Vijayawada: The state govenrment has announced sand prices on Friday. Committees have been constituted under the chairmanship of the districts collectors.
Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has directed the officials to check the sand prices and also directed them to initate stringent action against the black marketeers of sand.
The status of sand availability has been estimated by the government in order to have overall perspective on the sand and to improve its availability in each district and to identify more sand reaches.
The government has constituted district-level sand committees under the chairmanship of the district collector. The SP, deputy transport commissioner, river conservator or executive engineer of Water Resource Department are members and assistant director of Mines and Geology is the member convener.
Accordingly, the committees met and took a decision and prices (loading plus transportation costs only) have been fixed for all urban towns in the districts, except EG.
The government has stated that care has been taken to fix the price on lumpsum, instead of per km in order to avoid confusion in calculating the cost of sand.
The citizens in major towns can now easily purchase the sand per tractor or per lorry as unit. Care has been taken to exclude the lorries having more than 10 tonne capacity, except in and to Visakhapatnam district, and for government infrastructure works of public utility.
In order to avoid illegal activities, strengthening of existing border check posts has been given priority and new check posts will be established to curb transportation of sand outside the state, according to the minister for mines and eeology R.V. Sujaya Krishna Ranga Rao.
For rural areas and in the districts where sand reaches are less, works have begun to identify new reaches even in third order streams to meet the demand. The fixation of rates in rural areas will be on per kilometer basis.
Once more reaches are identified, the transportation charges in the rural areas will come down.
