Rohitesh Dhawan
PRESIDENT & CEO: ICMM
‘In the mining industry, we are not strangers to uncertainty and disruption’
ROHITESH Dhawan embraces the enigma that mining is both fundamentally exploitative and a force for good. While the industry’s executives have been saying this for years, they have looked and sounded defensive. In Dhawan, however, there is new fluency that chimes with modern sensibilities and values. That couldn’t be more valuable, especially given developments in the US, which has done wonders to promote the importance of mining while seemingly doing the bare minimum to safeguard against its excesses.
Communication skills at the ICMM alone wouldn’t matter for much without action. So it’s been important for ICMM to back up the talk with a series of upgraded industry standards such as the Consolidated Mining Standard, the Governance Model, as well as new guidance to help miners protect and restore biodiversity. The industry’s image is also improved by transparency: the ICMM publishes members’ progress on meeting the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management, which was agreed shortly after the catastrophic Brumadinho tailings dam failure in Brazil in 2019.
The ICMM has attracted two new members in the past year, bringing its total to 26. While the ICMM represents the world’s biggest mining organisations – about one-third of the global mining and metals industry – Dhawan acknowledges it needs to extend its membership to non-western companies without compromising it rigorous demands on qualification. This is the challenge, especially as Dhawan is helpless to address the negative impressions created by miners outside the ICMM
LIFE OF ROHITESH
He was born and raised in India but later moved to SA, where he studied Economics at Rhodes University. He followed that up with a Master’s degree in Environmental Change and Management at Oxford. He works with a number of organisations involved in governance and climate change, including the Energy & Climate Change Programme at the Centre for Strategic & International Studies, and the Asian Forum on Global Governance. One of his passions is fighting cruelty to animals and improving the lives of street dogs.
