MANGALURU: Illegal mining of laterite in Dakshina Kannada district and its transportation to cement manufacturing industries in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana has come to light through a Right to Information (RTI) query.
The Mines and Geology Department (MGD), in a reply to a RTI query, said that over 12,000 metric tons of ‘A’ grade laterite was transported from a mining area spanning 6.76 acres in survey number 141/1A in Kairangala village of Bantwal taluk in Dakshina Kannada between August 14, 2020 and September 30, 2020. The mining permit of the same is in the name of the panchayat development officer.
The said land belongs to the Balepuni gram panchayat and following a decision to develop 135 sites there to distribute among the poor, a contract was awarded to a private party to level the land in March this year. However, the MGD stopped the works after it got to know that the land had lateriate deposits for which permission was required for mining. Subsequently, an MGD survey on August 7 revealed that 89,223 metric tons of ‘A’ grade laterite was available there and it gave a mining permit to the PDO for a year.
The contractor resumed mining but within few weeks, the MGD withdrew the permit following rumours that the land had gold and bauxite deposits. By then, sources said the mining contractor, Red Stone Trading Corporation, Mudipu, had extracted over 3,000 tonnes of laterite from the said government land and had stocked the same in a patch of private land nearby.
GP sources said that permission was not given to the contractor to transport the laterite outside the panchayat limits as the authorities were still in the process of fixing the value. An official expressed shock over the PDO permit allegedly being misused to sell the laterite to cement industries. “Hardly, 3,000 tonnes of laterite could have been extracted there so far. It’s a wonder how someone could transport 12,000 metric tonnes of laterite from there.
It appears that the permit issued in the name of PDO was misused to sell the laterite illegally mined somewhere else,” said an official. Meanwhile, Congress leader B Ramanath Rai, in a press conference, accused Bantwal MLA Rajesh Naik’s wife Usha R Naik, who holds a laterite permit in Tenka Yadapadavu village in Mangaluru taluk, of misusing the PDO permit to transport the illegally mined laterite. He said that he has written a letter to Chief Secretary Vijay Bhaskar to conduct a high-level inquiry into the matter. MLA Rajesh Naik has dismissed the allegations.