Web interface for government, mine owners within month

An online platform to facilitate interaction between mine owners and the central and state governments to ensure timebound response to various queries will be set up within a month, Union Minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday.

"I have instructed my officials to put up within 30 days an online interface between mine owners, the Centre and the states, so that every query is available on the website, including timelines for response to those queries," the new Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines told reporters here.

"This one-month period is for creating the entire infrastructure for the interface, software etc.," he said.

"This is in the interest of transparency, so that nobody can delay approvals for extraneaous reasons," Goyal, who is credited for the earlier successful auction of coal mines, added.

The minister praised his predecessor Narendra Singh Tomar for a "painstaking analysis" of the ills plaaguing the mines sector for the last seven years and said he will make efforts to speed up implementation under a framework already prepared by Tomar.

Goyal said the District Mineral Foundations envisaged under the new policy, which will raise funds from mining and utilise it for local development, will create a corpus of Rs 6,000 crore (around $1 billion) every year.

--IANS

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