Hyderabad | June 10, 2016: A star rating system to assess miners on sustainable development activities is to be launched next month by the Union Ministry of Mines.

Overtime, the Ministry will make changes to the rules and introduce penal provisions for miners not achieving a high rating.

Union Secretary (Mines) Balvinder Kumar said this here on Thursday at the signing of an MoU under which National Institute of Smart Government will develop a web-enabled application for Indian Bureau of Mines.

“We have identified various indicators, social, economic and environmental and assigned certain weightage to each of them. While those getting above 90 marks (on 100) will get 5-stars, those scoring 80- 90 will be given 4-stars,” he said.

While it will be a self-certification process, with miners filing the details on the app, the Ministry would rate them after a third-party evaluation.

Those not achieving 4 or 5 stars would get time to improve. Those who continue to lag would be penalised with suspension of the mining operations for certain period, he said, adding the rules would amended to incorporate the penal provisions.

The system will be launched at a two-day national conclave on mining in Raipur beginning July 4, and the first set of ratings given to around 15 companies, he said.

New policy soon

Stating that the Ministry was initiating various measures aimed at improving transparency and checking illegal mining, Mr.Kumar, talking to presspersons on the sidelines of the event, said National Mineral Exploration Policy is likely to be notified in one month. The major change, he explained, would be auctioning of exploration blocks as opposed to mineral blocks hitherto.

The senior official, who earlier visited National Remote Sensing Centre here, said space technology is to be used to curb illegal mining. Digitised maps of nearly 1,000 mining areas have been prepared and in another one and a half months time all mining areas would be covered and monitored through satellites. Such surveillance would apply to mining leases of major minerals across the country, he said. Mr. Kumar said TCS, L&T Infotech and Wipro were in the fray for a project to computerise various aspects of the Mineral Tenement System.

Those who continue to lag will be penalised with suspension of operations for certain period

(Source: http://www.thehindu.com/)