VISAKHAPATNAM: The closed quarry of semi-precious stones had allegedly been illegally mined at the ‘Karaka’ reserve forest area under the Golugond PS limits of Narsipatnam Forest sub-division in Visakhapatnam district. Between Friday night and early hours of Saturday, last week, some miscreants illegally mined a large extent of the closed quarry near S Mallavaram village limits of Karaka reserve forest by using mining machinery and allegedly shifted crores worth of soil, stones and other raw material from the mining spot to an unknown place on the same day with the help of 10 lorries and tipper vehicles.
For the record, though the semi-precious stones quarry of S Mallavaram village had officially been closed a few years ago and the Mining and Forest departments have been patrolling the area since, miscreants reportedly had easy access and perfectly executed their plan and vanished with the crores worth material overnight. Investigation is on.
Curiously, around half a tonne of soil and sand of the mined material was found in a field near Bayyapureddy Palem village of Narsipatnam mandal on Sunday afternoon. Golugonda PS inspector Uma Maheswara Rao, along with the Narsipatnam forest ranger BV Ramana immediately rushed to Bayyapureddy Palem and inspected the mined material and confirmed that it was the mined material from the closed quarry at S Mallavaram.
Officers questioned the concerned caretaker of the field, Satyanarayana, about the miscreants. As per our information, the miscreants took away 10 truckloads of the material from the quarry and as we have identified only one lorry-load material of it, we are suspecting that the rest of the material is also kept like this in other nearby fields,” said Uma Maheswara Rao.