(PTI)
The Assam forest department has slapped a penalty of Rs 43.25 crore on PSU major Coal India Ltd for carrying out “illegal mining” inside a reserve forest for 16 years from 2003, officials said on Wednesday. The forest department has also filed an FIR at the Sub-Divisional Chief Judicial Magistrate’s Court in Margherita in Tinsukia district against officials responsible for the alleged illegal activity in around 73 hectares of land inside the Dehing Patkai Elephant Reserve forest between 2003 and 2019.
Accepting that the mining was going on since 2003 without a renewed lease, the North Eastern Coalfields, a unit of the Maharatna PSU, claimed that it had applied for renewal of the lease when the agreement had expired, but the Assam government did not act upon it for a “long time”. Taking up the issue at its latest meeting last month, the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL), under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, refused to accord permission to the miner to commence operations unless it fulfils a set of 28 conditions, including payment of the penalty amount.
