the killer mining fields - claims the lives of young IPS Officer

The Heart of India – Madhya Pradesh, the second largest State by area is in news for wrong reasons.

Mining – the extraction from mother Earth has been rampant and more rampant has been the illegal ways and the mafia attached to it. Not necessarily the mining of Gold or rare minerals – there is crores of money to be had whether it be rocks or sands.  You can see it for yourself  movement of lorries and tractors – wherever there are rivers, the river beds are exploited unscrupulously with loads of sand taken out daily by those with political clout defying everything else.   Loaded over and above its capacity, a truck could carry closer to 15 tonne and reportedly fetch closer to Rs.8000 per trip at its peak.  Only recently there was a report about illegal sand mining in Srikakulam and the amounts were mind boggling.  It was reported that close to 100 crore worth of sand was being illegally extracted every year from the Vamsadhara, Nagavali, Bahuda and Mahendratanaya rivers.

The mining mafia has claimed another life – that of a  young Indian Police Service (IPS) officer -  a tractor-trolley, suspected to be laden with illegally-quarried stones, ran over him when he tried to stop it in Madhya Pradesh's Morena district, police said. The driver  has been  arrested.  Narendra Kumar in his 30s, a 2009 batch IPS officer, was on probation. His wife Madhurani Tewatia, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, is also posted in Madhya Pradesh but is presently on maternity leave in Delhi.

This brazen murder is not a solitary incident but only shows the muscle power behind the illegal mining in this region and elsewhere.  Illegal mining poses a threat not just in the remote hinterlands.   There have been instances of gruesome murders executed without remorse – it is not only the killing also the  plundering of  natural resources that are to be worried. So also the  loss to the exchequer, and at enormous environmental and social cost.  Illegal mining poses a threat not just to the traditional way of life in remote hinterlands where tribal people live.

When will the Government act ? and when will the killings stop ?

With regards – S. Sampathkumar