KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) - Even as India awaits the verdict on its national elections on Friday, government officials have proposed a merger of the Steel and Mines Ministries.

Top officials in the outgoing Ministries have introduced the concept of an omnibus Ministry for these two sectors as part of an unofficial agenda to be placed before the next government, which would take charge once the elections results were announced.

Most senior bureaucrats heading various Ministries had, in fact, been working for the last two months on a draft action plan involving their respective Ministries, which would be placed before the new government as an immediate roadmap and policy guideline for the new Prime Minister.

The merger of the Mines and Steel Ministries was suggested to ensure greater synergies between the two linked sectors and it was suggested that a single Minister in charge of the two departments would eliminate delays and red tape in allocations, clearances and approvals an official involved in the exercise said.

A combined Mines and Steel Ministry might find favour since exit polls indicated that the next government would be biased towards 'big and efficient', he added.

All three exit polls conducted by leading media groups have forecast a victory for the rightist Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party with the current chief Minister of the western Indian province of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, as its Prime Ministerial candidate.

However, the call to combine the Mines and Steel Ministries was not new. In 2009, the then Steel Minister Virbhadra Singh urged the government to undertake such a merger to achieve faster growth of the steel sector through common linkages with the raw material requirement for steel production.

He said at the time that even if political rationale ruled out a complete merger, the Steel Ministry should at least be vested with the power to grant mining leases for specific minerals needed in steel production.

Several decades ago steel and mines were under the same Ministry but the two were separated following a coalition of various political parties, which formed the federal government, offering the opportunity to appoint two Cabinet Ministers to the posts to placate various demands.

However, officials were not able to clarify how the merger of the two Ministries would eliminate delays in the granting of mining leases at the level of the provincial governments.

According to the Mines Ministry, there were about 63 395 mining leases pending with various provincial governments.

Of the total pending applications, 42 861 were pending mining leases, 19 891 were for prospecting licences and 643 for reconnaissance permits.

As per current practice, while mining leases were granted by the provincial government, that government had to seek concurrence of the federal government prior to issue of such a licence.