New Delhi: India will monitor thousands of mines with the help of satellites starting this year, a government official said, after a three-month pilot project found rampant illegal extraction of limestone in a big state.
Mines secretary Balvinder Kumar declined to name the state ahead of the completion of surveillance in some other regions, but said the findings echoed a multi-billion-dollar iron ore scam that led to a three-year mining ban and turned India into an importer from a net exporter of the steelmaking commodity.
Local media have reported about illegal limestone mining in two of the top producing states — Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. The Indian Bureau of Mines is digitising maps of all mines under the purview of the ministry to check — as satellites pass over every 23 days — whether companies are violating rules by mining outside their lease areas.
“We suspect that there is rampant illegal mining by the unorganised sector,” Mr Kumar said. “After covering all the major minerals like iron ore and limestone in the next three months, we will look at sand mining. A lot of money is being made there.”
A Karnataka minister was arrested in 2011 and iron ore mining was banned for three years in the state and in Goa after India’s top court found that fly-by-night operators had profited from a surge in Chinese demand for the iron ore.
Mr Kumar said the scam had crippled India’s steel industry and the government was keen to avoid a repetition. He said he would soon write to the top bureaucrat of the state where limestone is being illegally mined to initiate action.
Karnataka, AP, Rajas-than and Gujarat are the country’s top producers of limestone, a raw material for making cement. Gujarat-based Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geoinformatics is helping the ministry monitor mineral extraction.
