In a setback to the Sawant government's efforts to restart the mining industry, a bench of the Bombay High Court in Goa on Wednesday said that winning bidders of freshly auctioned mining blocks will have to obtain environment clearances (EC) afresh before resuming mining operations.
The court was hearing a petition filed by Sociedade de Fomento Industrial Pvt Ltd, one of the winning bidders, who had contended that a winning bidder need not have to obtain fresh environment clearances before carrying out mining operations.
"However, we clarify that fresh ECs will have to be obtained even by the successful bidders to Block -VII or other Blocks to which the decisions of the Hon'ble Supreme Court in GF-I and GF-II apply or to mining blocks in respect of which the ECs were cancelled by the MoEF by order dated 23.04.2018," said the order by Justices Valmiki Menezes and Mahesh Sonak.
The mining issue has been hanging fire in Goa ever since the apex court banned extraction and transportation of iron ore from 88 mining leases in March 2018, while also directing the state government to re-issue mining leases. The Court had also scrapped existing mining leases.
Mining was earlier halted in the state in 2012, after a previous apex court order, in connection with Rs 35,000 crore illegal mining scam. It restarted again in 2014, before being banned again in 2018 after the Supreme Court scrapped all existing mining leases citing irregularities in renewal processes.
After several stops and starts, the Goa government started the process to auction the mining leases afresh, with JSW Steel, Fomento, Vedanta among others emerging as the winning bidders.
In Wednesday's order, the High Court relied on the 2018 judgement of the apex court which had also underlined the need for fresh ECs for the resumption of mining in the newly auctioned mining blocks.