A High Court has set aside a state government's rejection of a prospecting licence application filed under the Mineral Concession Rules, 2016, holding that the state could not rely on the application's age and the passage of time as a ground for rejection where the delay in processing was attributable to the department's own internal referral process, not to any default by the applicant.
The applicant, referred to here as Trishakti Mining Exploration Pvt. Ltd., had filed its prospecting licence application well within the prescribed period after the area was notified for grant, but the application remained pending for several years while it moved between departmental committees for technical clearance, before ultimately being rejected on the ground that "intervening developments", including competing applications for the same area filed after the applicant's own. Made the grant inexpedient.
The Court held that an applicant who has done everything the Mineral Concession Rules require of it at the application stage acquires a legitimate expectation that its application will be processed and decided on its merits within a reasonable time, and that allowing a state to reject a timely, complete application on account of its own processing delay, particularly where that delay allowed competing later applications to be filed and considered. Would undermine the "first-in-time" priority the Rules are designed to protect.
The Court directed the state to reconsider the application on its original merits and priority, treating it as though it had been decided within a reasonable time of filing, and cautioned that the ruling should not be read as preventing genuine, merits-based rejection on legitimate technical or environmental grounds.