Continuing action against illegal mining, the state steel and mines department has issued ‘stop mining’ notice to 128 mines, which includes 63 mines that were asked to suspend operation about a week back.
While 50 of these mines are iron ore and manganese mines, the rest have deposits of graphite, laterite, limestone and dolomite. These mines have been asked to stop operation for not having statutory forest and environment clearances and mining plan approvals.
“We have asked these mines to stop operation and issued them show cause notices. They have been asked to comply with all statutory clearances before restarting operations”, said a top official of the state steel and mines department.
Out of the 128 errant mines, 30 are located in the Barbil sector, 20 in Koida sector in Keonjhar district and the rest in different districts of the state.
It may be noted after the allegation of large scale illegal mining surfaced in June this year, government ordered the state vigilance department an enquiry into the incident, following which raids have been conducted on six properties.
Besides, the state government has formed a state level enforcement squad to check illegal mining operations. The squad is tracking and conducting raids on illegal mining activities in non-lease grant areas almost every day for the last one week, the official said, adding, huge quantities of minerals have been seized in these raids.
However, during one such raid last night, the miscreants attacked the squad members in which two mining officials were reported to have sustained serious injuries.
