the goan I network
PANAJI
In a development that could send ripples in Goa’s beleaguered iron ore mining industry, Vedanta, a major player in the sector has resorted to laying off hundreds of its employees across its workforce hierarchy, industry sources have confirmed.
The only listed company in Goa’s mining sector, Vedanta was said to be toying the idea of resorting to mass lay-offs for some time.
Before mining and exports came to a halt in March last year after the Supreme Court cancelled all the mining leases operative then, Vedanta accounted for over 50 per-cent of total iron ore exports from Goa.
Top executives of the iron ore division of Vedanta did not respond to calls for comments on the issue, but a top industry source confirmed that the company had been contemplating the move to lay off its employees, including middle and top-level executives, for some time now.
A major economic activity said to be contributing up to 40 per-cent to Goa’s gross domestic product before it came to a grinding halt last March, iron ore mining suffered successive setbacks in the six years between 2012 and 2018 with the Supreme Court stepping in to ban the activity twice.
First, the apex court in 2012 halted all mining and exports after a judicial commission unearthed irregularities and concluded that an astronomical loss was caused to the exchequer.
Later, when the State renewed some 88 mining leases in 2014 and allowed the industry to restart operations, the Supreme Court stepped in to declare the State’s act of renewing all the 88 leases illegal in February of 2018.
The Apex court however allowed the industry to continue operations to wind up and halt all activity by March 15, 2018. Since then, the industry and a section of the population dependent on it have been agitating for early
resumption.
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, meanwhile, has been promising to take the necessary steps to restart mining in Goa. He has promised to come up with a “mining dump policy” by which rights to extract ore from mounds of decades old rejects will be leased by the government.
The Sawant-led government is also negotiating with the Centre a legal solution to the tangle and is said to be banking on the outcome of a pending appeal in the Supreme Court which challenges the law on abolition of Portugese-era mining concessions and their conversion into mining leases under the Indian law with a truncated 20-year tenure instead of a 50-year term.
