The legal sand mining has to comply with the prescribed extraction limits. The Legal Sand mining is granted Environmental Clearance by the State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA), as per the prescribed provisions of Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification S.O. 1533(E) dated-14.09.2006 and its subsequent amendments on the basis of approved mining plan. Ministry has also issued the Sustainable Sand Mining Guidelines, 2016 and Enforcement and Monitoring Guidelines for Sand Mining 2020 to put in place an appropriate regulatory regime for sustainable sand mining and adoption
of environmentally friendly management practices.
The Environmental Clearance is granted together with prescribed general and specific conditions, including the volume of sand to be extracted and the depth up-to which sand mining can be done.
The extraction limit is recommended by the State Level Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC) and approved by the SEIAA after scrutinizing the sand mining proposal on case-to-case basis, based on the nature of water flow, volume of flow, width of the river,replenishing capacity, degree of aggradation and degradation,existence of public infrastructure, etc. in compliance of the ‘Sustainable Sand Mining Guidelines, 2016′ and Enforcement &Monitoring Guidelines for Sand Mining (EMGSM), 2020’ issued by the Ministry. Ministry, further, vide S.O. 3611(E) dated the 25th July 2018, has laid down the procedure for making District Survey Report for sand mining.
As per the guidelines issued by Ministry, the District Survey Report shall form the basis for application for environmental clearance, preparation of reports and appraisal of projects. The Report shall be updated once every five years.
Ministry has laid down the above procedures after much deliberation and indepth analysis and following the laid down procedure would encourage scientific, systematic and environmental friendly mining with respect to mining of minor minerals.
