CHENNAI: The state government has imposed a three-month ban on the transportation of rough stone and its aggregates to other states. The ban, which came into effect from Monday, does not apply to the Union Territory of Puducherry. The government has directed district administrations and the police to take stringent action against those violating the order.
In the order, Director of Geology and Mining T Prabhushankar said the current production of rough stone and aggregates from operational quarries in the state is insufficient to meet the growing domestic demand driven by infrastructure, housing, and industrial projects.
“The large-scale transportation of construction aggregates to neighbouring states further constrains the availability of these materials, creating an artificial supply-demand imbalance and driving up prices of construction materials, which ultimately affects public and private development projects within the state,” he said.
He noted that rough stone is not a scarce mineral in neighbouring states of Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. “The huge supply-demand gap fuels unscientific and illegal quarrying, storage and transportation of stone and aggregates, leading to excessive mining beyond permitted depths in most cases and posing a serious threat to the state’s environment and ecology,” the director added.
He said that the state requires an uninterrupted supply of building and construction materials such as stone and aggregates. Significant portions of these mineral-bearing areas in Kanniyakumari, Tenkasi, Theni, Coimbatore, Tiruppur and Krishnagiri districts are located within the eco-sensitive zones of the Western Ghats, necessitating measures to ensure sustainable resource utilisation.
A large quantity of rough stone and other construction aggregates has been transported to Kerala through the Tenkasi and Kanniyakumari districts for various infrastructure projects over the past few years.
The order stated that the continuous movement of heavily loaded trucks, including multi-axle vehicles, has been causing extensive damage to local roads. It noted that many routes leading to border check-posts are narrow and the existing infrastructure is not designed to handle such heavy freight traffic.
The large number of trucks heading towards neighbouring states has also resulted in severe traffic bottlenecks for local commuters, while the movement of heavy vehicles on narrow roads has contributed to an increase in road accidents, many of them fatal.
