The One Section That Undoes What a Nine-Judge Bench Settled in 2024

Section 9D Is a Legislative Answer to a Judgment the Centre Didn't Like Entry 50 of the State List gives state legislatures the power to tax mineral rights - but only "subject to any limitations imposed by Parliament by law relating to mineral development." That qualifying clause is doing all the work in this dispute and it is worth being precise about what it does and doesn't mean. In July 2024, a nine-judge Constitution Bench in Mineral Area Development Authority v. Steel Authority of India ruled 8:1 that royalty is not a tax, affirming states' plenary power to tax mineral rights under Entry 50 and even permitting retrospective recovery of dues going back to 2005. That judgment read Entry 50's opening clause - the grant of power - as the operative part. The MMDR Amendment Act, 2026, is Parliament using the qualifying clause instead: Section 9D now explicitly restricts states from imposing any tax, cess or levy on mineral rights or mineral-bearing lands except under conditions the Centre prescribes.

Two Readings of the Same Sentence This is not a

case where Parliament has ignored a Supreme Court ruling - Entry 50 genuinely does subordinate the states' taxing power to Parliament's limitations and the Court's 2024 judgment never disputed that Parliament retained this authority.

What the amendment does is exercise a power the Constitution always gave Parliament, in direct response to a ruling that had, for two years, left that power dormant. Patnaik's framing - "in a single legislative stroke, the control over our own minerals... was taken away from us"

• treats the 2024 judgment as having settled the question permanently. Constitutionally, it never could have; Entry 50's own text always kept Parliament's override available.

Why This Case Is Being Watched Beyond Odisha

The real stakes are not simply Odisha's claimed ₹12,000 crore annual loss, real as that figure is for a state with 44% of India's mineral wealth. The stakes are procedural and precedential: Section 9D converts a state fiscal power that the Court had just affirmed as plenary into one that is conditional on Central permission and it does so through an amendment passed with what Patnaik describes as under ten minutes of Lok Sabha debate.

If that pattern - using a limitations clause already embedded in a State List entry to legislatively neutralise an inconvenient judicial ruling - succeeds without serious legislative or judicial pushback, it offers the Centre a template applicable wherever a State List entry carries a similar "subject to Parliament" qualifier.

That is a considerably bigger question than mineral royalties and it's why mineral-rich states beyond Odisha - Jharkhand among them - are watching this fight as closely as Bhubaneswar is.