News that the government of India has succeeded in having both the governments of Assam and Nagaland on board for resumption of oil exploration and extraction is both good and bad news. According to official reports, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC)Ltd., will be responsible for oil operations along the disputed area belt (DAB). Oil has brought tremendous boon to Assam where several hundreds of highly trained technocrats occupy premier positions in the ONGC including other oil companies in Assam. Any effort to put plans for oil operations back on track should be done in a transparent manner so that people can participate in all-round development. The good news is that the shared revenue will certainly provide a huge bonus for cash-strapped Nagaland which, today is in dire straits financially. It is bad news because it means the controversial and much hyped Nagaland Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulation 2012 enacted by the then NPF government is practically infructuous. The people had been promised the moon through the NPNG 2012 for a huge royalty boon. The NPF-led DAN \u2013II had got into a conflict with the union government while enacting the NPNG 2012 by maintain its constitutional prerogative under Article 371(A). No other state has such an exclusive and constitutional safeguard. Nagaland and Mizoram have similar constitutional safeguards which no other state in the region has. The NPF government justified enactment of NPNG Rules on clause (iv) of Article 371(a) (iv) ownership and transfer of land and resources, shall apply to the State of Nagaland unless the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland by a resolution so decides; the government of India however pointed out that parliament alone has authority to frame laws for oil operations as per the Entry 53 of List -1 of the Seventh Schedule and also the Mines and Minerals (Regulation and Development) Act 1957 which extensively invests mines and minerals as the occupied field of the union of India. Nagaland needs to wake up to the economic realpolitik instead of fuelling dreams and visions, which, like a tide, does not wait for ever. Since 1992, the issue of oil exploration and extraction has been commented on many occasions in this column as well as highlighted as news item. Nagaland has a substantial deposit of crude oil estimated at around 600 million tons besides natural gas. However, the government of Nagaland then under the NNO, did not push for commercial exploitation but only limited extraction on experimental\/trial basis. In 1972 the government of Nagaland permitted Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) Ltd. The ONGC had extracted at least ten times more than the quantity it ought to have done as trial basis which was around 1.5 million metric tonnes. Nagaland was paid Rs.33 crore as royalty in 1993 and by the following year, all operations of ONGC were suspended by the government under pressure mid-way. Since 1994 nothing has been done by successive state governments to address the issue of oil and gas operations. The state government has to decide and not yield to unending consultations with various organisations. Article 371A can only be operationalised if the elected members take responsibility instead of outsourcing decisions to various NGOs and CSOs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
News that the government of India has succeeded in having both the governments of Assam and Nagaland on board for resumption of oil exploration and extraction is both good and bad news. According to official reports, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC)Ltd., will be responsible for oil operations along the disputed area belt (DAB). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}