Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The Monsoon Session ends today, and the Rajya Sabha spent its last morning on a Bill to amend a law from 1957. Most of the coverage will be about critical minerals. The provision that will still matter in ten years is about land.
When the House met at 11 AM, the Union Minister for Coal and Mines, G. Kishan Reddy, moved the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026 for consideration and passage. The Government’s stated purpose is to make the mining sector more efficient and investment-friendly, and to equip it for a demand curve in critical minerals that did not exist when the parent Act was written. Alongside that, and drawing less comment, the Bill seeks to bring under the Centre’s regulation what it describes as mineral-bearing lands — land whose mineral content meets parameters prescribed under the Act.
A sixty-nine-year-old statute, amended again: the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act of 1957 is the law through which Parliament regulates mineral development. The 2026 amendment was moved in the Rajya Sabha on 13 August.
Minerals sit under land, and land is a State subject. Every mining reform in India is really a conversation about that sentence.
At a Glance
• Bill: Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026
• Moved by: Union Coal and Mines Minister G. Kishan Reddy
• House: Rajya Sabha, 13 August 2026, from 11 AM
• Parent Act: MMDR Act, 1957 — 69 years old
• Stated aims: efficiency, investment-friendliness, critical-mineral supply
• Key provision: Central regulation of mineral-bearing lands meeting prescribed parameters
• Session: Monsoon Session, 20 July to 13 August 2026
The reason that provision carries weight is constitutional rather than commercial. Land is a State subject. Mines and mineral development sit in the Union List only to the extent that Parliament has declared, by law, that Union regulation is expedient in the public interest — and the MMDR Act of 1957 is that declaration. Everything the Centre does in mining flows from it. Extending the declaration from the mineral to the land that bears the mineral is therefore a real shift in where a decision gets taken, and it is the sort of shift that is easy to legislate and hard to unwind. For a critical-minerals programme it is also defensible: lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare-earth deposits do not respect district boundaries, exploration is expensive, and a single regulatory window is what an exploration company actually needs before it will spend on a licence area.
The constructive work now lies in the rules rather than the statute. Three things would settle most of the questions the Bill raises. Publish the parameters early — the mineral-content thresholds that will decide whether a given parcel is mineral-bearing land or ordinary land should be in the public domain before the first notification, not after. Second, keep the State revenue share visible: mining royalties and the District Mineral Foundation are how a mining district sees any benefit from what is dug out of it, and a change in who regulates should not be allowed to blur who is paid. Third, publish an exploration calendar. India’s binding constraint in critical minerals is not the law and not the capital; it is that too little of the country has been surveyed at the resolution an investor needs. A statute passed in August is worth exactly as much as the survey data released after it.
