Aiming to check illegal mining and the associated mafia, the Government on Thursday came out with a draft policy that will use hi-tech technologies like satellite surveillance to regulate mining of sand and other minor minerals. The new sustainable sand and minor mineral mining policy will, henceforth, determine where riverbed mining should be allowed based on stringent scientific monitoring.
“We have made a policy which is scientific, sustainable, technology driven, user friendly, decentralised and has strong monitoring system,” said Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar in a Press conference. The new policy will check illegal mining and allow serious, legitimate players to remain in business, he added.
This draft notification will come into effect from January1, 2016. It has been put up on the Ministry website for comments from general public.
As per the draft policy, a decision to allow or prohibit mining would be based on a district survey report which would take the help of remote sensing technology and ground truthing to find out how much sand is deposited in riverbeds. Only that much material will be allowed to be mined out which is deposited annually, he added.
He said that after taking over, his Ministry looked at the best practises of the world, consulted States, officials undertook visits and deliberations were done with experts.
Stringent monitoring of movement of mined out material from source to destination using IT tools as bar coding would be done, said Javadekar. The transit permit for movement of sand will have a number of security features such as unique barcode, fugitive ink background, invisible ink mark and watermark.
The Supreme Court, in February 2012, had ruled that environment permission to be sought for all sand-mining activities. “Unfortunately the UPA Government did not follow up on it to make a policy. No new licences were given and the entire system collapsed. As a result, legitimate players went out of business, while illegal mining prospered,” he said.
To curb the menace of illegal mining of river-bed sand, governments of at least nine states have begun a crackdown on these miners by setting up flying squads, levying stiff financial penalties and initiating their respective policies to auction sand.