Shibu Soren’s fight against internal imperialism continues. Decades after the JMM patriarch voiced it in Parliament, his son Hemant Soren is fighting the same battle. This time over the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026.
The grievance has not changed in seventy years: Jharkhand’s minerals benefit everyone except Jharkhand. Only the instrument used to enforce that outcome has.
A Bill Dressed as Reform
Parliament passed the MMDR Amendment Bill this month. Its core change is Section 9D, which bars states from imposing any new tax, cess or levy on mineral rights or mineral-bearing land without conditions set by the Centre.
It also brings mineral-bearing land itself under Union regulation for the first time, not just mining operations. Any state levy not yet collected is voided outright. Money already collected, however, stays with the states.
The government’s PIB backgrounder frames all this as “certainty and uniformity in mineral taxation,” meant to give “impetus to national economic growth.” What it does not mention, anywhere, is the Supreme Court judgment that made this Bill necessary in the first place.
In July 2024, a nine-judge bench ruled 8:1 that royalty is not a tax, and that states, not Parliament, hold the constitutional power to tax mineral rights. States could recover dues retrospectively from 2005, staggered over twelve years starting this April. The 2026 Bill claws much of that back, just as the money had begun flowing in.
The 1952 Playbook, Rerun
This is not the first time Delhi has invoked national uniformity to override a mineral state’s advantage. The Freight Equalisation Policy did exactly this from 1952 to 1993.
Under it, the Centre subsidised rail freight on coal, iron ore, steel and cement so factories anywhere in India could buy raw material at the same price, regardless of distance from the mine. The 1956 Five Year Plan called this “balanced and coordinated development,” so “the entire country attain higher standards of living.”
The result: industry set up in Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Bengaluru instead of near the mines. Bihar (undivided), West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh lost their locational edge. Industrial states gained it, at the mineral belt’s expense.
The parallel with 2026 is almost exact in structure. Freight equalisation neutralised geography. Section 9D neutralises fiscal autonomy. Both ask mineral states to absorb the cost of uniformity, while framing that cost as service to the nation.
There is one difference worth noting: in 1952, states had no royalty architecture to lose. In 2026, Jharkhand had just won one back from the Supreme Court, only to see it taken away again within two years.
What Jharkhand Says It Stands to Lose
The numbers explain why Jharkhand is fighting this hard. Mining-linked revenue made up close to 85 percent of the state’s own non-tax revenue in 2024-25, an extraordinary dependence by any state’s standard.
Its Mineral Bearing Land Cess, introduced in 2024, collected ₹1,379 crore that year. Projections put it at ₹7,488 crore in 2025-26, and ₹13,215 crore in 2026-27, nearly a tenfold jump in two years. The state separately cites an annual potential closer to ₹11,000 crore.
Hemant Soren has tied this revenue directly to welfare delivery, including the Mukhyamantri Maiya Samman Yojana, which benefits more than 50 lakh women. Healthcare, education, drinking water and rural infrastructure spending are also funded through the cess.
Jharkhand’s argument goes beyond money lost. It rests on a constitutional claim: that Section 9D makes a state’s taxing power conditional on Delhi’s approval, undermining what the 2024 verdict had settled. Odisha and Karnataka, it says, face the same exposure.
Certainty For Miners, Uncertainty For States
The Centre has a legitimate argument, and it should not be dismissed. State-level mineral taxation can create a patchwork of levies, increase costs for steel, cement and power producers, encourage tax competition and make investment decisions more uncertain.
That is a genuine national economic concern. India cannot have a completely fragmented mineral-tax regime if it wants globally competitive steel, power, cement and manufacturing industries.
The government’s case also rests on protecting smaller and medium-sized miners from excessive tax burdens, avoiding cascading costs, discouraging imports and creating greater predictability for investment.
But there is another side to the equation. The beneficiaries of eliminating retrospective and future tax uncertainty are not merely small miners. Large public-sector and private mining companies, including Coal India, its subsidiaries and SAIL, stand to gain from reduced contingent liabilities.
The Centre had previously cited an enormous retrospective exposure, with media reports putting the potential burden at around ₹1.5 lakh crore. For companies facing such liabilities, certainty is undeniably valuable.
The Case Nobody Makes
Here the argument sharpens into something closer to indictment than analysis. If uniformity in the “national interest” justifies stripping Jharkhand of its mineral-tax advantage, the same logic should apply elsewhere.
Coastal states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka hold a locational advantage of their own: ports cheaper trade logistics, easier FDI access. No one has proposed a Coast Equalisation Policy to neutralise it. No one will.
Nor has anyone proposed converting Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Kolkata or Ahmedabad into Union Territories, even though the same “raw input feeds the whole nation” logic used to justify Union control over mineral land applies just as easily to corporate headquarters whose economic footprint sits elsewhere entirely — Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Adani, Coal India among them.
The reason is not principle. It is political weight. The Centre invokes uniform national-interest logic only where the targeted states lack the power to resist it.
Whether Section 9D survives the legal challenges Kerala has already threatened remains to be seen. What is harder to dispute is the pattern underneath it: every time this coordination problem has been “solved” nationally, the solution has landed on the same handful of states — first through freight subsidy, now through fiscal pre-emption.
Some in the south and west continue to call eastern India a drag on the national economy, forgetting it was asked to carry that burden in 1952 too, in the name of nation-building. The name has changed. The ledger has not.
