani Pattnaik and others
Examples of some mines violating the EC (name not mentioned) for 2017-18:
| Mine | EC capacity (million ton) | Reported ROM production (million ton) | Reported processed ore production (million ton) | ROM production (million ton) = reported ROM + 20% | Violation of EC – Excess production (million ton) | Loss of Royalty on unreported ROM (Rs. Crores) |
| I | 3.00 | 2.9970 | 2.9970 | 3.5964 | 0.5994 | 71.928 |
| II | 5.62 | 5.6020 | 5.6020 | 6.7224 | 1.1204 | 134.448 |
| III | 5.50 | 5.4995 | 5.4995 | 6.5994 | 1.0999 | 131.988 |
| IV | 4.00 | 3.9906 | 3.9906 | 4.7887 | 0.79812 | 95.7744 |
| V | 2.20 | 2.1985 | 2.1985 | 2.6382 | 0.4397 | 52.764 |
| Total | 20.32 | 20.2876 | 20.2876 | 24.34512 | 4.0575 | 486.9024 |
