Government takes on mining mafia with new rules

NEW DELHI: Seeking to strike a balance between construction as well as ecological concerns, the Centre has notified a policy of granting environmental clearances for minor minerals, including sand, and has come out with guidelines to monitor present mining activities.

Under the new policy, the environment ministry has for the first time delegated the power of granting environmental clearances (ECs) for leases up to 5 hectares to district level committees. Besides sand, the minor minerals include clay, chalk, shale, agate and slate among others.

"Keeping two factors — decentralization of EC process and stopping sand mafia through IT-enabled monitoring systems — in mind, we finalized the new rules," said environment minister Prakash Javadekar on Thursday Under the guidelines, states and local authorities have been advised to use Android applications, GPS and bar-coding systems to track vehicles of illegal miners and those who indulge in exploiting natural resources beyond permissible limit.

The ministry had published a draft on September 22, 2015 on EC for mining of minor minerals for comments.

Referring to the IT-enabled services to stop sand and other mining mafia, Javadekar said, "Stringent monitoring of movement of mined out material from source to destination using information technology tools will be done. This system will generate real-time data on mined out sand".

The minister said the preparation of district survey report for sand and riverbed mining will also be done in the future.

The new policy has exempted certain categories from the requirement of an EC, which includes extraction of ordinary clay or sand manually by the Kumhars (potter) and by earthen tile makers and removal of sand deposits on agricultural fields post floods by the farmers.