Major merchant miners in Odisha reported to have agreed to take part in proposed E-auction by the state government according to sources closed to the matter said.
The Odisha government has reportedly cleared a major huddle in the way of rolling out electronic auction of minerals after it successfully convinced the private miners for the new auction system.
“Almost all the leading private miners have finally agreed to take part in the upcoming e-auction in the high level meeting held on the last week of October. After the agreement of the private miners a major huddle has been cleared before the e-auction and we are hopeful that e-auction will be rolled out within few months” a senior official in the directorate of mines said.
“However, the final decision on the timing of e-auction would be taken by the government” he added.
In the previous meeting held on 8th of October private miners have expressed their displeasure over the poor infrastructure at the mining circles for e-auction.
Meanwhile, during this meeting (8th October) the government had successful in finalizing the modalities of the proposed e-auction. As per the decisions, miners will have to inform to MSTC (Metal Scrap Trade Corporation) about the grade of the mineral they wish to sale and the base price in every 15 days. After collecting the data from the miners, MSTC would show the data like name of the miner/company, amount and grade of the mineral, base price etc in the website.
Subsequently, auction would be held and the mineral would be sold to the highest bidder. Both iron ore lumps and fines would be sold through this method. It has been decided that MSTC will charge 0.2 percent of the sale price of the mineral as commission.
OMC (Odisha Mining Corporation) had already introduced two separate e-auctions for sale of Chrome ore, in which 70% is reserved for state based industries and rest 30% for industries located outside Odisha.
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