Home ›› 30 Nov 2022 ›› Front
Bangladesh Oil, Gas and Mineral Corporation, also known as Petrobangla, has found a 1.39 billion tonne hard rock reserve near Maddhapara Granite Mining Company Limited (MGMCL) in Parbatipur, Dinajpur.
With extraction from a mine there underway, the government is now planning to open a second mine under MGMCL, which is one of the 13 companies that operate under Petrobangla.
However, the state-run corporation is considering giving the project to a contractor from the private sector as it would take around Tk 3,000 crore for the new mine’s development and Petrobangla does not have the fund. The technical inefficiency of Petrobangla officers is also a major reason.
The idea has drawn strong opposition from experts, who say people of the country will be deprived of the benefits of state resources if the project goes to the private sector.
The Barapukuria Coal Mining Company Limited and MGMCL are big examples of that and failure as well, they said.
Both mines fully operate through foreign contractors and a large portion of the profits go into their pockets. Experts have urged Petrobangla to develop the new mines on their own.
Talking to The Business Post, former Petrobangla chairman Mosharraf Hossain said 95 per cent of the total domestic demand for hard rock is imported. “Petrobangla and MGMCL have not shown efficiency in managing the Maddhapara mine so far. “The government should ensure maximum benefit after extracting such domestic resources with its management, considering the fact that the new mine can be profitable.”
The Maddhapara conundrum
The country’s only granite mine at Maddhapara was discovered in 1974 at a depth of 128-136 metres underground. Petrobangla data shows that the total hard rock reserves at this mine in around 1.2 square kilometre area are 21.6 million tonnes and of that, 10.13 million tonnes are recoverable.
In 1994, Petrobangla signed an agreement for four years with North Korea’s Korea South-South Cooperation Corporation, also known as NAM-NAM, for the mine’s development and stone extraction. It was supposed to develop the mine and transfer it to Petrobangla.
But as Petrobangla officials were not ready, NAM-NAM worked on mine development till 2007 through two more supplementary contracts.
MGMCL took over after NAM-NAM left in 2007. At that time, 60 NAM-NAM officials were working as experts for MGMCL. Until the end of 2012, MGMCL operated the mine on its own but faced heavy losses and corruption allegations on top of inefficiency.
An MGMCL official, who is currently on secondment to another Petrobangla company, told The Business Post that most of the MGMCL officials never wanted to become self-reliant in acquiring mine development management skills.
“There are geologists and mining officers who never made any effort to become skilled. Moreover, the corrupt officials removed the good ones from MGMCL,” the official alleged.
Mining expert and geologist Professor Badrul Imam said, “It is sad and unfortunate that the country’s two mines are being operated by contractors because Petrobangla officials have failed to acquire the necessary mine management skills even after such a long time.”
Several Petrobangla officials also confirmed that most of the government officers working at MGMCL are inefficient and do not have enough knowledge about the mine and its management, leading to losses.
Enter GTC
To overcome the deadlock, the government entrusted the Maddhapara mine with a private company named Germania Trest Consortium (GTC) in 2013. It was appointed to extract 9.2 million tonnes of stone in six years under a Tk 1,400 crore project.
However, the company was able to extract only 3.75 million tonnes before the contract expired in 2019. Despite that shortcoming, MGMCL signed another contract with GTC in 2021 for six more years.
According to MGMCL, the Geological Survey of Bangladesh conducted a survey in 2019 that showed that there is a reserve of 1.39 billion tonnes over 2.25 kilometres of area and 1.13 billion tonnes of that are recoverable.
MGMCL currently produces 5,000 tonnes of stone every day but 11,000 tonnes will be extracted from the new mine per day and the yearly production would be 3.3 million tonnes.
The new mine
Sources at Petrobangla said that at a recent meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, the Energy and Mineral Resources Division presented a report on the reserves and potentiality of new mines at Maddhapara. The committee then gave preliminary approval for the new mine.
Talking to The Business Post, a general manager of MGMCL, seeking anonymity, said, “Funding is the major problem. Around Tk 3,000 crore will be needed to build the new mine at Maddhapara.
“We have plans to outsource the work to foreign contractors. But everything depends on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina since she will give the final green light. We’ll make a presentation before her very soon.”
On this issue, Petrobangla Director (Operation and Mines) Md Kamruzzaman Khan told this correspondent recently that a discussion is going on about whether the new mine can be developed under a production-sharing contract based on the principle of profit sharing.
“At the moment, Petrobangla or MGMCL do not have the money required to develop this new mine. Also, our technical skills are not advanced. Because of these reasons, contractors must be hired,” he said.
According to Petrobangla, the country’s annual demand for stone is 10.5 million tonnes and MGMCL supplies only 1 million tonnes. Due to this, the government and private companies meet the demand for this essential construction material by importing it.
MGMCL officials claim that the stone from the Maddhapara mine is of international quality and they have been used to build the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant and Padma Bridge.
Since the number of development projects has increased in recent years, the government now plans to develop the new mine at Maddhapara as it wants to cut import dependency and meet the domestic stone demand from the local mines.
