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| Koda: Shocked |
Ranchi, Aug. 28: The mines and geology department today held a meeting with the senior officials of the leading coal companies operating in Jharkhand to facilitate the transfer of abandoned coal mines to the villagers’ co-operative societies.
Presiding over the meeting, mines and geology minister Madhu Koda proposed to the Union coal ministry to spend the stowing excise duty on coal — Rs 10 per tonne collected from the coal companies — be spent on making corpus fund for the proposed co-operative societies.
Senior officials of Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL), Central Coalfields Limited and Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), the leading Coal India Limited (CIL) subsidiaries operating in Jharkhand, as well as the representatives of CIL and ISM attended the meeting held in presence of mines and geology department secretary S.K. Satpathy.
Citing the coal companies’ previous meeting, when Koda said the CCL had 23 and the ECL had eight closed mines, the CCL authorities admitted that illegal mining was frequent at 195 places in its leasehold. Around 174 such places had been sealed, they added.
Soon after his meeting with the coal companies was over, Koda, also the co-operative minister, held another meeting with JSMDC chief Deepak Prakash and co-operative secretary Rajbala Verma to work out modalities to make the co-operative societies functional at the earliest. He also took stock of the community development and welfare schemes being taken up by the coal companies.
“I was terribly shocked to learn that they intended to spend only Rs 5 crore on community development. This issue figured during the last Assembly session as well. The coal companies will be taken to task if they did not mend their ways,” said Koda.
Significantly, the Union coal ministry proposed in a meeting in Delhi a couple of weeks ago that “abandoned” mines be handed over to local residents. Run by the local residents, the co-operative societies would be supplying coal to the nearest coal companies.
Their accounts would be audited every year and only local residents would be involved in the mining work. However, the CIL would assist them in mining.
