KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) - The local government of the  east Indian province of Odisha has firmed up plans for a joint venture (JV) with the country’s largest iron-ore miner NMDC Limited to explore resources in the region.

Orissa Mineral Corporation (OMC), the provincial government’s mineral exploration and production arm, would represent the local government in the JV with NMDC, for which an initial investment of $481-million had been lined up.

Talks completed between OMC and NMDC covered an in-principle agreement on floating the JV and a targeted production level of 10-million tonnes a year of iron-ore and manganese from resources across the eastern Indian coastal province had been set.

For NMDC, the tie-up with OMC followed close on the heels of it firming up a strategic plan last month to ramp up iron-ore production to 60-million tonnes a year by 2019 and 100-million tonnes a year by 2025, up from the current levels of around 32-million tonnes a year.

Towards this end, the iron-ore miner received approvals from the Indian government to explore across the country in collaboration with Geological Survey of India (GSI), a company official said.

For NMDC to achieve its targeted production, marking its maiden presence in mineral-rich Odisha was crucial considering that the miner’s current operations were confined to the central province of Chhattisgarh and Karnataka in southern India, the official said.

Odisha accounts for 34% of the country’s total 28.42-billion tonnes of iron-ore resources according to data from the Indian Bureau of Mines. The province also has the largest share of manganese resources at 190-million tonnes, or 44%, of the total 430-million tonnes available in the country.

In a related development, NMDC announced that it would be opening two new iron-ore mines next year, one at Bailadila, in Chhattisgarh, where the miner already has its operations and the second in the Bellary-Hospet region, in Karnataka.