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Chapter 3: Who Keeps the Money — Central Legislation and the Extraction of Odisha’s Mineral Wealth

In May 2012, the Ministry of Coal issued Notification G.S.R. 349(E), fixing the royalty on coal at 14 percent ad valorem on the price of coal. That notification has not been revised since. As of March 2026 — fourteen years later — every tonne of coal pulled from the Talcher coalfield in Angul district, the largest coal reserve in India with estimated deposits of 38.65 billion tonnes, generates a royalty payment to Odisha based on a rate set when the iPhone 5 was new and Narendra Modi was still Chief Minister of Gujarat.

Fourteen years. The price of coal has moved. The cost of living in Angul has moved. The aspirations of the families displaced by open-cast mines have moved. The royalty rate has not.

This is not an accident. It is a design feature of how India’s central government has managed mineral wealth since independence. The machinery is intricate — an interlocking set of laws, regulatory bodies, and constitutional provisions that determine who gets to dig, how much they pay, and where the money goes. But the outcome is simple: the ground gives up its wealth, the people living above the ground bear the cost, and the financial return to the state that owns the minerals is determined not by the state itself, but by a committee in Delhi that revises rates when it feels like it.

This chapter is about the specific legislation — the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act of 1957, the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act of 1973, and their subsequent amendments — through which the central government has maintained control over Odisha’s mineral inheritance. Not the internal politics of mining governance, which is its own story of complicity and corruption. But the architecture that Delhi built, the rules it set, and the money it either took or allowed others to take.

The Inventory Under the Ground

Start with what Odisha actually has, because the numbers are staggering in a way that makes the fiscal outcomes almost incomprehensible.

Odisha holds 33 percent of India’s iron ore reserves, 24 percent of its coal, 51 percent of its bauxite, 92 percent of its nickel, 96 percent of its chromite, and 44 percent of its manganese ore. In FY 2022-23, the state contributed over 41.9 percent of India’s total mineral production value. These are not marginal deposits. Odisha is to India’s mineral economy what Saudi Arabia is to OPEC — not just a participant but a foundational pillar.

Put it in software terms. If India’s mineral economy were a codebase, Odisha would be a core dependency — the library that everything else imports. Iron ore from Keonjhar feeds steel plants across the country. Coal from Talcher and the Ib Valley powers thermal plants from Andhra Pradesh to Maharashtra. Bauxite from Koraput becomes aluminium processed elsewhere. Chromite from the Sukinda Valley, one of the largest deposits on the planet, underpins India’s entire stainless steel and ferro-alloy industry.

And yet, Odisha’s per capita income in 2025-26 stood at Rs 1,86,761 against the national average of Rs 2,00,162. The districts where the minerals are thickest in the ground — Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Angul, Koraput — are also the districts with the worst human development indicators. This is not the paradox it appears to be. It is the predictable outcome of a system designed to extract value from one location and realize it in another.

The question is: who designed that system?

The MMDR Act: Delhi’s Master Key

The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act of 1957 is, in structural terms, the most important piece of legislation governing Odisha’s economic destiny. It is also, in structural terms, a mechanism by which the central government maintains veto power over how states manage their own geological inheritance.

The Constitution of India places mineral regulation in a peculiar split. Entry 54 of the Union List gives Parliament the power to regulate mines and mineral development “to the extent to which such regulation and development under the control of the Union is declared by Parliament by law to be expedient in the public interest.” Entry 23 of the State List gives state legislatures the power to regulate mines and mineral development “subject to the provisions of List I.” Entry 50 of the State List allows states to tax mineral rights “subject to any limitations imposed by Parliament.”

What this means in practice: the states own the minerals, but the centre controls the rules. The MMDR Act of 1957 is the law through which Parliament has declared virtually all major minerals to be under central regulatory control. And “regulatory control” is a capacious concept. It includes who can mine, how mining leases are allocated, what environmental and forest clearances are required, and — critically — what royalty rates the states can charge.

Think of the MMDR Act as an API that sits between the state and its own resources. The state can access its minerals, but only through the interface that Delhi provides. And Delhi controls the rate limits.

Until 2015, this API had a particularly pernicious feature: mining leases were allocated on a “first-come, first-served” basis. In theory, this was a neutral administrative mechanism. In practice, it was a patronage machine. Access to leases was determined by access to political power — specifically, by relationships with the Steel and Mines Department and the Revenue Department at the state level, enabled by central clearance requirements that created additional gatekeeping points. The system functioned like a poorly designed authentication layer: formally rule-based, practically penetrable by anyone with the right credentials.

The 2015 amendment replaced first-come-first-served with competitive auctions. Mining leases for specified minerals would be allocated through transparent bidding, with the highest bidder winning the right to mine. This was a genuine reform. In Odisha, the 2020 auctions for 17 expired iron ore mining leases in Keonjhar and Sundargarh generated substantial premiums, sometimes exceeding 100 percent of the statutory royalty. The state’s revenue from mining increased significantly.

But the fundamental architecture remained unchanged. The central government still sets the royalty rates. The central government still determines which minerals fall under the MMDR Act’s ambit. The central government still controls the pace and direction of policy reform. The states are customers of a system they did not design and cannot unilaterally modify.

Coal: The Most Controlled Mineral

If the MMDR Act is Delhi’s master key to mineral governance, coal is the room with the most elaborate locks.

The story begins in the early 1970s. Indira Gandhi’s government nationalized coal mining in two phases — coking coal mines in 1971-72 through the Coking Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, and all remaining coal mines in 1973 through the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act. The stated rationale was to end unscientific mining practices, improve working conditions for miners, and ensure rational development of a strategic national resource.

The effect was absolute centralization. All coal mining rights were transferred to the central government. Coal India Limited, a central public sector undertaking, became the monopoly producer. State governments lost all operational control over coal deposits within their borders. They could not decide who mined, how much was mined, or where the coal went. Their role was reduced to receiving royalty payments — at rates determined by the central government.

For Odisha, this meant that the Talcher and Ib Valley coalfields — together holding the largest coal reserves in India — were operated by Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL), a subsidiary of Coal India. MCL mines the coal, sells it (primarily to thermal power plants), and pays royalty to the state government. The state has no equity stake in MCL. It has no seat on MCL’s board. It has no say in MCL’s production plans, pricing decisions, or investment priorities. It is, in the most literal sense, a landlord collecting rent at a rate set by the tenant’s parent company.

And the rent has been frozen since 2012.

The Frozen Royalty

The 14 percent ad valorem rate set by the May 2012 notification applies to all coal-producing states except West Bengal, which follows a different formula combining per-tonne rates that range from Rs 2.50 to Rs 7.00 depending on coal grade, plus a separate cess of about 25 percent. The MMDR Act itself stipulates that the central government “shall not enhance the rate of royalty in respect of any mineral more than once during any period of three years.” In practice, the government has gone far beyond the statutory minimum interval. Coal royalty was last revised in 2012. Before that, the revision came in 2007, when the structure was changed from a semi-ad-valorem basis (a fixed component plus a variable component) to the current straight ad valorem system.

What does this mean in rupees? In 2023-24, Odisha received Rs 3,881.80 crore in coal royalty at the 14 percent rate. That sounds like a large number until you consider what is leaving the ground. MCL’s coal production in the Talcher and Ib Valley fields exceeds 200 million tonnes annually. At a rough average pithead price of Rs 1,500-2,000 per tonne, the gross value of coal extracted from Odisha’s soil approaches Rs 30,000-40,000 crore every year. The state keeps roughly 10 percent of the value of what is taken from its land.

Compare this with what oil-producing countries or even Indian states with different resource endowments manage to capture. The principle of sovereign resource ownership — that the entity above the ground should capture a significant share of the value below it — is a basic tenet of resource economics. In Odisha’s case, the capture rate is determined not by negotiation between equals but by a central government notification that the state cannot contest, amend, or refuse.

The Arrears Problem

Even the frozen royalty is not fully paid. In 2015, it was reported that Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd owed Rs 1,385 crore in unpaid royalty arrears to the state of Odisha, with the Samaleswari mine alone in Sambalpur district accounting for Rs 1,322 crore. Eight mines in Talcher Coalfields and four more in the Sambalpur district had accumulated outstanding dues over years.

This is the central government’s own company, operating under the central government’s own legislation, failing to pay the central government’s own royalty rate to a state government. The circularity is instructive. Delhi sets the rate, Delhi’s company extracts the mineral, and Delhi’s company doesn’t fully pay even the rate Delhi set. The state government — which bears the costs of displacement, environmental degradation, road damage from mining trucks, and the health impacts of coal dust on surrounding communities — is left to petition for arrears from an entity over which it has no leverage.

The State-by-State Gap

The comparative numbers sharpen the picture further. During April-December 2020 — admittedly a pandemic-disrupted period, but the relative proportions are revealing — coal royalty payments to states were: Jharkhand Rs 2,102.01 crore, Chhattisgarh Rs 1,575.73 crore, Madhya Pradesh Rs 1,489.44 crore, and Odisha Rs 1,165.48 crore.

Odisha received the least among the four major coal-producing states, despite holding reserves comparable to or exceeding those of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Part of this reflects production volumes and coal grades — not all coal is equal, and the price of coal from different mines varies. But part of it reflects the fundamental problem: royalty is calculated on the sale price of coal, and the sale price of coal from different coalfields is influenced by factors (transport logistics, power plant proximity, contractual arrangements between Coal India subsidiaries and their customers) that the state government has no control over.

The state that holds the ground holds none of the pricing power.

The Coal Block Allocation Scam: When the System Broke Visibly

If the ordinary functioning of coal governance represents a slow, structural extraction of value from mineral-bearing states, the coal block allocation scam of the 2000s was the moment the system’s dysfunction became impossible to ignore.

Between 1993 and 2011, the central government allocated 218 coal blocks to public and private companies through a Screening Committee process. The allocations were meant to serve end-use industries — steel plants, power plants, cement factories — that needed captive coal supplies. The process was neither auction-based nor transparent. Companies applied, a committee evaluated applications based on criteria that were never clearly codified, and blocks were allocated.

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s draft report in 2012 estimated that the allocation of coal blocks at below-market rates had cost the exchequer approximately Rs 1.86 lakh crore. The final report modified the methodology but not the underlying finding: public resources had been allocated through a process that was arbitrary, opaque, and deeply susceptible to influence.

On August 25, 2014, the Supreme Court delivered judgment in Manohar Lal Sharma v. Principal Secretary. The Court held that the allotments made through the Screening Committee and through the Government Dispensation route since 1993 were “arbitrary and illegal.” It found the allocation process to be “alien to the legal regime” and cancelled the allocation of 204 out of 218 coal blocks, sparing only the Tasra block allocated to SAIL, the Pakri Barwadih block allocated to NTPC, and 12 blocks allocated for Ultra Mega Power Projects.

Several of the cancelled blocks were in Odisha. The cancellation meant that companies that had invested in infrastructure around these blocks — and in some cases, communities that had been displaced to make way for mining that was now declared illegal — were left in limbo. The Supreme Court imposed a levy of Rs 295 per tonne on coal already extracted from the cancelled blocks, but this was small recompense for a decade of resource mismanagement.

The scam illustrates a structural vulnerability of centralized mineral governance. When the allocation of mineral rights is controlled by a central committee operating with broad discretion and limited transparency, the system is optimized for capture by those with political access. The states that own the minerals have no institutional mechanism to challenge allocations made by Delhi, even when those allocations are — as the Supreme Court found — fundamentally lawless.

For Odisha, the coal block saga had a specific sting. The state hosts some of the most valuable coal deposits in the country. The blocks allocated and then cancelled represented potential revenue — in royalties, employment, and downstream industrial development — that was first promised, then misallocated, and finally revoked. At no point in this cycle did the state government have meaningful agency over the outcome.

The 2024 Supreme Court Ruling: A Structural Shift

On July 25, 2024, a nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, delivered what may prove to be the most consequential judgment on mineral governance since independence. In Mineral Area Development Authority v. Steel Authority of India, the Court ruled by an 8:1 majority that the legislative power to tax mineral rights vests with state legislatures.

The ruling addressed a question that had been contested for decades: does the MMDR Act’s regulatory framework limit or extinguish the states’ constitutional power to tax mineral-bearing lands under Entry 50 of the State List?

The Court held that it does not. The MMDR Act, the Court ruled, does not contain specific provisions that limit the states’ power to tax mineral rights. Royalty and tax are conceptually different — royalty is paid as consideration in a contractual arrangement (the mining lease), whereas a tax is imposed by the authority of law. The two can coexist.

The practical implications are significant, though their full impact will take years to materialize. The Court’s ruling means that states can impose taxes on mineral-bearing lands and mining activities beyond the royalty framework of the MMDR Act. For mineral-rich states like Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh, this potentially unlocks a new revenue stream — one that is determined by state legislation rather than central notification.

But the Court also imposed constraints. The demand for tax shall not operate on transactions made prior to April 1, 2005 — cutting off what could have been a massive retroactive claim. No interest or penalties can be imposed on taxes due before July 25, 2024. And tax payments must be staggered in installments over twelve years, starting from April 1, 2026.

This is where the judgment reveals its tension. The legal principle is expansive: states have the power to tax their own mineral resources. The practical application is cautious: the timeline is long, the retroactivity is limited, and the staggering of payments means that the full fiscal impact won’t be felt for more than a decade.

Still, the ruling matters enormously as a matter of constitutional architecture. For sixty-seven years, the prevailing assumption — reinforced by the central government’s interpretation and by a 1989 ruling in India Cement Ltd. v. State of Tamil Nadu that treated royalty as a form of tax — was that the MMDR Act occupied the field, leaving states no room to impose additional levies. The 2024 judgment overturned India Cement and established that the central law governs regulation, not taxation. The state’s taxing power is a separate, constitutionally protected domain.

Think of it as a permissions model. For decades, the central government operated on the assumption that its regulatory authority over minerals implicitly included the authority to cap what states could earn from those minerals. The Supreme Court has now clarified that regulation and taxation are separate permission scopes. The centre can regulate how minerals are mined. The states can determine how minerals are taxed. Neither authority subsumes the other.

For Odisha, the question is whether this legal victory will translate into fiscal reality. The state government will need to design and implement a tax framework, navigate industrial pushback (mining companies will lobby against additional levies), and manage the political dynamics of imposing costs on an industry that is also a major employer and contributor to GSDP. The legal permission has been granted. The execution is a different matter.

I believe with roughly 70 percent confidence that Odisha will implement some form of mineral tax within the next five years, but that the effective rate will be modest — perhaps 2-5 percent of mineral value — because the state government will be reluctant to discourage investment in a sector that contributes 7.3 percent of real GSDP and generates 84 percent of non-tax revenue. If this analysis is wrong, it would be because the state’s new BJP government, aligned with the centre, either defers to central preferences on keeping mineral costs low or, conversely, uses the ruling aggressively to fund its welfare commitments.

The District Mineral Foundation: Money Collected, Money Unspent

The 2015 amendment to the MMDR Act created the District Mineral Foundation (DMF) — a mechanism that, on paper, addresses the fundamental injustice of mineral extraction. Mining companies are required to contribute a percentage of their royalty payments to the DMF of the district where mining occurs. The DMF funds are earmarked for the welfare of communities affected by mining — the people who live above the ore, who breathe the dust, who lose their grazing land and water sources to open-cast pits.

In Odisha, the DMF has generated substantial revenue. By the end of October 2024, a total of Rs 34,052 crore had been collected from the state’s 11 mining districts. This is not a trivial sum. It is larger than the annual budget of many Indian states. It represents a direct financial link between the extraction of minerals and the welfare of the communities that bear the extraction’s costs.

And approximately 45-50 percent of it sits unspent.

The numbers tell a story that is by now familiar in Indian governance: the creation of a fund is politically attractive; the effective deployment of that fund requires institutional capacity that often doesn’t exist. As of 2021, Odisha had the highest DMF collection in India at Rs 14,934 crore but had spent only 50 percent. The ratio has not dramatically improved since.

The reasons for the spending gap are structural. DMF funds are managed by district-level trusts whose administrative capacity varies wildly. The funds are earmarked for specific categories — drinking water, health, education, infrastructure, environmental remediation — but the identification, planning, and execution of projects in remote mining districts requires a bureaucratic apparatus that is often understaffed and undertrained. Land acquisition for DMF-funded projects encounters the same difficulties that all government projects face in tribal areas. Monitoring and accountability mechanisms are weak. And the sheer scale of the accumulated fund creates its own inertia — spending Rs 34,000 crore effectively in districts with limited absorption capacity is a genuine administrative challenge, not just a failure of political will.

But there is also a harder truth. The DMF, for all its progressive design, is a downstream correction for an upstream problem. It asks: how do we compensate communities for the damage done by mining? It does not ask: should the communities have a greater say in whether and how mining occurs? It does not challenge the fundamental structure — central control over mineral rights, central determination of royalty rates, central allocation of mining leases — that produces the damage in the first place. The DMF is a bandage designed by the same system that inflicts the wound.

In early 2025, Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi directed departments to submit DMF audit and annual reports, signaling a push for greater transparency and faster utilization. Whether this represents a genuine shift in administrative priority or a standard political gesture toward a politically visible fund remains to be seen.

The Royalty vs. Value Gap: What Actually Leaves the Ground

Step back from the specific legislation and look at the aggregate picture.

Odisha’s mineral production value reached Rs 87,086 crore in FY 2021-22. The state’s mining revenue — royalties, auction premiums, dead rent, and cesses combined — constitutes approximately 84 percent of Odisha’s non-tax revenue. This makes Odisha the most mineral-dependent state in India in terms of revenue composition.

But dependence is not the same as adequate capture. The royalty on iron ore, the state’s most valuable mineral by production, is 15 percent of the sale price. The royalty on coal is 14 percent. The royalty on bauxite is lower. After accounting for all levies — royalty, DMF contribution, auction premium, and various cesses — the total government take from mineral extraction in Odisha has been estimated at roughly 20-30 percent of the gross mineral value, depending on the mineral and the specific lease terms.

Compare this with global benchmarks. In resource-rich nations, the effective government take (combining royalties, taxes, production-sharing, and equity participation) typically ranges from 40 to 70 percent. Norway captures approximately 78 percent of petroleum value. Botswana, often cited as a model of successful resource management, captures over 70 percent of diamond revenue through a combination of royalties, taxes, and its equity stake in Debswana. Even within the Indian context, the post-auction mining leases in Odisha, where premiums sometimes exceed 100 percent of royalty, generate a significantly higher government take than the pre-auction leases — suggesting that the old system was systematically underpricing access to public resources.

The royalty-vs.-value gap is not just a fiscal issue. It is a development issue. Every rupee of mineral value that leaves Odisha without contributing to the state’s revenue is a rupee that cannot fund schools in Keonjhar, hospitals in Koraput, or roads in Sundargarh. The mining districts remain poor not because they lack wealth but because the wealth flows through them rather than to them. The central legislation that determines royalty rates, combined with the corporate structures that determine where value addition occurs, creates a pipeline that carries Odisha’s geological inheritance to balance sheets in Mumbai, Kolkata, and points beyond.

This would be wrong if the mineral-rich districts were, in fact, converging with the rest of India in human development outcomes despite the low fiscal capture rate — if some other mechanism (private investment, corporate social responsibility, central government transfers) were compensating for the royalty gap. The evidence does not support this. Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Angul, and Koraput remain among the worst-performing districts on child malnutrition, educational attainment, and access to healthcare.

The Structural Logic: Why Delhi Controls and Why It Matters

Zoom out further. The central control over mineral resources is not arbitrary. It has a logic, and understanding that logic — even while criticizing its consequences — is important for intellectual honesty.

The constitutional architects placed mineral regulation in the Union List because minerals are geographically concentrated. A handful of states — Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Karnataka — hold the vast majority of India’s mineral wealth. If each state had unconstrained sovereignty over its minerals, the argument goes, a few resource-rich states would become disproportionately wealthy while resource-poor states would have no claim on the nation’s geological inheritance. Central control was intended to prevent the geographic lottery of geology from becoming the permanent basis of fiscal inequality between states.

This argument has merit. It is the same argument that underpins revenue-sharing mechanisms in federations worldwide — the idea that natural resources are, in some sense, national patrimony, and the benefits of their extraction should be shared across the polity.

But the argument fails when the sharing goes only one way. The central government extracts regulatory control and fiscal capacity from mineral-bearing states. What does it give back? The answer, for most of Odisha’s post-independence history, has been: less than it takes.

The Finance Commission transfers that are supposed to equalize fiscal capacity across states have not compensated Odisha for its mineral extraction costs. The special industrial investment that the central government could have directed to mineral-bearing states — building steel plants, aluminium smelters, and downstream processing facilities where the raw materials are — has been inconsistent and often inadequate. The Rourkela Steel Plant was built in the 1950s as a German-assisted Nehruvian showpiece. Since then, the major value-addition investments in India’s steel sector have gone to Jamshedpur (Jharkhand), Bokaro (Jharkhand), Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh), and the private sector plants of the Mittals and Jindals — many of which process Odisha’s iron ore at facilities located outside Odisha.

The structural logic, stripped of its noble language, is this: Delhi takes the regulatory power over Odisha’s minerals because someone has to manage national resources. Delhi sets the royalty rate low because industrial consumers — steel plants, power plants, cement factories — want cheap inputs, and industrial consumers are concentrated in states with more Lok Sabha seats. Delhi’s companies mine Odisha’s coal and sometimes fail to pay even the low royalty rate. And Delhi points to Finance Commission transfers and central scheme allocations as evidence of reciprocity — while the people of Keonjhar and Koraput and Angul measure the gap between what leaves their ground and what arrives in their lives.

What Would Have to Change

The 2024 Supreme Court ruling opens a door. The competitive auction system introduced in 2015 has improved revenue capture from new leases. The DMF, despite its spending problems, channels money toward mining-affected communities. These are real improvements over the pre-2015 system.

But the core architecture remains. The central government still controls royalty rates for coal and major minerals. The frequency of royalty revision remains at the centre’s discretion. Coal India’s subsidiaries still operate as monopoly miners in Odisha with minimal accountability to the state. And the value-addition gap — raw materials leaving the state, finished products being manufactured elsewhere — persists.

A genuine rebalancing would require several things that are politically unlikely in the near term: index-linking of coal royalty rates to eliminate the freeze problem; giving states a formal role in royalty rate-setting rather than being passive recipients of central notifications; requiring that a percentage of mineral value-addition occurs within the state of extraction; and restructuring Coal India’s operations to give host states equity participation or board representation in subsidiary companies.

None of this is on the immediate political horizon. But the 2024 Supreme Court ruling has shifted the terms of the argument. For the first time in decades, the legal framework recognizes that states are not mere recipients of whatever the centre chooses to give them for their minerals. They have an independent constitutional power to tax mineral rights — a power that exists alongside, not subordinate to, the central regulatory framework.

Whether Odisha uses this power effectively, or whether the practical difficulties of implementation and the political pressures of a BJP state government aligned with a BJP centre prevent meaningful change, is the question that will define the next decade of Odisha’s mineral governance.

The money is in the ground. The question, as always, is who keeps it.

Sources

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Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.