Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Thursday said it is not possible for the state administration to completely stop illegal mining and transportation of coal but effort is on.
Speaking to reporters, Sangma said that there are different laws that are in place for people who are into illegal activities of coal mining.
“Actions are being taken and thousands of cases have been registered and thousands of people have been affected and chargesheeted. As far as possible our efforts are on to ensure that we are able to minimize it. Number two, you also have to realise the reality of things…that people have been engaging in this form of mining for the last 200 years and the livelihood has been based around that and unless and until alternate forms of livelihood don’t come up, people will keep on going back to those activities. It is not possible for administration to completely stop everything but effort is on,” he said.
He also said, “we are happy to see that now the legal mining process is going to start and we will have scientific mining and we will see those things and on the other side we are also having different kinds of livelihood that are coming up whether it is in the agriculture sector or tourism sector and that is the only way we can ultimately see that we are able to put an end to this kind of activity. Already four people have been given the permission and as we speak the details of everything is being worked out and I hope that within a matter of few months we should be able to some of the mines start scientific mining.”
When asked on drone technology, the chief minister said, “It is a more complicated than said because areas is huge and well we have drones but we will require large number of drones and we have used drone technology already in the past to map the entire stock of the coal that are there whether legal or illegal and that has been submitted to court and that has been going on but as you said it is continuous process and that will require us to put 100s of drones and then working every day to keep mapping it is an option we can examine and look into some areas but as I said there are obviously financial and administrative as well as manpower requirement that are there so we will have to how it works as technology as of now has been used as I said to even map the stock of the coal that are there.”