MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court recently directed the Sivagangai collector to conduct an inquiry and file a detailed report on the illegal sand mining carried out in Pappakudi village of Sivagangai district, under the guise of agricultural reclamation activities.
U Chinnamari, an agriculturist from Thiruppuvanam taluk in Sivaganga, stated in her Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petition that as per Section 19 of the Tamil Nadu Minor Mineral Concession Rules, 1959, whenever quarrying permits are issued to extract sand from cultivable lands, quarrying should be done only for an optimum depth to be specified by the district collector so that the land could be restored to a state fit for cultivation. However, in the guise of agricultural reclamation, many people excavate sand indiscriminately beyond the permitted limit and make agricultural lands uncultivable, she alleged.
After she claimed that the quarried sand was transported in nearly 40 heavy-duty trucks between January 23 and February 12 through a toll plaza in Madurai-Rameswaram road in Thiruppachethi village, a bench of justices D Krishnakumar and R Vijayakumar had earlier directed the highways authorities to preserve the CCTV footage recorded in the toll plaza during the relevant period. When the case was heard again recently, the highways authorities submitted the hard disk containing the CCTV footage in a sealed cover before the bench.
The Sivagangai collector also filed a counter affidavit stating that there was an illegal excavation of nearly 20,144 cubic metre of soil in three of the lands mentioned by the petitioner. Recording this, the judges directed the collector to conduct an inquiry by inspecting the lands concerned and also question the owners of the vehicles recorded in the aforesaid CCTV footage, and file a detailed report to the court on March 6.
Meanwhile, hearing a similar petition alleging illegal mining in Kanniyakumari on Friday, the bench granted additional time to the district collector to conduct a survey using drones and file a report to the court on March 15.