Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minerals Development Department being the custodian of mineral resources of the province took it upon itself to introduce newer technologies to administer the non-renewable precious resources in the best manner. Under the umbrella of the Minerals Development Department, there are three attached formations i.e., Directorate General Mines & Minerals, Inspectorate of Mines, and Commissionerate of Mines & Labour Welfare. The exploration promotion and licensing of mining rights come under the purview of the Directorate General Mines & Minerals. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s mineral resource potential has a wide range that comprises metallic minerals, industrial minerals, precious stones and metals, coal, construction minerals, and dimensions stones. Due to the geo-tectonic setup of the province, extreme tectonism has resulted in the evolution of mineral resources that are more preferably to be exploited in the small-scale operational category. This has caused the management of exploration and mining concession a challenge for the department, as investors desire to award small-scale category mineral titles, ensuing in the high number of granted mineral title rights in the category of small-scale mining.
In the past, for Licensing Authority to grant mineral title rights, the most important criterion was the availability of a free area. The availability of free area used to be scrutinized by departmental survey & drawing section using in-house manually maintained Toposheets. As the process was de-centralized and the lack of technical staff, instigated all sorts of untoward scenarios that led to litigations and a bad reputation for the department.
To shoulder in, the exploration promotion division of Directorate General Mines & Minerals in 2009 came forth with a project to introduce GIS technology to the department with a focus on adopting the technology. Much work was done in the next couple of years that included the acquisition of digitization resources, hiring technical human resources, and capacity building of the staff that led to the creation and digitization of mining concession spatial records and compilation of mineral maps. Department took time with the 1st phase, made itself equipped and ready with the help of technical team experts in GIS, developed an offline centralized geodatabase. At par with the development of geo-database, the department was also engaged in developing an MIS system for mining concession management.
Because of these two projects, the department collected mineral title applications via an online application MIS when the ban on mineral title applications was lifted in 2016. The GIS section was fully integrated into the mining concession grant process and the centralized geo-database made the Licensing Authority confident enough to identify the priority of rights and availability of free areas for the grants. The centralized geo-database has made it possible to authenticate the survey and drawing reporting related to the overlapping of mineral title applications with one another and with other granted or restricted areas.
The introduction of an online application system and GIS database was such a hit that the investor’s uncertainty about the priority contest and availability of free area was eliminated in a methodological way. The investors got more confidence in the process and the department received a record number of applications in 2016-17. With the new solution in place, there were new problems that the department was facing which was overlapping mineral title applications, as may be observed in the figure. The application overlapping map was first drafted in Auto Cad and later in ArcMap but in both cases, it was a nightmare for both Survey & Drawing Section and GIS Section to work out the data, and has started taking too much time to process. But as said by Norman Vincent Peale “Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution”.
Minerals Development Department took another leap of faith and approved a project to develop a solution that enables the administrator to showcase the mining concession spatial data on a public online Map Portal and improve the online application with integration of web-GIS features and fee payment gateways. The aim was to provide an online platform for the mineral department to present Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mineral Data, simplification of procedures, ensure transparency, easy regulation of mining concession, and collection of tax, royalties, and excise duties. Secondly, it was intended that investors would be given access to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mineral Data, provided with an interactive online application feature and mineral title management option and on-spot reconciliation of their receipts. The project was made in motion in 2019 by the Minerals Development Department of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in collaboration with the Department of Sustainable Advanced Geomechanical Engineering (SAGE) Military College of Engineering (NUST) and Trimble to configure and deploy a state-of-the-art Mining Cadastre System for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. After much deliberation with the developers, a much-needed and flexible Mining Cadastre System was configured as per existing KP Minerals legislation that was launched in 2021 that is currently operational.