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The Central Government invoked Section 11C of the MMDR Act, 1957 — the provision empowering it to designate minerals as "critical and strategic" — to add coking coal to Part D of the First Schedule via gazette notification on 29 January 2026. This triggers three automatic statutory consequences:
1. Centralisation of auction authority. Mining block auctions for coking coal are now conducted exclusively by the Central Government. State governments, which previously had jurisdiction over coking coal leases, lose their discretion to grant or auction these blocks independently.
2. EIA public-consultation exemption. Under MoEFCC's 2025-09-08 carve-out (already filed), projects on the critical-mineral list are exempt from the mandatory public-consultation stage in the Environmental Impact Assessment process. Coking coal projects now inherit this exemption, materially shortening the permitting timeline.
3. Compensatory afforestation on degraded land. The notification permits compensatory afforestation for coking coal projects to be carried out on degraded forest land rather than non-forest land, reducing the land-acquisition burden on developers.
The decision was made on recommendations from the High-Level Committee on Implementation of Viksit Bharat Goals (HLC-VB) and NITI Aayog, framing coking coal as an input-security constraint on India's steel sector ambitions (target: 300 MT steel capacity by 2030-31 under the National Steel Policy).
India is the world's second-largest steel producer but imports ~80% of coking coal — the metallurgical-grade hard coal required for blast-furnace steelmaking. Major supply sources are Australia (dominant), USA, Russia, and Canada. The concentration in Australian supply has long been flagged as a strategic vulnerability, crystallised during the 2020-21 China- Australia coal trade disruption that forced Chinese steelmakers to seek alternate suppliers, compressing India's spot-market access.
The critical-mineral designation makes coking coal eligible for:
coking coal assets abroad under its bilateral-offtake framework alongside lithium, cobalt, and REEs
2025-2030) announced in January 2025
Private sector participation is explicitly enabled via competitive auction, marking a shift from the earlier regime where coking coal was de facto within Coal India's captive domain.
for coking coal blocks at Central Government auctions; however, CIL also gains faster exploration clearances on its own coking coal assets (mainly in Jharkhand/Odisha).
operations benefit from faster permitting; import exposure remains until domestic production scales.
cobalt; coking coal eligibility could redirect a tranche of its overseas-acquisition budget.
timelines for new coking coal blocks; practical benefit depends on MoEFCC regional office capacity.
was gazetted? PIB PRID=2219947 confirms the notification; the eGazette S.O. number would allow precise legal citation.
Mines has not published a block list as of filing date.
(Moatize basin) are natural candidates given existing India-Australia CECA coking coal provisions.