INDIAN METALS FERRO ALLOYS LIMITED FERRO ALLOYS CORPORATION LIMITED ORISSA INDUSTRIES LIMITED Vs. UNION OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE Judgment of the court was delivered by

(2.) ALL these matters are in the nature of offshoots of a basic con- troversy raised in W.P. No. 14116 of 1984 which was "disposed of" by the orders of this court dated 30/04/1987 and 6/10/1987. The parties are now seeking certain clarifications and directions in relation to the orders passed by this court in the above writ petition. There have been several subsequent developments having an impact on the issue originally brought to this court in the Writ Petition (W.P.) and, at present, the matter has become very complicated and involves the interests of a large number of parties. To give a cogent narration of the necessary facts, it is best to start with an enumeration of the various parties with whom we are concerned in the matters which are being disposed of by this judgment.

(3.) AS already mentioned, this court 'disposed' of W.P. No. 14116 of 1984 by its order of 30/04/1987. We shall have to consider this and several other orders passed by this court in the course of the hearing more closely but a brief reference may be made here to the resultant effect thereof. When this court found that there were a large number of applications for MLs over varying extents of land in the areas in question, this court decided that the respective merits of the applications could not be gone into by this court but that they should be considered by a responsible officer of the C.G. Accordingly, by the orders above referred to, this court referred the entire controversy to the secretary to the government of India in the Ministry of Mines (Shri B.K. Rao, "Rao", for short) for a detailed consideration of the claims of the various parties. When the matter went to Rao, OMC and IDCOL also put forward claims that the public sector units in the State of Orissa were entitled to the grant of mining rights in the State to the exclusion of all private parties inasmuch as there was a reservation in their favour by an appropriate notification issued by the State government. The other parties objected to the intervention of the OMC and IDCOL at, what they alleged was, a belated stage of the proceedings. However, on applications made by OMC and IDCOL, this court directed that the claims of these two public sector undertakings would also be examined by Rao. Eventually Rao, after considering the claims of all parties, reduced his conclusions in the form of a report dated 1/02/1988. In his report, Rao accepted the claim of reservation made on behalf of the OMC and the IDCOL. Nevertheless it appears that, bearing in mind certain interim orders passed by this court in the various applications made to it during the pendency of the writ petitions, Rao came to the 98 conclusion that only three of the parties other than the two public sector undertakings should be granted leases to the extent mentioned by him. Broadly speaking, Rao accepted partially the claims of IMFA, FACOR and Aikath. He rejected the claims made by GRIND and OCL. He accepted the claim of the public sector undertakings but he recom- mended for them leases in respect of only the balance of the lands left, after fulfilling the claims of the others which he had accepted.