When Bhartiya Janata Party government was formed in Uttar Pradesh under the leadership of Yogi Adityanath a number of educated middle class people thought that days of caste politics and corruption were over. They were expecting a clean government.
The Yogi Adityanath government cancelled all sand mining contracts alleging illegality and corruption in operations and announced that it will soon come up with a new sand mining policy. This seemed justified because the escapades of Gayatri Prasad Prajapati, the Mining Minister in the previous government, were fresh in public memory. Illegal sand mining is not just a menace in UP but is an all India phenomena and officials have had to pay with their lives if they tried to take action against illegal operations. To recall a few incidents, the sand mafia killed deputy tehsildar R. Venkatesan in 2004 in Tamil Nadu, IPS officer Narendra Kumar was killed in Morena (MP) in 2012, forest guard Narendra Sharma was run over by a tractor trolley and crushed to death in Raira, Gwalior (MP) in 2016, and earlier this year, Boyini Sayulu, a Village Revenue Assistant, in Kamareddy, Telengana was mowed down by the sand mafia when he tried to stop a sand tractor which was illegally transporting sand.
Now, the UP Government has awarded three sand mining contracts to Suprayas Construction, Deoria, Reliable Infrabuild, Gorakhpur and Globe India Infrastructure, Maharajganj in the bed of Narayani or Badi Gandak river in Kushinagar district. All these companies are connected to BJP Members of Parliament Guddu Pandey from Padrauna, Harish Dwivedi from Basti and Pankaj Chaudhary from Maharajganj, and were recommended by at least another ten BJP Members of Legislative Assembly. These contracts are expected to fetch Rs. 2,47,61,520, Rs. 2,65,21,530 and Rs. 2,32,45,410 respectively, as revenue for the government in the first year. This means that government will get a total of Rs. 7,45,28,460 from these contracts. A tractor trolley, which can fill upto 3 cubic metres of sand, is sold for Rs 4,000 in the market. The cost that the contractor is required to pay to the government is only Rs 65 per cu.m. The margin is enormous.
No mining contract has been awarded ever before in this area. These contracts were awarded without the formation of a sub-divisional committee or a appraisal committee which is required for taking a decision on this matter. Instead, a junior officer, an Assistant Engineer, was made to sign the approval for these contracts.
Interestingly, a senior executive engineer of the Irrigation department, who is in-charge of floods, has written a letter to the District Magistrate, Kushinagar on 2 February 2018 that sand mining in this area will be a threat to the 17 km long Ahiraulidan–Pipraghat (AP) embankment on the UP–Bihar border. This provides protection to close to 50 villages having a total population of 1.5 lakh. The river is notorious for its vagarious behaviour, as it has dramatically changed its course and devoured a number of villages in the past. It is ironical that against an expected revenue of Rs 7.5 crore from the new sand mining contracts, the government spent Rs 22 crores in 2016–17 and another Rs 36 crores in 2017–18 for protection of the embankment from erosion by the river. Even if we attach no cost to the lives of the people who will be drowned if there is a breach in the embankment, even then no cost-benefit analysis can justify these contracts!
The leader of the Congress Legislature Party in UP, Ajay Kumar Lallu, who happens to be the MLA from Sewrahi, which is located at one end of the AP embankment, is leading a sit-in at Virvat Konhwalia village on the embankment for the last more than hundred days, since 3 February, 2018, demanding cancellation of the above mentioned three contracts. Nineteen protestors were arrested by the district administration on false charges on 6 April 2018, of which 17 have been released on bail. Narad and Gautam Singh are still in jail facing charges of dacoity and attempt to murder, whereas the fact is that the protestors caught six trucks illegally carrying sand. Because of the continuous sit-in of the villagers, the mining activity in the river has come to a standstill.
In an unrelated incident and a major scandal, the Forest Department of the UP government has registered a First Information Report on 5 May 2018 against its own officials serving on deputation, the Managing Director, UP Forest Corporation, S.K. Sharma, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and General Managar Manoj Sinha and Divisional Manager, Eco-restoration, G.C. Sinha, for inviting online tenders for coarse sand mining under the euphemism of ‘eco-restoration,’ in violation of State and Central government norms and regulations. The proposed activities were to be carried out in Nazimabad, Urai, Hamirpur, Mirzapur and Sonebhadra on forest land, which was completely illegal. Could the three senior officers have undertaken the exercise in violation of Indian Forest Act and Supreme Court ban on sand mining in forest areas on their own, without any external political pressure acting on them? Did they not know that they would be liable to be punished? S.K. Sharma has been forced to go on leave and the two Sinhas have been suspended. It needs to be investigated that on whose behest these three senior officers were acting?
Far from checking corruption the BJP government seems to have opened new avenues for it, at higher rates. It has failed to demonstrate the political will to act against illegal sand mining business. Instead, it too has adopted the beaten path, where politicians become part of the bandwagon of corruption.
Email: ashaashram@yahoo.com
