Patnaik tells Odisha BJP MPs the mining law will cost the state Rs 12,000 crore a year

Naveen Patnaik told every BJP Lok Sabha member from Odisha on Saturday that the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2026, will take more than Rs 12,000 crore a year out of the state. He called 13 August, the day the Lok Sabha passed the Bill, a black day for Odisha. He said the House spent less than ten minutes on it.

The letter is a direct ask. Patnaik, who leads the Opposition in the Odisha Assembly and the Biju Janata Dal, wants those MPs to demand a reversal of the clauses that, in his reading, remove the state's power to tax mineral rights and mineral-bearing land. He wrote that history will judge them by whether they stood for Odisha, not by the party whip.

The Act received presidential assent on 18 August and came into force on 23 August. Section 9D says no state tax, cess or levy on mineral rights or mineral-bearing land shall be imposed except under conditions set by the Centre. States also cannot recover pending cesses, and amounts already paid will not be refunded to companies. The Union says the change creates a uniform mining regime and is meant to attract private capital into critical minerals.

What Odisha stands to lose

Odisha accounts for about 44 percent of India's mineral wealth by the figure Patnaik used in the letter. Iron ore, bauxite, chromite and coal from the state feed steel plants, aluminium smelters and power stations across the country. For decades the state collected a mix of royalty, cess and other charges on that extraction. Those receipts sit inside the state budget that pays for roads, schools and the handling of displacement around mines.

Patnaik's annual loss estimate of more than Rs 12,000 crore is a political number. The state government has not published a matching official score. The larger legal point is clearer. After the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling that states could tax mineral rights, Parliament has now written a bar into the parent mining statute. Mineral-rich Opposition states read that bar as a federal raid. Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren had already written to President Droupadi Murmu before assent, asking her to weigh the same federal question.

Patnaik first asked Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi to call a special Assembly session when the Bill was moving through Parliament. Majhi, a BJP chief minister, did not convene one. Saturday's letter skips the state Cabinet and goes to the MPs who voted in Delhi. Several of them represent mining districts. The political cost of ignoring the letter is local. The political cost of breaking with the Union is party discipline.

The clause that changes the map

The amendment also expands the Union's reach from the regulation of mines to mineral-bearing land itself. Umesh Jena, a former Additional Director of Mines in Odisha, has described that change as a shift in the object of control. If the Centre can set the terms on the land as well as on the pit, a state that hosts the pit keeps the dust, the displaced villages and the contaminated streams, and loses the instrument it used to price the resource.

Companies wanted certainty after years of litigation over state cesses. The Act gives them that certainty by closing the state channel. Whether it raises investment in critical minerals is a future test. Whether it shrinks Odisha's mineral revenue is a near-term budget question. Patnaik's letter puts that question on the desks of BJP MPs from the state and leaves the next move with them.

The MPs can ignore it. They can ask the Centre for a compensation formula. They can join the court challenge that Opposition-ruled mineral states have already flagged. None of those options changes the text that is now in force. From 23 August, a state that wants to levy a mineral tax needs New Delhi's conditions first.