Asia-Pacific Partnership Workshop on Mining in Kolkata, India

The Coal Mining Taskforce of Asia-Pacific Partnership on clean development and climate organised a Sustainable Development Workshop in Kolkata (this is the new spelling of Calcutta), India, from 17-20 April, 2008, on Mine Rehabilitation, Closure and Completion. It was a high-level meeting attended by senior mine managers and policy-makers of India, besides foreign delegates.

Amongst the speakers were the Chairman of Coal India Limited (a state-owned company that control almost all coal production of India), representatives from ICMM and Rio Tinto Coal Australia, URS, CMPDI officers, consultants from Advent Asia Pacific and Australian Tailings and Japan Coal Energy Centre, and academics from University of New South Wales, University of Queensland (Sustainable Minerals Institute) and University of Western Australia. Prof David Laurence of the Department of mining Engineering, University of New South wales, was one of the key speakers and facilitator at the Workshop.

From RMAP I represented the Australian National University, and spoke on community engagement in mining, focusing on how the lessons learnt globally can be implemented to the Indian context. Click kolkata-photos.pdf for some photos of the Workshop. For a copy of my paper, click community-engagement-in-mining.pdf.

Amongst the results of this Workshop is the immediate invitation that I have received to address an Illegal Coal Mining Task Force of Coal India Limited to share my research on illegal coal mining in India. This is because the question of illegal mining came up repeatedly in the symposium - communities digging up not only old and abandoned collieries, but also co-existing with ongoing operations. Further changes in policy might be on the anvil - the introduction of fully-fledged Social Impact Assessments of mine projects being one of them.

Following this Workshop, on 21^st April, I presented in another Symposium on ‘Mining and Community Livelihoods in Bangladesh’ organised by the Bangladesh Government and Petrobangla, the key player in mineral resources of the country. Bangladesh has been looking at developing large open cut coal mines in one of its northern districts as it is peaking in gas in 2011, but public pressure resulted in a shelving last year of the Phulbari open-cut project owned by Asia Energy. Largely a donor-driven country, community issues in Bangladesh are extremely complex; reportedly, 40,000 people were going to be affected by this project. Consequently, the Symposium received a great attention in local media in Dhaka. Here is one of the reports from bangladesh-independent-newspaper-22-april-08.pdf.