One of the biggest challenges that will erupt in the mining belt will be clearly and simply, the capacity of the mining affected to repay their loans and get their lives back on track. There is of course an argument that mining stakeholders earned enough to last them for long, but his argument doesn’t pass the muster when the wait is so long and the hope of some business trickling in had dwindled, even in a deleted twenty million ton annual export scenario.
Now with Prime Minister Modi seeking a report on the economic impact of mining, it is clear that any decision will also have to weigh in the amount if time which will be taken to restart some form of mining.
The biggest challenge is that from March 16 onwards there will no entity called, “a lease holder”. The landscape will be cleaned. Goa will be state where there will be mines but there will be no one to mine. While the time needed to get into a landscape of controlled monitored mining will be long and could extend to even three years, how does the state, and most importantly a ruling political party which is going to face elections next year, handle a potentially explosive situation in the mining affected areas?
The Prime Minister’s intervention, asking the Goa government to give a report on the economic impact of the mining closure, is indicative of the undercurrent of tension that prevails within the party. This nervousness is palpable among the mining MLAs, all of whom happen to be in the BJP, or MGP or an Independent supporting the coalition.
The Supreme Court in the judgment where the renewal of 88 leases was struck down stated “The problem cannot be wished away. You need to see to it that the paying capacity of the mining affected is restored to pay the loans.”
Therefore, even as the state, as per the Chief Minister, is not dependent on mining revenue, the community of mining affected need to be at the centre of decision making and not at the periphery. One of the first priorities here is to ensure that remaining loans are paid off
The government had reopened the Debt Relief – One Time Settlement (OTS) scheme to those mining affected borrowers, whose applications were pending before the banks and financial institutions but could not get cleared due to the expiry of the scheme in March 2016. Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar was the final authority to grant the benefit on case to case basis. The scheme was extended upto December 2017. The scheme, aimed to provide Debt Relief to the trucks and barge owners’ dependent on the iron ore mining industry, was introduced in September 2014. Under the scheme, total 3978 applications have been sanctioned with subsidy of Rs 120 crores.
In March 2015, the scheme first lapsed and was granted extension of six months upto September 4, 2015. Later it was further extended to December, 2015 and then upto March 31, 2016.
As per the Debt Relief scheme, the banks and financial institutions granted waiver of 100 percent loan interest from September 2012 and 40 percent waiver on principle loan amount for trucks owners while 30 percent to barge owners.
What now remains to be seen is how many of the 3978 plus applications have managed to pay off even 60 or 70 % of their principal amount after their waivers and in the restricted mining scenario and whether their payment schedule can be met.
The human cost of the latest blow to mining is going to be high. The state may not quite need revenue from mining, even for arguments sake, but it still has a lot of unfinished business with common stakeholders of the mining landscape.
