Mining the Mitigation Hierarchy: Biodiversity Management Across the Mine Life-Cycle at Vedanta Limited

India's mining sector is the country's single largest corporate driver of forest and habitat loss, yet systematic evidence on how mining firms manage biodiversity obligations across the full mine life-cycle remains almost entirely absent from the Indian business-strategy literature. Regulatory frameworks are multi-layered spanning across Environment (Protection) Act 1986, Forest (Conservation) Act 1980, Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, the Biological Diversity Act 2002, and SEBI's Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR). But the combined effectiveness at producing ecological outcomes remains empirically unexamined. This paper addresses that gap through a focused secondary-data case study of Vedanta Limited, one of India's largest diversified metals and mining conglomerates, whose operations in Odisha (Lanjigarh bauxite-aluminium), Rajasthan (Zawar zinc-lead mines), and Goa (iron ore) are in ecologically sensitive geographies and have been subject to some of the most publicly contested biodiversity clearance proceedings.

The research question addresses - How does Vedanta Limited manage biodiversity obligations across the mine life-cycle from environmental clearance and active operations through progressive rehabilitation and mine closure and does its publicly disclosed biodiversity strategy align with the mitigation hierarchy? The hierarchy rests on a logic of sequential prioritisation: avoidance is ecologically preferable to offsetting, and biodiversity losses from the latter are rarely equivalent to those from the former (Bull et al., 2013; Maron et al., 2016).

The paper applies institutional theory specifically the compliance-decoupling proposition and the mitigation hierarchy framework to analyse whether Vedanta's disclosed biodiversity commitments represent genuine strategic integration or symbolic conformity with regulatory expectations. The decoupling prediction is tested against life-cycle stages. The natural resource-based view provides a counterpoint predicting that firms operating in ecologically sensitive, community-governed geographies face continuous rather than episodic accountability, making full decoupling strategically untenable.

The paper uses exclusively publicly available secondary data as Vedanta's BRSR filings; Environmental Impact Assessment reports and Forest Clearance orders; Indian Bureau of Mines (IBM) Progressive Mine Closure Plan compliance summaries; CAMPA state-level utilisation data; Vedanta's Sustainability Reports and Supreme Court and National Green Tribunal orders. 

Findings will inform SEBI's development of sector-specific BRSR biodiversity indicators for extractive industries, the Ministry of Mines' ongoing review of mine closure norms.