CUTTACK: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has mandated an investigation into alleged illegal sand mining at a quarry located along the Brahmani River in Dhenkanal district.
This directive arose during a Friday hearing regarding a petition from a Talcher-based NGO, alleging that 11.80 acres of sand was being mined illegally at Gunadei village under Odapada tehsil, in violation of various environmental regulations.
The petitioners’ legal representatives, Sankar Prasad Pani and Ashutosh Padhy (participating virtually), asserted the project was breaching the Sustainable Sand Mining Management Guidelines, 2016, established by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.
The NGT’s east zone bench, consisting of Justice B Amit Sthalekar (judicial member) and Dr. Arun Kumar Verma (expert member), has formed a five-member fact-finding committee. This committee includes officials from the Dhenkanal administration, the Odisha State Pollution Control Board, the State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA), and the mines department, with the Dhenkanal district magistrate designated as the nodal officer for coordination.
The committee is tasked with conducting a site inspection and submitting an affidavit report within three weeks. The next hearing has been scheduled for August 19.
NGT’s order highlighted that the original environmental clearance (EC) granted on March 30, 2021, to the Odapada tehsildar, was conditional upon the submission of an Annual Rate of Replenishment Study (ARSS) by May 2022, which had not been completed.
The EC was transferred to a private lessee on July 12, 2023. However, SEIAA has identified it as a “violation case,” noting that the quarry operated without proper clearance transfer.
The petition claimed that the lessee was authorized to extract only 8,618 cubic meters of sand in the third year, but mining surpassed permissible limits within just four days, with over 100 trucks operating daily, indicating an extraction of nearly 2,000 cubic meters per day.
Additional allegations include mechanical mining against manual mining conditions, absence of site demarcation, an unapproved district survey report, and failure to display statutory clearances. The use of heavy machinery was also reported to be adversely affecting the river’s flow and local infrastructure.
